Life in the Newsroom: August 2005 Archives

This is the question that Dave Sirulnick is surely asking himself as he watches MySpace climb atop the newest media pedestal. Sirulnick, for those who don't know, is the Executive Vice President of MTV News who has been a trend-setter at MTV since its inception. He can't be happy about this new darling of the youth culture. MySpace poses a direct threat to his baby and is now under the control of his corporate overlord's sworn enemy. Rupert Murdoch, with the gristly flesh of MySpace still stuck between his teeth, can't wait to run into Sumner Redstone at the next meeting of the Illuminati, basking in the glory of his latest feeding, er, acquisition.

Back to the question at hand: is MySpace the future and if not, what is? Is it the giant-killer that can bring down the MTV Goliath? The answer to these questions is a resounding "maybe." MySpace may be News Corp's answer to Viacom's dominance of youth culture, specifically youth news sources like MTV News and The Daily Show. Personally, MySpace is much more appealing to me than the thought of wading chest-high through a big, steaming pile of Laguna Beach during a commercial break, trying to find the next big band to break on the LA scene. But I have recently escaped MTV's demographic, so my opinion is about as valid as, well, a big steaming pile of Laguna Beach.

Unfortunately, audience inertia is working against the kids on MySpace. Inertia, or indisposition to motion, exertion, or change, lends its power to television networks well before an Internet upstart. MTV clawed its way to the position of dominance in youth culture over the last three decades and is not likely to roll over now. If anything, MTV is likely to fire back with an incarnation of a MySpace-ish cyber-world.

Are you still reading this? I didn't scare you off with my admission of demographic obsolescence or my reverence for the hard work of MTV producers over the years? Well, your tenacity has earned you a reward: my vision of youth news in the future. The youth of the industrialized world (Yes, all of them!) will have something akin to a Palm LifeDrive, with more of a tablet PC feel to it. On it, they will keep their schedules, music, games, etc., and will download all their news wirelessly via RSS feeds or whatever news collection technology the future brings with it onto the one-inch terabyte drive. Slide it all into their back pocket and off the kiddies will go, ready to face the world -€” or as much of it as can fit on a 2" x 3" screen.

At this very second, a recent story on our TV news site is ranked #3 on Google for hurricane katrina gas shortage.

We're not well-linked by other websites, and most of our traffic comes from in-house hits to the website, but Google loves us for some reason. (And I think we love you back, Google.)

My explanation for our search engine success is that our HTML is very cleanly written, instead of being cluttered with ads and other cruft like (most) commercial news sites.

Now the trick is to find a way to profit from our high rankings.

Monday is already edging out all other days as my favorite day of the week not beginning with "S". Take, for instance, my online producing shift, my only class of the day. If you take away the producing aspect of the shift it's quite fun. It boils down to four hours of leering at attractive female passersby, rocking out to my iPod on shuffle (currently Deadsy's rendition of Rush's immortal "Tom Sawyer"), and watching our new wall-mounted flat-screen TV's. The TV's, however, attract droves of viewers as Hurricane Katrina continues to pummel the Gulf Coast, leaving me feeling like a zoo animal on display.

So far I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the crowds. Last year we had TV's, although few people noticed them, and very few people ever stopped to watch. My initial reaction to the new screens was to dream about watching March Madness during my newsroom shift. Although I won't be here for the spring semester, I can already envision crowds lining the glass from one side to the other, which would make working on scripts directly in front of the glass offputting to say the very least.

March Madness, however, is carried only by CBS. Thinking on the present gives me a great idea: newsroom football parties. Each screen can handle at least four different channels simultaneously. This means we can have ESPN, ESPN 2, Fox Sports Net, NBC, and ABC all running games at once, with the premiere game of the week on full screen. Come one, come all, journalism students, to "study" in the newsroom on Saturday mornings. Bring water bottles full of "water" to dilute your orange juice or preferred drink*. I think all of us could better handle the pressures of being on display if we were rewarded with football parties on the weekends. We truly have the coolest classroom on campus.

*Producer's note: this is only a dream. do not come to the newsroom on Saturday.

2005: Me turning on my computer

I wake up at 7:30 and immediately reach for my laptop. As soon as I hear the dulcet Microsoft tune signaling another beautiful day outside my window -€“ or inside my Windows XP? -€“ I am on. Online. Getting my morning fix. From my homepage, a German politics magazine, I rush to yahoo. The New York Times has sent me news: Google has $ 4 billion to spend. A friend writes the East Coast bores him. Big news. I check my second account and find a message from a digital friend: friendster.com, the networking tool that reveals our personalities on the Net. Or, as I see it, a popularity contest online.

