No. 6 - Reporters adapting to new mediums

I got to hear about how reporters felt about working at the paper I interned at this summer when I went out on assignments with them. Most of the time when I would go out on assignment it was with one of the two photographers there, which I found interesting as a convergence student. While I hardly ever was able to write and shoot a story on my own, it was interesting to be able to work with the photographers while reporting a story. The process of working with them is very similar to the process of working with my team now.

What I really liked about working with other reporters though was seeing how people actually employed in the industry felt about their place of employment and the industry in general. On a particularly long drive with one of the photographers, we started chatting about the increase use of technology and the multiple forms of media that are being used by reporters at newspapers now.

Just the day before, the photographer I was talking to had to spend a lot of time helping one of the new reporters with uploading photos to a story he had just written. The reporter hadn’t taken the photo’s himself, but he was still very frustrated about having to add his own photos to his story. He even complained about never having to do that before.

While driving back from our interview, the photographer and I talked about how much the new reporter was struggling with being tasked with finding his own art and adding it to his stories. It was then brought up how the business reporter is actually really great at adapting to changing media. The business reporter wrote a daily column, but on Thursdays when we didn’t have a print deadline for the next day this reporter would make a video for the column. This video was not elaborate like anything we have to do for J4804, it was actually the reporter dictating what his column would have said while filming at a location relevant to the column off of a selfie-stick.

While that may sound simple, this reporter actually puts a lot of effort into using multiple forms of media. One story that he did about the Nutmobile he took plenty of photos that he ended up posting on Twitter.

He also messed around with the app Videolicious, which the newspaper had just been given access too. Essentially it provides an easy way to make a video package and even had a feature of scrolling reporter track so reporters could record themselves while reading their script off of their phone.

In addition to all of that, the business reporter, along with many others in the newsroom, was an avid user of twitter. I chose to add links to his story in the from of his tweets above, because that is one of the ways that many people are exposed to his work. Also fun fact, he is the most followed person on Twitter in Rochester, where the paper is located.

The photographer was happy to have a reporter like that in the newsroom, and later that day that photographer was promoted to multimedia editor, so that probably added to the photographer’s enthusiasm about reporters embracing media instead of him having to force it on to them. At the meeting where his promotion was announced another reporter made a joke about the new editor now having to attach all of his photos to his story for him, as this was a trend of frustration for many of the reporters in the newsroom. The new editor was adamant that he would teach every reporter how to add photos to their stories.

I found it all very interesting to watch as this newspaper was slowly growing its online and multimedia presence. I’m sure that more multi-media will come from them. It was also reassuring as a convergence student to see that it what I am studying is actually the trend, even one of the reporters was impressed with the depth that I would get into with convergence.

While what I described above was not a social media reporter, I did find it interesting to compare some of the tasks that reporters have been doing to what social media reporters do. There was always some talk about the hashtags they use in their tweets, and sometimes a conversation about when to break news solely on Twitter. All in all, very interesting to see the industry evolving in a newsroom and how that evolution is not just limited to new journalists entering the industry.