Convergence issues

Attended a workshop this morning at Riverside College about convergence issues. The presenters were all from the Internet side of their publications, so there was a decided bias for web enhancements. That’s okay, though, I have that bias, too.

One presenter said that visual content –video and photos and photo galleries—is what drives readers to the web sites, not necessarily text content or voice podcasts, which is what most of old journalism types think about most. While blogging is a hot topic, they indicated that few papers are finding a model that works.

They also talked about a lot of segmentation of news. Sometimes some amateur can do one aspect of news --an example of a track and field web site was used-- better than the news organization, which still believes that it must be all things to all readers. These amateurs are going to eat news organizations' lunches. Rather than compete with everyone, they need to find what areas they do best. Or maybe they concentrate on becoming a portal that brings all these other sites to one spot.