My initial reflections
Thanks for setting this up!
I agree with Matt that the “silo” boundaries continue to blur for many or – for folks like us – have already faded into the pages of the “history” textbooks titled “mass communication.” This moment in multimedia is tremendously exciting to me since I finally see opportunities to parse the different modes (textual, audio, video, etc.) and their related techniques and then deciding how all of these elements can be used to tell one coherent story. For the typical news consumer seeking the latest information, good bye to linear video, multiple paragraphs of text, stand alone Flash documentaries or any one of the above without supplemental content from another. Of course there will always be a specific audience for this long form journalism, but that’s not the focus of my interest.
Maryland is in a unique position to devise courses with experts that address BOTH the tools of the trade and the CONTENT produced by those tools. There was little discussion about content production at the story level in the ONA sessions I attended. In other words, great tools, great short-cuts, nice designs and interesting ways to collect, illustrate or aggregate info, but I didn’t see examples of individual multimedia stories that communicate different types of information or a comparison of why one multimedia story is better than another. Perhaps this will be the direction for ONA in the future.
In the interim, I spent much of my time not in the individual sessions but in the student newsroom, observing what the students were doing to cover ONA. Fascinating. There’s nothing like contemplating curricular changes while assessing the needs of those on the ground. Some of these student reporters said they felt overwhelmed by the expectations for them to use multiple media to cover a conference about multimedia. Don’t get me wrong. They were damn good at what they were doing. Many of them, however, wanted more guidance on how to quickly decide what mode to use and when.
Finally, after thinking about our exciting new building and the facilities needed in the future to address these tectonic shifts in the journalism landscape, I couldn’t help but be a bit depressed when I read about what is being described as “the most technologically advanced facility of its kind at any Maryland higher education institution.” Its 3,000-square-foot high-definition digital video production studio “is one of the few on a university campus nationwide.” An audio recording studio with the capability of 24-track recordings is believed to be the only one on the Eastern Shore. Supporting them are 15 video editing suites and five audio editing suites. (One aspect guiding the design of the building was space for collaborative creative teamwork, reflective of the professional environment that students will find after graduation. WOW!)
This facility? Salisbury.