Tim Porter on newspapers podcasting:
Podcasts are small. They are immediately energizing and creative for the journalists doing them. They provide examples to others in the newsroom who wish they were doing something different, but want someone else to show them the way. Podcasts contribute to and foster a culture of innovation.
They don’t just extend what newspapers can provide to their community, he argues, they are small things, easily done, that have the power to begin a much needed change in the culture of the newsroom.
…most important, podcasts require newspaper reporters and editors to jump platforms, to think in a different medium, to develop new skills. That’s innovative. And, innovation breeds innovation.
Small changes can be catalytic. A few weeks ago, during a discussion about developing training for front-line editors in newsrooms, Butch Ward, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and now a trainer at the Poynter Institute, told a story of how a couple of editors at one newspaper collaborated on their own with the copy desk to produce a more active style of writing at the newspaper. It was not a sea change, said Ward, but a pond change.
I like that. Change enough ponds and you’ve got a new sea.
Pond change. Great concept: not great sweeping, mandated changes, nor mere tinkering, but small, significant steps that when taken together redefine what the newsroom is, over time, and driven by the innovative spirit of those in the newsroom.
Macro changes are driving citizens media efforts. Enough micro changes can blow up and rebuild the newsroom. The power of media is going to emerge from where the two — micro and macro; citizen and newsroom — come together.
Among the critical, knee-jerk responses, of course, is the snort of derision and the question of who is why are all these citizen journalists going to do media work when they’re not being paid for it? Podcasting, as it has developed, provides part of the answer. There are more than 5,000 podcasts now and they have almost exclusively been created without being “monetized.” The ‘casters are, in most cases, doing it because they can and because they care. And those are the motives driving those in the newsrooms who are bringing on the innovation.
TECHNORATI TAGS: PODCASTING, NEWSPAPERS, JOURNALISM
