The Convergence Newsletter
From Newsplex at the University of South Carolina
Vol. V No. 7 (February 2008)

Commenting on Convergence

By Brad Petit, Editor of The Convergence Newsletter

A new year, and still the world converges. New readers of The Convergence Newsletter might have wondered otherwise when January came and went without a trace of TCN in their inboxes. Fear not – we remain as steadfastly devoted to studying and covering convergence as ever. We just know better than to compete with the remnants of holidays and winter vacations for your attention.

One of our New Year’s resolutions is to bring a greater focus to each issue. To that end, you’re going to see more in the way of theme issues in which our contributors will tackle particular elements or perspectives related to convergence.

This month we look at broadcasting. Over the years, this newsletter has borne witness to the fact that convergence has had and will continue to have a strong impact on the broadcast landscape.

How have TV broadcasters responded? Former CNN executive Sid Bedingfield, now at the University of South Carolina, suggests local TV stations are lagging well behind national network TV and newspapers in their use of the Web to bring interactive multimedia content to viewers.

TV isn’t the only broadcast format affected by cross-platform content delivery. We talk with Maria Thomas, senior vice president of digital media at National Public Radio, about how NPR uses online to complement and supplement its radio operation. Part one of our two-part interview is featured this month; part two will follow in March.

Those looking for the latest tools for teaching the next generation of journalists how to get by in a converged world will want to take note of Dr. George Daniels’ review of “Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World,” by Deb Wenger and Deborah Potter. Daniels, of the University of Alabama, is a former TV news producer and a veteran contributor to TCN.

We’re excited about the new theme-oriented direction, and we hope readers will appreciate a more concentrated approach to issues in convergence. Upcoming editions will focus on convergence internationally and the effects of convergence on social and physical communities. Readers who have perspectives on either of these topics shouldn’t hesitate to contact me or executive editor Doug Fisher about submitting an article. We see TCN as giving authors a forum for trying out emerging thoughts on a topic and getting feedback, without necessarily the rigors and formality of peer review. Think of TCN as a journal of first impressions, a testing ground for an idea whose time has come – or at least isn’t too far off.

We have said we want this to be a conversation, and we hope you will visit The Convergence Newsletter blog and leave comments, some of which we may print in future issues. In an upcoming issue, we will have “Why I Hated the Convergence Conference,” which will lay out the feedback solicited from attendees at October’s conference here at USC. If you have thoughts of your own you’d like to see included, please contact us by e-mail or leave a comment on the blog.

Speaking of which, we want to give special mention to Palo Alto College’s Dr. Denise Richter, the proud (we hope!) contributor of the first comment to our blog. We hope you will follow the links she has to her classes' work and follow her lead in taking advantage of the comments feature to post your own reflections and reactions as you read through this and future issues of TCN. We launched the blog in no small part because it allows readers to engage in an interactive, real-time dialogue on the topics of the day. Remember, we want to encourage readers to contribute and give as much feedback as possible.

Contact Brad Petit, editor of The Convergence Newsletter, at convergence-editor@mailbox.sc.edu.

View past newsletters at http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/convergence/.
Visit The Convergence Newsletter blog at http://convergencenl.blogspot.com.
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Feature Articles

The Problem with Broadcast News on the Web

NPR: Not your Parents’ Radio

Book Review – “Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World”
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Conferences, Training and Calls for Papers

Newsplex Summer Seminar

AEJMC Midwinter Conference

AEJMC Southeast Colloquium

BEA 2008

61st World Newspaper Congress

15th World Editors Forum

AEJMC Convention 2008

The Colorado Colloquium on Media Ethics & Economics: Competing Imperatives and Duties

28th American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) Annual Conference

Convergence and Society: The Participatory Web
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---------------Feature Articles


The Problem with Broadcast News on the Web

By Sid Bedingfield, University of South Carolina

NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams launched its new Web site with a splash last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Designed for the broadband world, the site focuses almost exclusively on video. Users land on a home page dominated by an elegant player that delivers a near seamless stream of clips from the newscast. As a means for watching broadcast news on the Web, the NBC player is first-rate. It is easy to navigate and delivers crisp, clear video. What’s more, NBC Nightly News seems serious about building an audience on the Web. The program’s content goes up shortly after airing on television and is available for free (with advertising). The site breaks the tyranny of the clock by allowing viewers to watch the newscast when they want to. And it lets them choose only the segments they want to watch. Sounds like a news junkie’s dream, right? So why do I often find the site stale and unsatisfying?

