As I progress and increase my knowledge and interest in new-media ventures and the people who work with them I realize more and more about the organizational and staffing problems of companies, especially news organizations who feel threatened by new-media.
I’ve worked with new and emerging media for five years now, and I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable about any of the technologies that I support, however I do have strongly-held beliefs as to what news organizations should be doing to embrace and take advantage of the tools and resources available to them.
The most common problem that I encounter in trying to support and innovate news-products with the newsrooms that I work with is the culture of fear, not in the traditional sense, but a culture of fear, of technology.
I’m constantly surrounded by editors, producers, writers, reporters, and management who don’t understand the technology resources they have and are scared to even try something new.
This self-destruction and fear does nothing to help their news organization emerge as a winner in a new-media landscape. Thank goodness there are news organizations who feel otherwise, but at least of the newsrooms I work with (one TV station and the other a small-market daily newspaper) feel compelled to constantly lag behind the industry, and innovation.
Both of the perps have people within their walls who not only aren’t afraid of technology, but actively seek new and innovative ways to present news and information, it’s those people, or people like them who need to be guiding the news media into the present and the future.
One key example is the TV station, They launched a new website 3 years ago using a huge content management system hosted in-house. The problem is, they’ve gone through one major redesign of the site (which was a very good thing) but that redesign took a year or more to complete, and other than that, they have done little to no new innovative things with their web site.
I’ve offered numerous opportunities to try new and exciting things that have been tested successfully elsewhere, but they are afraid to move forward.
They actually have someone who was supposed to make it a ‘priority’ to offer on their site podcasts of news stories etc. This may have been a good idea a couple years ago, but we can now see that podcasts aren’t as strong as we all thought they would be, and the adoption of RSS feeds to the general public is moving a lot slower than many of us thought.
Despite that, they continue to work on it, in the meantime not accomplishing anything nor moving forward with anything new that is indeed spreading much faster than podcasting.
The use of new-media tools like Flash streaming video, Twitter, Facebook, Widgets, and dare I say it, RIAs, are the things these news organizations need to be looking at to generate new revenue streams, but instead their stuck eternally in the late 90s with little to no progress.
I’m off to a meeting later today with 4 people who are working on a big converged media election project, we were making great progress for a week and a half on this project, only to have it run off the rails in the last 3 days. Now there’s discussion of using a different CMS, starting over, and other drastic, and unneeded changes.
Not only that, but the committee which has a hard enough time making decisions (as they often do) keeps growing, now I completely understand the importance of decision by committee and bringing in external viewpoints, but doing so in a fashion which alienates key players is not a recommendation I would make.
I’ll post again soon about this election project as it is consuming a lot of my time right now, and there are some very interesting implications of this project and how it is eventually developed and promoted.
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