Every week in class, we talk about how easy convergence could be. And then we admit that our reporters aren't likely to be as excited about convergence as we are.
Wednesday, JT and I talked about how we'd like to accomplish this whole convergence thing on the new KUJH-TV website. (Or rather, I got excited about using some form of trackback pings and JT told me I was overambitious -- in technique, not concept.) In effect, all I'm proposing is a system to allow cross-linking like the Lawrence Journal-World and 6News Lawrence do, where related articles are threaded together.
The reality is that KUJH-TV and the Kansan will probably always remain on separate sites with mostly separate content. The impression I get is that both groups seem interested in convergence as long as it doesn't require (much) additional effort. Ideally, the CMSs that each group migrates to would allow for some sort of article threading or trackback pinging where, for example, a Kansan story's page would include links to both other Kansan stories on the same topic and also KUJH-TV stories on the topic. I'd even like to include the Multimedia Reporting students' blogs in the system so that if they post a story that's relevant but perhaps not quite good/timely enough to be published in the campus media, it can still be included in the "conversation."
So what would that mean for students like us who pull weekly newsroom shifts? Basically, we'd be monitoring the budgets each day and looking for related stories, then pulling up those stories in their respective CMSs and telling the database to add in the links. If we can get an editor/producer to do this for us as part of their daily routine, even better -- although I'm not holding my breath for it. And besides making sure that our new CMS will be capable of this, we need to find a way to get access to those budgets each day. That means at least getting it printed out and hand delivered, or better yet published online. And how hard can that be?Well, it sounds easy to me.
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