The Nightly News site is designed to bring the traditional broadcast news format to the Web. And therein lies its problem. Much of the content consists of an anchor lead-in followed by a reporter package. You know the drill: An anchor tossing to a video report that unfolds something like this – narrator track, sound bite, narrator track, sound bite, narrator track, reporter stand-up, sig-out. The package format has been the workhorse of broadcast news since the days of Murrow and Friendly. It is an efficient means of visual storytelling. In skilled hands, it can pack an emotional wallop. In the passive environment of television, where viewers “lean back” to watch the news, the package works well. On the Web, however, users “lean in” to engage with the content. There, the broadcast format falls flat.

I realized just how flat after spending a few days on the Nightly News site. The packages were not the problem; they were polished, network-quality pieces of broadcast journalism. They just felt clunky and out of place. Consuming news on the Web feels more like a surgical strike than a leisurely stroll. We move quickly from story to story and site to site, often using the phenomenal power of search to navigate more efficiently. In this environment, even short packages seem long and cumbersome. They bog us down. And, on the Nightly News site, where most reporter packages stand alone, they fail to deliver a true multimedia experience.

The best online presentations combine text, photos, video and graphics – and they give users freedom to move seamlessly among them. We scan the headline and text to determine our interest. If so moved, we read on for more detail and then consider whether to supplement that information with visuals – a sound bite, perhaps, or a short video clip. We determine how much time to give a story and which elements to view. On the Web, the user is always in control. With the broadcast package, we don’t have that control.

Consider a clip from the Nightly News site covering a fire at the Monte Carlo casino in Las Vegas. A 40-second Brian Williams toss leads to a brief live shot and a 1:25 package from correspondent John Larson. In Web time, it seems to take forever to get the basic information – a scary fire, but no one hurt. The Larson report has strong elements – aerials of the blaze, eyewitness accounts of the evacuation – but we must sit through the entire piece to see them. We lose control. Now consider this page from CNN.com. We get text, stills, video clips and a satellite map all integrated on the same page. We get the details immediately and – as we scan the text – we can quickly access a photo slide show and brief video clips. (My favorite video tease on this page: “Watch the fire.” We know what our users want – Let’s see those flames!)

This piece is not an advertisement for CNN.com (although I worked for years at the network and have tremendous respect for the CNN.com team). MSNBC.com also does a nice job of integrating text, still photography, graphics and video. And the Nightly News site can justify the heavy use of the broadcast news format because it has one narrow mission: to expand the audience for NBC’s flagship newscast by spreading the expensive product to those Web surfers who have abandoned appointment television.

So we should not worry too much about NBC News. Local television stations are another matter.

Most local television news operations rely on the traditional broadcast piece as the backbone of their online video strategy. Consider one example – the “video page” on the Web site of Atlanta’s leading local news station, WSB-TV. It is dominated by reporter packages, and the video stands alone, with only marginal integration with other content. Users definitely are not in control.

The Pew Internet project and other studies show that we are moving quickly into a fully broadband world. As we make the transition, I wonder if local television news organizations are being lulled into a trap.

Local news stations believe they have a tremendous advantage over newspapers in this broadband world because they gather so much video. They edit that video into a broadcast package format, then dump it on their Web sites. Many newspapers, on the other hand, realize they must scramble to compete in the multimedia world. They are being creative in how they integrate content. They make strong use of still photography through interactive slide shows that are often as compelling as video. (Also here, here and here.) And because these newspapers are growing their own video operations from scratch, they package that video for the Web – short clips, raw video, reporter debriefs and chunks of newsmaker interviews. Most important, these elements are integrated with text and are fully interactive. The user controls the experience.

