Having separate newsroom is an advantage in a broadcasting network. Also, the advantages of maintaining a separate new media staff include creating a mechanism to generate original news reporting for online publication. Newspapers that have not set up a separate new media staff have put incredible demands on their reporters, who must now report for both the newspapers and online. Success has been achieved at least in part by integrating the online and print staff. It is important to get print reporters more involved in the online arena even if they don’t actually report for the online product.
The slow integration of Internet access in the newsroom was partly the result of a belief that the internet is not a terribly important tool for the modern journalist. This view is dying, but there remains another reason for the slow integration of Internet technologies into the newsroom: the presence of computer systems that were custom-built for the newsroom with specialized text-editing software that many newsroom managers find too expensive to replace. The biggest problem that arises with maintaining a separate new media staff is that in many cases the line between editorial and advertising is blurring.
Regardless of how the online operation is structured, new media present an unprecedented opportunity for creating collaborative approaches to reporting. The advent of much-improved wireless communications, such as personal communications services; improved news-gathering tools; such as high-resolution digital camera or experimental imaging sensors such as Columbia University’s Omnidirectional camera; and powerful lightweight portable handheld personal computers combine to give reporters in the field as many computing and communications capabilities as their central newsroom counterparts.
The introduction of a commercial device for mobile news reporting demonstrates the viability of what the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center has called the “virtual newsroom”. A virtual newsroom exists without any physical boundaries. Through electronic mail, remote electronic access to databases, and the ability to transmit multimedia content via the existing public telecommunications infrastructure, journalist are able to work entirely from the field without ever needing to enter a central newsroom location and to exchange messages, stories and picture files with editors anchored firmly in cyberspace.
The world’s first all-digital newsroom was KHNL-TV of Honolulu, Hawaii, launched on April 17, 1995, as a joint development with Avid Technology. New management models emphasizing communication with members of a highly decentralized, distributed newsroom are a clear imperative of research on mobile journalism technologies. The unsettled newsroom management issues including figuring out how to:
-- transition of a 24 hour news cycle
-- maintain efficient and reliable communication when technological advances have made high-speed and ubiquitous communication the de facto standard and;
-- produce effective news packages that utilize the full pallet of new media software tools but don’t overburden the news consumer with endless plug-ins, downloads, software glitches, and hardware up-grades.
New technology can produce many unexpected consequences. A study conducted for the Media Studies Center in 1988 by newsroom veteran Adam Clayton Powell III, now vice president of technology studies and programs for the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, revealed that the introduction of videotape in TV newsrooms in the 1970s did more than simply provide an easier way to edit moving images.
The slow integration of Internet access in the newsroom was partly the result of a belief that the internet is not a terribly important tool for the modern journalist. This view is dying, but there remains another reason for the slow integration of Internet technologies into the newsroom: the presence of computer systems that were custom-built for the newsroom with specialized text-editing software that many newsroom managers find too expensive to replace. The biggest problem that arises with maintaining a separate new media staff is that in many cases the line between editorial and advertising is blurring.
Regardless of how the online operation is structured, new media present an unprecedented opportunity for creating collaborative approaches to reporting. The advent of much-improved wireless communications, such as personal communications services; improved news-gathering tools; such as high-resolution digital camera or experimental imaging sensors such as Columbia University’s Omnidirectional camera; and powerful lightweight portable handheld personal computers combine to give reporters in the field as many computing and communications capabilities as their central newsroom counterparts.
The introduction of a commercial device for mobile news reporting demonstrates the viability of what the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center has called the “virtual newsroom”. A virtual newsroom exists without any physical boundaries. Through electronic mail, remote electronic access to databases, and the ability to transmit multimedia content via the existing public telecommunications infrastructure, journalist are able to work entirely from the field without ever needing to enter a central newsroom location and to exchange messages, stories and picture files with editors anchored firmly in cyberspace.
The world’s first all-digital newsroom was KHNL-TV of Honolulu, Hawaii, launched on April 17, 1995, as a joint development with Avid Technology. New management models emphasizing communication with members of a highly decentralized, distributed newsroom are a clear imperative of research on mobile journalism technologies. The unsettled newsroom management issues including figuring out how to:
-- transition of a 24 hour news cycle
-- maintain efficient and reliable communication when technological advances have made high-speed and ubiquitous communication the de facto standard and;
-- produce effective news packages that utilize the full pallet of new media software tools but don’t overburden the news consumer with endless plug-ins, downloads, software glitches, and hardware up-grades.
New technology can produce many unexpected consequences. A study conducted for the Media Studies Center in 1988 by newsroom veteran Adam Clayton Powell III, now vice president of technology studies and programs for the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, revealed that the introduction of videotape in TV newsrooms in the 1970s did more than simply provide an easier way to edit moving images.
