A Monday morning distraction

I find the online medium's ability to take you on a wild ride you had not intended to take one of its greatest strengths. For instance, this morning I came in and started my daily email check. This includes reviewing the various Google Alerts I am subscribed to.

This morning my 'community journalism' alert picked up an interesting submission on Jake Jarvis's Buzz Machine. This submission was on the recent announced Layoffs at the News & Record in Greensboro. By the way, his bottom line suggestion is that everyone in the newspaper industry needs to get some training on interactivity. If you have not figured this one out yet on your own, shame on you. After all, even if your newsroom lives and breathes interactivity, if your salespeople don't know how to sell it and your publisher doesn't know how to vision it, your still dead in the water.

As I was reading some the comments to Jake's submission I saw a link to a presentation on why newspapers have an opportunity to do local. This presentation is a 67 slide deck that appears to have been presented on June 8th at @media 2007. The presentation was given by Simon Wilson on the approach by Lawrence.com and LJworld.com. I have long been a fan of the online work at the Lawerence Journal World and so gladly went through the presentation. Slide 65 of the presentation provided me with links to the personal sites of the team behind World Online.

I spent a little bit of time visiting the team member sites to see if there were any ideas/thoughts I might grab. I struck gold with playgroundblues.com. This is the personal site of Nathan Borror, Senior Designer at World Online. I found his May 6th post, Transmedia Newspapers.

In this submission he writes of the need for the newspaper industry to take a transmedia storytelling approach rather than a parallel approach to how they disseminate information. I have been spewing this concept for years.

I have a real problem with how most every newspaper company is basically doing what they have done for years in print, online. As an industry I think we all need to try and figure out what are the best uses for print and online. The real gold I found though in his submission was his Fortune Cookie analogy. It works, and it is an analogy I will add to my spew to hopefully help get my point across.

So an hour later, some new news, a new person to possible add to my Linkedin network, a new book to read, a new analogy, and a new blog entry. Not bad for the beginning of a new week. See what I mean about those wild rides?