News consumption is moving to the Web, and broadband is putting video front and center. This should play to the strength of local television news organizations. But too many rely too heavily on the broadcast package. And they may be letting the better newspapers take the lead in creating the future of interactive and visual storytelling online.

Sid Bedingfield, a former print reporter, television producer and cable news executive, is a visiting professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of South Carolina. He can be reached at bedingfield@sc.edu.

Links referenced in this article:
NBC Nightly News: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/
Nightly News casino fire: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#22848286
CNN casino fire: http://snipurl.com/cnnfire
WSB-TV video page: http://www.wsbtv.com/video/15161854/
Washington Post: http://snipurl.com/washpostslides
Boston Globe: http://snipurl.com/globeslides
New York Times: http://snipurl.com/nytimesslides
Guardian (U.K.): http://snipurl.com/guardianslides
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NPR: Not your Parents’ Radio

(Editor’s note: Maria Thomas is the senior vice president of digital media at National Public Radio. Since 2001, she has directed NPR’s digital media activities and has led the growth of NPR.org. Recently, TCN spoke with Thomas by phone about the role digital media play in influencing the way NPR does business. What follows is part one of that interview. Please be sure to check out the March issue of The Convergence Newsletter for part two.)

TCN: Tell us a little bit about what NPR.org is and the function it serves.

Thomas: The Web site plays a variety of different functions, one of which is simply to make radio not ephemeral. ... So on some level, we are representing the stories that are told on the radio so that they can live on in an archival form. That’s a very basic element. Beyond that, if we think of these people in NPR News as storytellers, eventually we’ll want to move to a place where we think of them as storytellers or journalists and not necessarily affiliated with one platform or another.

The Web site is many things, because NPR is many things. NPR News happens to be a big kahuna. But the Web site itself is not only about news. … Part of the opportunity and also part of the challenge of my position here at NPR is defining precisely what NPR is, because NPR is many things. If you polled 100 NPR listeners and said, “What is NPR to you?” you might get answers as diverse as “Well, it’s my primary news source,” or somebody might say “Oh god, I love ‘Car Talk,’” or someone might say, “Oh, 'This American Life,’ I love that,” but oh, by the way, that’s not even an NPR show. Or they might mention their station or they might mention a really warm and human story like something that we might have had on “This I Believe.” So my point is, NPR is many things on a kind of story level or a more tactical level.

TCN: How much impact does the radio side have on your digital operations and vice versa, especially in terms of determining content or direction?

Thomas: NPR really is ... a place that’s about ideas and a place that’s about curiosity and a place that’s about integrity and about joy and about the human condition and the importance of a free media in our democracy, and it’s about all these sort of bigger ideas. And it’s also about a local-national collaboration that’s unique in this country between the stations and NPR; and so if you ask me, ideally or aspirationally, what would we want the Web site to be, it would be all of those things. And all of those things ... would create an experience that when you come to NPR.org you feel those same feelings that you feel when you listen to NPR. And that might happen because you landed in the music section (of the site) or that might happen because you discovered a new author or you heard a book reading on NPR.org and it may or may not have anything to do with the radio. So when you look at it that way, what NPR News is for NPR.org is a critical provider of some of the most important news and information that people might be looking for. But NPR News itself and the people who create news headlines and news stories don’t – in sort of the larger sense of the word – define what the site is. Their work is a really important part of the site, but my team is here to help sort of convey these bigger ideas and lay out the strategy and the plans that get us to that place. And there are a lot of things that go on in my team that don’t have anything to do with NPR News and that people in NPR News probably wouldn’t care about or have any interest in.

TCN: It seems that NPR has always been fairly forward thinking with its use of the Web. Has that come about naturally or was there a conscious effort to incorporate that into your operational philosophy?

