Comments on: Multimedia roll out at Skagit Valley Herald

By: Ralph Schwartz

Ralph Schwartz — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:27:48 +0000

Apology accepted, but not really necessary. I respect what you’re doing, chronicling the change in our media environment. I believe it was an appropriate literary device, to set up my offhand comment as a foil for Don.

I’ll be interested to follow your reporting on this blog and on MediaShift.

By: Kate Martin

Kate Martin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:37:58 +0000

Ralph, I’m sorry it came out that way but that was not my intent, honest. Everyone at our shop does what they can in the time they have to do it.

I haven’t owned a television since 2004 and I don’t subscribe to cable, so I didn’t know this was a reference to “The Wire.” But I have worked alongside competing reporters from Gannett papers at previous jobs and they’ve said “more with less” came from their manager’s mouths.

My “more with less” statement in the post was really just a setup to Don Nelson’s comment, because I thought it summed up exactly what I think about the issue.

By: Ralph Schwartz

Ralph Schwartz — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:20:46 +0000

As the Skagit Valley Herald reporter who mumbled something at that newsroom meeting about “more with less,” I wanted to set the record straight. (I also want to vow to speak more distinctly at newsroom meetings from now on.)
While Kate’s blog entry creates the impression that the mumbler is a cynical reporter who doesn’t love his job, I want to let it be known that neither is true in my case. My statement may have appeared cynical to those who overheard it, but I was trying in vain to make a pop-culture reference.
I was cribbing a line from season 5 of the HBO series “The Wire,” which is set, in part, in a fictional Baltimore Sun newsroom. I should have realized the HBO series, now off the air, is too obscure to be a legitimate pop-culture reference.
Anyway, in the show, the unheroic editor of the paper calls the newsroom staff together for an impromptu meeting and announces immediate layoffs and buyouts. He’s the one who makes the quip about doing more with less, which generates quite a bit of eye-rolling from the staff.
At the SVH meeting, I was only trying to bring levity to what was a fairly serious discussion. But I’m not guilty of cynicism.
If you want to hear cynicism, ask me about politics.

By: Aaron Burkhalter

Aaron Burkhalter — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:26:35 +0000

It’s nice having an editor allowing you to write about this.

I’ve been excited by the change, and I’m skimming through all my story ideas trying to figure out which ones could have video on them.

But I’m most excited about the immediate change of getting news stories up on the web quickly. The short stories I write for the web on a breaking news story during the day actually help with my print story the next day.

By: Kate Martin

Kate Martin — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:29:08 +0000

Great idea on the blog. I’ll pass it on to the editors. It’s a temporary fix, but at least we’d get that stuff up on the Web!

By: Ryan Sholin

Ryan Sholin — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:22:02 +0000

Sounds like a great plan!

On the Soundslides issue: In Santa Cruz, faced with a Web platform that consisted of static HTML pages that we could only edit by FTP, we launched a Multimedia blog where we hosted all our video and Soundslides.

We built it in WordPress, using plugins like SWFObject to get Soundslides into posts.

Obvious advantages: Great SEO, searchable archives of video and slideshows, and relatively easy to use.

Big disadvantage: No automatic tie-in to stories on the news site, which meant we would often hardcode an image and links by FTP to tease the story.