Christian Oliver’s digital thoughts

I gave a seminar on Monday at the American Press Institute (API) about the newsroom of the future. It was a quick trip except for a cancelled flight on Sunday that almost made me loose the conference entirely. Fortunately they rerouted me to a different airport and after a long taxi ride I made it to the hotel.

The conference went very well, the audience was engaged and I got many congratulations and requests for contact information.

Here are some pictures of the trip. Click on them to see them larger:

Working “multimedia” on the plane during Sunday’s Ground Stops.

The Hyatts are very good for me because they come iPod ready with a bedside radio and inputs on the TV

Introducing me and ready to start

As many of you know, I couldn’t resist. I have the black bag and now want the white one…

I’m honored to have been invited to Full Sail University’s Advisory Board. I’ve heard of Full Sail for many years but I never had the chance to visit before. Now I must say I’m incredibly impressed. This University is a model to follow and the most cutting edge, multi-disciplined production oriented university out there. There may be equivalent facilities somewhere else but none with the variety of disciplines covered at Full Sail.

No wonder they can’t keep up with growth. There are so many opportunities for companies like Full Sail yet their main challenge is managing their growth. They currently have more than 6,000 students and the facilities are used 24/7.

What I found to be most amazing was the incredible mood everyone seems to be in. You can tell people are learning and working while having a lot of fun.

Let me give you a little tour.

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We are having an internal meeting in INNOVATION at Norfolk, near Juan Antonio Giner’s home. We are discussing our latest lessons learned regarding newsroom integrations and the 2008 WAN congress. Very interesting meetings. One important message from the WAN; its not a matter of wether or not to integrate, its all about how and there are no unique magic formulas because each company has different realities, different skills and different audiences and since media companies can no longer force content to their audience, they have to be really innovative and listen hard to determine how to compete.

Here are some pictures of us working:

Juan Antonio Giner and Marta Botero

Javier Zarracina and Marcos Foglia

Carlos Soria

Carlo Campos, Ernesto Rinaldi, Christian Oliver and Alvaro Moncada

Ernesto Rinaldi and David LaFontaine

I’ve been saying this since 1999. Filtering is the key and the mayor challenge we are facing. With so much information and so much BAD information, the Playlist is the most valuable asset and the best added value. Who can build a “playlist” ideal for me. This playlist should have all kinds of media that I would like and should consume. The key to the playlist is also context because I don’t want the same playlist when I’m in the car than when I’m home nor in the morning on a Monday than in the morning on a Saturday.

Peter Gabriel explains it very well in this video about the site he endorses and invested in called The Filter:

I will be speaking at the exclusive “One Day with INNOVATION” event on October 24th. at Harvard’s Faculty Club.

I was reading a post by Jeff Jarvis and it hit a note on my subconscious. This is a topic I’ve been struggling about for the past year. When I was invited as a judge for the Fundación de Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano on their yearly awards, I realized that some changes need to be made on this kind of awards, including the Pulitzer.

In general, awards should look to reward innovation, journalistic principles and above all quality. They should not limit themselves to rewarding traditions or old ways of doing things.

Awards have to change their structure from media outlet based to content type based. It is obsolete in this era of fragmented media and audiences to continue giving awards to “newspapers”, “television” and “radio”. Some awards like the Pulitzer have already taken this path but I would suggest breaking them down further by type of content, i.e. politics, economics, technology, etc. Even the Pulitzer only takes into account the web and print when giving awards for Breaking News. How about using other communication tools such as SMS, Twitter or even AIM?

Furthermore, we should move away from rewarding individualistic work and motivate team work. They should shift their focus from rewarding single individuals to coordinate efforts of multidisciplinary teams. The Pulitzers make a great job at this but many awards are still not up to par and many still think of them as individual achievements. I would rather see an award given to the newsroom that managed to cover a breaking news event in the most effective way, making the best use of its available media outlets than rewarding the typical photographer who was at the right place at the right time. We have to incentivize going beyond that.

There should still be categories for individual efforts and for individual skills, almost like in the Oscars, say for “Editing”. But there should be awards for innovation. How about an award for “Best use of Social Networks in the creation and dissemination of a journalistic piece”. It would be great to have entities looking at these type of awards and in themselves disseminating best practices in the cutting edge of media.

Maybe fragmentation is the answer to awards as well. It would only make sense that in a fragmented media world, we had fragmented awards. Fragmenting the awards would also open the door for smaller operations to qualify, that way we can start seeing new names other than the usual suspects with enormous budgets. Rewarding excellence in smaller operations can have a bigger impact on the overall quality of journalism as we all want to learn from examples we can achieve.

This is the second day at the Next Newsroom conference. Today we had a non-conference format. Attendees suggested subject matters on the conference’s wiki and those were turned into break-out sessions. I led a session on Productivity Tools for the newsroom of the future. It turned out very well. Then I attended another session about the Business Models that would pay for journalism.

My breakout session was very interesting and makes me think of the possibility of focusing this blog on that subject matter.

Now I’m headed home because I’m feeling terrible with a cold.

Chris O’Brien opening the day

I’ll be part of a panel speaking about the Newsroom of the future at the NextNewsroom conference in Duke University.

I found Steve Outing’s article about his experience of switching to digital only very interesting. I’ve been digital only for more than 11 years now. I tried to go back once but found the paper to be too messy.

[From Life Without the Print Edition]