Thomas: I think it’s because they’ve had a brilliant leader for the last six years (laughs). … I think that it is true that since Ken (Sterns) became CEO of the company just over a year ago, he definitely has charted a strategic course for the company that’s much more focused on a formal strategy of moving NPR more squarely into the digital space. So I would certainly give Ken credit where credit is due. But I would say that well before that – I mean, I’m here for six-plus years now – I would give a lot of credit to my team. … It’s no accident that we are able to, at least in some areas, excel, because there are a lot of smart people that are thinking about how to construct the infrastructure, how to think about the brand in a visual environment, how to form the relationships that need to be formed in order to execute all this, how to do the evangelizing and education inside the company and inside the public broadcasting system that advances our goals. So I’d like to give credit to a very smart group of people who’ve been assembled here over the last few years, some of whom have been here now for six, seven, eight years – kind of since the beginning.

(Read part two of our interview with NPR’s Maria Thomas in the March issue of The Convergence Newsletter.)
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br /> Book Review – “Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World”

By Dr. George Daniels, University of Alabama

This article started out being just a review of a single textbook. But one will quickly see that “Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World” (CQ Press, 2007) is more than just a book – indeed, it exemplifies the textbook of the future.

While there is a hardcopy book, it only provides half the learning experience – the other half being a Web log and an interactive workbook, which authors Deb Wenger (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Deborah Potter (NewsLab) have been updating constantly since this text was published in October.

With the title “Advancing the Story,” Wenger and Potter, both veteran broadcast journalists with major-market and network TV experience, cast the discussion on convergence in the terms that we ought to be thinking of it in 2008 – its impact on the news product.

After acknowledging that the words “multimedia,” “convergence,” “cross-platform” and “multi-platform” would all be used interchangeably, the authors define them as “communicating complementary information on more than one media platform” and a cross-platform journalist as one who can “work effectively in more than one medium.”

Two key points on which I particularly agree are handled well:

“Good journalism skills are universal.”

“Just because technology allows you to do something does not mean it’s something you should do.”

At the 2006 Convergence Conference at the University of South Carolina, we convened a panel of authors of convergence, Web journalism and multimedia books. As the moderator for that “Convergence Booknotes” session, I recall how much we grappled with the challenges of preparing a teaching resource on a topic that is constantly changing.

Wenger and Potter may have the best answer yet. With unit-specific exercises and a long-term project completed in steps during each unit, the interactive online workbook is head and shoulders above the static print resources that students often don’t use.

Simultaneously, the authors are posting to a Web log that has current developments with tags to specific chapters in the book. So in effect, the core concepts in the text can hold even as the blog is being updated semester-to-semester.

Let’s acknowledge that Wenger and Potter aren’t the first authors to use a blog with their text. Janet Kolodzy, for instance, launched her Urge 2 Converge blog with her book, “Convergence Journalism: Writing and Reporting across the News Media.”

So what makes this particular book different from other Web journalism or convergence books? I think the chief difference is that it is written from the perspective of broadcast journalists, without excluding the needs of those whose primary role is a newspaper one.

At their core, this text and the supplemental e-resources are designed to make students better reporters for whatever platform on which they’re conveying the story. While the early chapters deal with the reporting process, the latter ones address such issues as doing live shots, dressing for television and producing for podcasts.

With students coming to our classes immersed in the World Wide Web, it was only a matter of time before we would have a multimedia-journalism textbook that is truly multimedia.

It looks as though that time has come.

Dr. George Daniels is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He can be reached at gdaniels@bama.ua.edu.

