Tom's Blog of News-y Goodness

Field Trip

Mere hours ago I was in the newsroom for the Washington Post's website (washingtonpost.com) being given a tour by its managing editor of multimedia, Tom Kennedy. While last week's discussion with Ryan Thornburg was a little more abstract in its tackling of heady online intellectualism, this week's discussion with Tom Kennedy was a real look into the daily grind of online journalism as well as the logistics behind actually implementing all of the things we've been talking about in class.

First of all, it's important to establish the sheer number of awards that Kennedy has won during his life. He won two consecutive Pulitzer prizes at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Working for National Geographic, he won five awards for best photography from the American Society of Magazine Editors. In the past three years, his work at washingtonpost.com has earned the website many awards including two Emmy's and a Murrow award.

One of the reasons that he keeps winning these awards is his unique philosophy on video journalism. His term is "subject-driven narrative," which roughly means that the video should be mainly told from the point of view of the subject. There is very little narrative or explanation beyond what is seen on video, almost the opposite of how traditional television news works. Kennedy said that this approach to video came from his time at National Geographic.

Echoing what we have said time and again during class, Kennedy said that interactivity is "what separates the Web from older media." To that end, Kennedy said that they are currently working on allowing comments on video along with sharing (like usnews.com has with Facebook and del.icio.us tags).

Kennedy talked about the site's audience as well. The Washington Post is obviously a metropolitan paper on one level, but being situated in Washington places it in an international position as well. It was interesting to learn how at the same time, there is one photographer doing a daily video locally in Washington while another one is over in Viet Nam. The Washington Post website gets traffic from all over the world, according to Kennedy, and one challenge is appealing to all those different audiences.

One thing that interested everyone was when Kennedy speculated that newspapers would have to become "more analytical" in order to survive. The one-day delay that newspapers suffer from is simply too long in a time when facts can be uploaded to the Internet in minutes. While he emphasized that it was a guess, Kennedy said that newspapers could potentially focus on interpretation in order to increase its value to consumers.

Kennedy ended with a discussion of the future of the Post's website. Going along with the legally mandated switch to HDTV, he said that all of the videos on the website are being shot in high-definition. Kennedy agrees that online video is vastly underutilized. He hopes that video will play a more integral part in the overall website in the future. Kennedy said that the technology will soon increase to the point where it will only make sense to have video and graphics have a larger part in the overall presentation. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that technology is what drives much of online journalism, so I have little doubt that his speculation will eventually pan out.

posted by tromano @ 10:42 PM