Reboot

Recently, we all huddled into a staff meeting as "Scripps 3.0" was unveiled to the newsroom. Basically its our parent company's new initiatives to improve the quality and profitability of all the newspapers in the E.W. Scripps chain. The good news is the plan is journalism focused. Its about looking at improving our daily product and focusing on community journalism, not slashing and trimming the news to death. More good news it that much of the organizational initiatives were modeled after things we were doing at the Caller-Times, so there will be no massive shake up as far as jobs. Job descriptions, however, have changed. We are no longer "reporters" and "photographers." Now we are all "Multimedia Journalists."

Yeah, I know. Anyone who's worked in a newsroom the last five years has probably heard this before. I myself was a bit skeptical. I've been told several times (at more than one paper) that its time to be web focused. Usually I get all excited and try to immerse myself in multimedia. Unfortunately after a month or so everyone goes back to being reporters and photographers, and no one seems to want to invest the time or resources needed to do good multimedia. This time, it may be different. I'm told everyone in the newsroom is going to be held accountable for doing their share of videos, web updates, blogs, tweets, etc. And with the orders coming straight from corporate, we are suppose to see a real investment in new media. I'm really hoping it will be different.

So in my first week as a "Multimedia journalist," I put together two videos. One in a couple of hours on deadline, and the other in about a day and a half.

They both turned out well, I thought, but the second one I really enjoyed. I saw an ad in our paper about a piano sale at the university, and had visions of a room full of pianos just begging to be played. After a couple phone calls and some vaguely grounded reasoning, I had a willing subject.

With the new initiative, we were told we don't really need permission to do things (at least that what I took from it). If you have an idea, just do it. If a reporter wants to take their own photos, go for it (God help us). If I want to pull a student away from studying the week before finals and force him to play the same song over and over for my amusement, have at it.

He was actually a great sport, super cooperative and a pleasure to work with. I should take a lesson or two from him.

(P.S. Sorry, about the auto play. I manipulated the embed code a bit to get the bigger video size on my blog, but then couldn't stop it from playing as soon as it loaded.)