Links referenced in this article:
Wenger: http://snipurl.com/debwenger
Potter: http://www.newslab.org/staff.htm
Online workbook: http://college.cqpress.com/advancingthestory/default.asp
Wenger-Potter blog: http://snipurl.com/wengerpotterblog
Urge 2 Converge blog: http://urge2converge.blogs.com
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---------------Conferences, Training and Calls for Papers

Newsplex Summer Seminar
Columbia, S.C.
May 12 – 16, 2008
http://newsplex.sc.edu/newsplex08/sumsem.html
As of Feb. 13 only 1 space remains. If you are interested in the last seat, please register online as soon as possible by following the link above.
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AEJMC Midwinter Conference
Pittsburgh
Feb. 29 – March 1, 2008
http://www.aejmc.org/_scholarship/_calls/08midwinter.php
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AEJMC Southeast Colloquium
Auburn, Ala.
March 13-15
http://aejmc.org/_events/regional_meetings/index.php
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BEA 2008: The New Communications Frontiers
Las Vegas
April 16-19, 2008
http://www.beaweb.org/bea2008/index.html
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61st World Newspaper Congress
Goteborg, Sweden
June 1-4, 2008
http://www.wan-press.org/
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15th World Editors Forum
Goteborg, Sweden
June 1-4, 2008
http://www.worldeditorsforum.org/
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AEJMC Convention 2008
Chicago
Aug. 6-9, 2008
http://aejmc.org/_events/convention/08convention/index.php
Call for Papers deadline: April 1, 2008
http://aejmc.org/08convention.php
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The Colorado Colloquium on Media Ethics & Economics: Competing Imperatives and Duties
Estes Park, Colo.
Sept. 15-17, 2008
http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/~tbivins/aejmc_ethics/news-events.html
Call for Papers deadline: April 15, 2008
Organizers are particularly interested in proposals that address issues of communication technology as part of the ethical practice/economic model equation. For more information, contact Dr. Patrick Plaisance of Colorado State University at patrick.plaisance@colostate.edu.
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28th American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) Annual Conference
Oct. 1-4, 2008
Seattle
http://ajhaonline.org/convention.html
Call for Papers deadline: May 15, 2008
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Convergence and Society: The Participatory Web
University of South Carolina
Columbia, S.C.
Oct. 9-11, 2008
http://newsplex.sc.edu/newsplex08/cfpapers.html
Call for Papers deadline: June 15, 2008
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---------------Publisher and Editorial Staff

The Convergence Newsletter is free and published by The College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina.

Executive Editor
Doug Fisher
dfisher@sc.edu

Editor
Brad Petit
convedit@mailbox.sc.edu
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---------------Online

Visit The Convergence Newsletter blog at http://convergencenl.blogspot.com, where you can comment on recent articles and keep up with the latest in convergence news. There is also an RSS feed option for those who want alternative access.

View past and current issues of The Convergence Newsletter at http://www.jour.sc.edu/news/convergence/. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------Copyright and Redistribution

The Convergence Newsletter is Copyright © 2007 by the University of South Carolina, College of Mass Communications and Information Studies. All rights reserved.

This newsletter may be redistributed in any form - print or electronic - without edits or deletion of any content.
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---------------Submission Guidelines/Deadline Schedule

The Convergence Newsletter provides an editorially neutral forum for discussion of the theoretical and professional meaning of media convergence. We welcome articles of all sorts addressing the subject of convergence in journalism and media. We also accept news briefs, book reviews, calls for papers and conference announcements. Our audience is both academics and professionals; the publication style is AP for copy and APA for citations. Feature articles should be 750 to 1,200 words. Other articles should be 250 to 750 words; announcements and conference submissions should be 200 words. Please send all articles to The Convergence Newsletter editor at convedit@mailbox.sc.edu along with your name, affiliation, and contact information.

If you would like to post a position announcement, include a brief description of the position and a link to the complete information. All announcements should be submitted to The Convergence Newsletter editor at convedit@mailbox.sc.edu.

The Convergence Newsletter is published the first or second week of each month except January and July. Articles should be submitted by the 15th of the month to be considered for the next month’s issue. Any questions should be sent to convedit@mailbox.sc.edu.
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---------------Subscribe/Information

To subscribe  or edit your information, please send a message to convedit@mailbox.sc.edu. You may write to The Convergence Newsletter c/o School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.