Tuesday, June 06, 2006

The Word in Moscow is Interactivity

The 13th World Editor's Forum is going on right now in Moscow.

Interesting place to have a Fourm like this...considering there are still some questions over the role of the Russian state in Russian media...

But the emphasis of this Lucky Number 13 Forum was Interactivity and what editors can do to get all us folks under the age of 50 to read the paper again...

Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com rhapsodised about the realities of theconvergent newsroom
the Post’s philosophy is now that the actual article is the starting point of the conversation, rather than its more traditional endpoint…

That means that now, the Post’s stories also link to the different independent blogs that have commented on a particular article… Soon readers will be able to instantly comment on articles… Washingtonpost.com is also full of interesting “packaged” content -- multimedia efforts that show how politicians voted, for instance, that can be organized however the reader wants…

What else has the Post done? Basically, the newspaper has established the convergence newsroom, which includes a multimedia control room, TV studio, and a radio studio. They have also equipped reporters with cameras…


And Steve Yelvington talked about what's happeneing with hyperlocal news site BlufftonToday--and how the "consumption of news is directly related to civic engagement" and “Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around.”

Also there were
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Google News' Nathan Stoll, and Yahoo!News' Neil Budde.

Odd that GoogleNews would be there...kind of shows that there's a shift in what could be considered a news organization. Google's Stoll said they're "not trying to be all things to all people" and "not trying to have an editorial voice."

Both Google and Yahoo are shaking up the paradigm of "news organization" by simply aggregating (although I believe Yahoo! has hired journalists to write news for them.)

We live in interesting times.

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