WashingtonPost.com on the 21st Century Newsroom

Early this morning two senior editors of WashingtonPost.com spoke to a small intimate group of web professionals on creating a newsroom in the 21st century. Jim Brady, Executive Editor, and Tom Kennedy, Managing Editor, labeled their presentation, “Creating a converged newsroom”. Together they focused on four key areas of convergence:

• Technical Convergence
• Audience Convergence
• Competitive Convergence
• Information Convergence

I’ll begin exactly where Jim and Tom started; what is really meant by the term convergence? It seems to be one of those buzz-words thrown around as frequently as “Web 2.0”. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is implementing it, but no one really has a grasp of what it is – or at least they are all defining it differently. Convergence is a post in itself – however, the general idea is that you leverage your medium by utilizing and maximizing your content in the greatest capacity allowable and appropriate for your audience. Jim and Tom start by identifying four areas of convergence:

1. Technical Convergence:
   The 21st century is here and with it comes an amazing wealth of advancements in our “toys”; like the Trio, iPod, camera phones, wi-fi capable digital cameras and Tivo to name a few. However, these “toys” have now added to and also transformed the ways in which we read and report news. One can keep restaurant reviews on their iPod or read (even watch) sporting events as they happen on their cell phones. Now more than ever before the power of journalism is in the hands of us all. The front-page photo of the London tube bombing was taken by a near-by pedestrian on their camera phone – an amateur with a phone presents to us all an almost instant-reaction to the horrific events; that is powerful! We need to be conscious of the many different devices and the ways in which their being used.
2. Audience Convergence:
   There is a new community arising – the oversaturated abundance of social networking sites has paved the way. More importantly to WashingtonPost.com is the emergence of the hyper-local-world; that local community coverage. We live in a time where mass-communication is easier and more affordable than ever – out of this arises local portals of information who’ve developed unique and powerful niches to specific content. Local sites covering state counties, school districts or even a couple street blocks can easily and rapidly disseminate more specific information to that community and more easily appeal to growing that specific community online. Competing with niches so targeted and so specific becomes a growing challenge. It is now more important to be aware of these local portals and understand how they relate to your core audience and how your core audience relates to them. Know your content, know your audience and figure out a method for optimal delivery.

3. Competitive Convergence:
   You know you have a story to tell –the question becomes, how do you tell that story? No longer are we limited to a text format of delivery; the opportunities of mediums are now growingly available for everyone; text, video, audio and a variety of combinations. Every story has an appropriate medium – some have more than one and others only belong to one. The competition is between medium and method of delivery. The web has played an enormous role in this competitive convergence – now video can compliment text or vice-versa. There is now a huge difference between an audio file and a podcast or a video and a slideshow of images from video. It is to you to determine how best to tell the story.
4. Information Convergence:
   “Mash-ups” have become extremely popular – the concept of taking multiple/different elements of data to create new and more useful data. Google Maps and their open API have been instrumental and used with strong examples of successful Mash-ups. By combining the real estate data from Craig’s List with a Google Map of the Washington DC metro area – users now have a targeted visual map of available real estate in their area. Leveraging the information you have, your audience demands and that which is useful and available is a key metric to success.

Everything comes back to one thing; you have story, how will you tell that story?

View Larger Image on Flickr