The time is now

At the start of this semester, as I introduced my second-year students to a redeveloped News Production course, I spent some time talking about the new multimedia skills they were expected to learn. I said something like this: “You may not need to know how to do a video or audio report right now, but within the next two to five years, you will.”

Apparently, they do need to know it now. I’ve just spent some time poking around the websites of the community newspapers published in and around Vancouver, and I’ve found them using Soundslides and video. Like the multimedia efforts of the Vancouver Sun and Province, these are all new, basically since the start of the semester.

So, when I told students they had a one- to two-year window, where they’re training in multimedia would give them the advantage over j-school grads with limited exposure to the “new journalism,” I may have been wrong.

It is curious, though, how quickly these newspapers have leapt onto the multimedia wagon considering how much of the ‘net they don’t seem to get. None of the newspapers — the dailies or the community newspapers — offer readers the ability to comment on articles. There is little or no linking going on. The platfroms for building community connections are absent. Much of the content of the websites of the community newspapers is provided by shovelware: the print edition is still the (almost total) franchise.

The community sites are cookie-cutter designed. The community newspapers owned by CanWest, publisher of both the Vancouver Sun and Province, share the same look (and many of the same ad links) as the dailies. The community newspapers owned by Black Press (David, not Conrad), recently underwent a major redesign and, as a result, the individual newspapers have all but lost their local identity on their web front pages.

It’s odd that this is the case in the major metropolitan area of the province. Out in the hinterland, there is at least one site that is treating the web seriously. The Prince George Citizen has multimedia, comments, regular updates and more. It’s worth taking a lot at.

It’s good to see these newspapers starting to exploit the journalistic potential of the web (not the least because it justifies all the effort I’ve put in to trying to teach these skills to the up-and-coming journalists). But I’m not convinced that it’s anything other than trendiness that’s driving them.

(A couple of notes. The existence of community newspaper video was pointed out to me by Daniel Pi, a former student, working journalist and pretty good nature photographer. Second, in the interests of transparency, I worked for Black Press slightly more than a decade ago.)