Multimedia Radio

From this morning’s Star Tribune:

In a move it hopes will change the morning drive-time habits of public radio listeners nationwide, Minneapolis-based Public Radio International (PRI) has teamed up with a roster of other media providers to develop a live national news program that would compete with National Public Radio’s venerable “Morning Edition” show.
PRI and its partner, WNYC, New York Public Radio, will produce the show in collaboration with the BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH, the Boston public radio station. The show will launch as an interactive multiplatform program, inviting radio and online listeners’ participation, the partners said.

Meanwhile, NPR is launching its own new competitor to “Morning Edition”:
“We’re actually developing our own program to compete with ‘Morning Edition,’ ” said Andi Sporkin, NPR’s vice president for communications. She said a show aimed at a slightly younger audience — 25 to 44 — will debut in September, launched simultaneously on radio, online, high-definition radio via satellite and podcasts.

So, between the two public radio organizations, we’re seeing multiplatform delivery from both and high involvement from listeners (at least in the PRI program). Clearly, they’re not going to just be doing radio; they’ll be incorporating photos and video on the web, and are trying to build deeper relationships and develop community.

Just another sign of all the media converging (note the PRI partners); and because radio and print organizations don’t carry the same psychic baggage about video that TV stations do, they may actually do online video better.

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More Media Layoffs

Well, layoffs may not be exactly the right word, but the recent news that two dozen Star Tribune newsroom staff had accepted buyouts continues the trend toward newsroom downsizing.

The buyouts amount to two weeks of pay for every year of service. I was surprised at some of the names I saw, like Dane Smith, with whom I worked back at the state capitol in the late ’80s to mid ’90s. With 20 years under his belt, the MPR story says he sees this as an opportunity to move to other pursuits. Still, I’ve been reading his byline for a long time, so it will be quite a change.

This is the same buyout formula the St. Paul Pioneer Press offered its employees late last year. Buyouts are better than layoffs (at least they’re voluntary), but they’re happening all over: this post has links to some other notable and recent ones.

It’s another signpost on the road to smaller mainstream media news organizations, even as the amount of news and information available explodes. Reporters are needing to be more versatile, producing multimedia content in addition to their old-fashioned writing. And many reporters are starting blogs (often hosted by their newspapers), so the writing part of the job isn’t diminishing either.

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Pediatric Anesthesia Presentation on Media Relations

Dr. Will McIlvaine from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Jen Gentile from NBC’s Today show and I are giving a presentation today at the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia Winter Meeting in Phoenix.

We had a great time discussing this morning in preparation for the presentation, which you can download below.

Presentation in PDF form

I’ll have more to say afterwards; we’re looking forward to the give-and-take of Q&A…and I welcome the discussion to continue here as well.

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Medicine and Media

…is the topic of the presentation Jen Gentile from NBC’s Today show, Dr. Will McIlvaine of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and I will be giving at the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia meeting in Phoenix this week.

The focus will be conjoined twins in the media, with which Dr. McIlvaine has had experience as a health care provider, Jen has as a TV producer, and I have in media relations, being the bridge between providers, patients and journalists in three cases in the last year.

I’ve been looking forward to this for some time, but the picture below gives additional reason to look forward to being in Arizona.

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The Aase Switch

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for pointing out Michael Rosenblum’s blog, and particularly some great posts he’s done about why magazines and newspapers do web video better than TV stations do.

The irony, at least from my own perspective, is the comparison between news organizations that have traditionally worked in print and those that have traditionally worked in video – that is, local TV news stations. The magazines and newspapers have far less problem adapting to video; at least in the VJ model – that is where the reporter carries their own small camera and laptop, and produces their own stories. The magazines and newspapers ‘get it’ right away because this is they way they have always worked. Newspaper journalists have never worked with a crew. They have never had to wait in a reporting situation for ‘the pencil to arrive’.

In most local newsrooms in this country, we field an average of 8 camera crews in any given day. That means 8 cameras to cover a city like Tampa or Houston or Nashville. Can you imagine what would happen if a newspaper were suddenly reduced to covering Tampa with 8 pencils?

Read the whole article here; it’s well worth it. The fundamental point is right on; in a smaller-audience world of web video, you can’t afford multi-person crews taking a long time to produce content. Rosenblum advocates miniDV production with laptops for editing.

Newspapers and magazines and others that aren’t accustomed to high-end broadcast production can be more nimble; they can send a reporter with a mini DV camera instead of just a pencil and notebook, enhancing their print reporting and at the same time opening a new world of web video opportunity. It requires a more radical rethinking for TV stations to “gear down” their production.

Ironically, I’ve seen TV stations moving in the opposite direction. I’ve seen them bring digital cameras on some of their highly popular stories, so they can create still-frame slide shows for their web sites.

So TV stations (which use hugely expensive video cameras in their main business) use inexpensive digital still cameras to create more page views that can enable them to serve more ads and generate more revenue, and newspapers (which use expensive gigapixel still cameras with foot-long lenses in their main business), use inexpensive video cameras to enhance their sites.

This is something of a take-off on the Anderson Switch, which holds that everything paid will become free and vice-versa. In the Aase Switch, TV goes print and print goes video.

Of course, I’m not optimistic this label will catch on, for two reasons. First, my last name isn’t easy to pronounce, like Chris Anderson’s. (For the record, it’s AY-see.) But more importantly, it’s so obvious that it can’t possibly be original.

Here are some other good Rosenblum posts on similar themes:

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