New Newsrooms: Notes from 2008 International Symposium for Online Journalism

-- The head of the Dallas Morning News believes in "live" journalism models that are local centric and exclusive of international or national news. Indeed, the company is eliminating or downsizing mose of its foreign and national bureaus outside of Texas.
-- This last point did not go over well with the academics in the audience, who suggested that the Dallas Morning News was doing Americans a disservice.
-- Newspapers need to move from the mentality that they are in the newspaper business and towards the fact that they are in the "information" business.
-- The Daily Telegraph in the UK just re-trained 350 of its print journalists for online considerations. Yet it will "continue to invest in its newspaper assets." Their revenues to the website are growing 18 percent every year.
-- Nytimes.com employees are sitting with print reporters in a new newsroom. So are the Wall Street Journal reporters. And the Miami Herald.
-- Everyone is getting trained in video, which has become "viral." (Viral situations emerge when the item -- ie videos -- instills itself into an industry/culture/etc, where its very existence and operation reproduces over and over, until it is an epidemic.) But there is some mocking. Check out this video in which a professor makes fun of the Journal's foray into video etc. The point here? Just because you CAN make video doesn't mean you should.
-- The Wall Street Journal has videos on pumpkin boats and football-throwing lessons. What's up with that?
-- The diffusion of online technologies into these newsrooms involve: physical, technological and cultural integrations and transformations. This also means new seating plans. By far the biggest challenge is cultural, say these editors (24/7 news cycle, content providing, "audience"-to-"people" considerations).
-- Gannett is experimenting with videos that are 1:20 minutes long, and that is IT.

You can find the conference information etc here: http://online.journalism.utexas.edu/