Most of my family and friends live overseas. Thanks to the Internet we don't have to communicate at carrier pigeon pace. I check more e-Mail accounts, then weather.com. Wait, do you still step outside to feel the temperature?

After that I look up some English and Spanish words in online dictionaries. I haven't soaked up enough news yet. Thus I skim an article from a newsletter I receive daily but read only weekly. It says that Amazon now sells short stories, 49 cents apiece.

I wonder, "Is it already time to throw out my books? Where will we be in 10 years?"

2015: My computer turning on me

I wake up at 7:30. My computer is running and salutes me with my Monday playlist off iTunes. To the dismay of many, Apple has defeated Microsoft. After Apple merged with Google four years ago and released the voice-operated G10 in 2013, the conglomerate became unstoppable. Bill Gates snatched at least a temporary seat on the Goopple advisory board.

Like more than half the world's population, I am constantly online. My Internet service provider assists me a bit more these days than back in 2005. For my mother's birthday it has already sent her some present a worldwide consumer database calculated she would like.

While I prepare breakfast from ingredients ordered online, my computer reads to me my e-Mails and gives a world news update including potential consequences on me, my neighborhood and my country. Most U.S. cities are equipped with cameras that scan people's physical features and compare them to those of criminal suspects in an international database. Few question the use. Goopple's services have made life too convenient to ask.

I decide to arrange a dinner with friends sometime this week. I tell my computer whom I intend to invite. It scans their profiles for availability, food preferences and allergies. Afterwards it sends out digital invitations and gives me a list of recipes that suit both my friends' taste and my budget. My computer knows my bank account better than I do. After the 19th dish suggestion: silence. It's the first disconnection since 2010. Time to pick up a book.

I consider myself a media snob. I check the Drudge Report at least five times a day. Crooks and Liars is my favorite spot on the web for commentary. I make posts on Media Matters. I even helped McGraw Milhaven -€“ the radio host I worked for this summer at KTRS in St. Louis -€“ put his own blog on the web.

Until Thursday, I thought I was savvy. I thought I was in. Then I see this EPIC 2015 and I'm floored. How has this been out there in the "newsosphere" -€“ a word with a definition I am still trying to find -€“ for so long and be so popular without me knowing about it? I was supposed to be the one to discover this and show it to everyone I knew. Now I was out. It was deflating to be sure.

But wait a minute. What about Media Matters and Crooks and Liars? What happened to starting my own blog with McGraw? Yeah! I know more about this crap than 99 percent of people out there. Ask my mom what a blog is and she'll tell you to watch your mouth. Tell my uncle in Cleveland that I'm making a post on a web site about the smear campaign against Cindy Sheehan happening on right-wing blogs and he'll change the subject. It's not because he's being rude. It's because he has no idea what the hell I'm talking about!!

The fact is that the people talking about EPIC 2015 are even bigger media snobs than me. They're in an even smaller, more elitist group of people who solely subsist on talking about this stuff. They write, read and dream about "convergence" and the "newsosphere" as if it all mattered in the minds of the other 99.999 percent of the population. You think Joe Everyman has the time, inclination or even the ability to keep up with this stuff?

And that's the thing about EPIC 2015. For these IPod "neighborhood-casts" or "Googlezon" to be effective, isn't there some implied consent and participation on the part of the user? And isn't there an assumption that the usership of these tools will continue to grow? Are we to assume that every farmer or factory worker out there will be as capable to participate as their white-collar counterpart? My point is that as we venture out into the technological frontier, the possibilities grow at an exponential rate while our own personal capabilities stay constant -€“ or arguably decline. We're being out-paced. An avid IPod user can not so much as learn how to use his IPod FM tuner in his car before five other gadgets and add-ons are available that he has to have. What happens when it gets worse? What happens when we can't afford it all? Better Question: Who really cares? And how much does this really change the newsosphere when 95 percent of people out there don't even own an IPod?

I like what Matt Thompson said about how obsolete ideas become over time. "Visions of the future tend to age poorly." He's right, but not in the way he means it. He seems to imply that since they've had to re-work EPIC once already, things will keep getting more and more absurd as time goes on.

I tend to think that his latest vision of the future will too, age poorly. Not because things will get more out of hand. Rather, I firmly believe that -€“ and maybe for no other reason than incompetence or pride -€“ people will put down their obsolete CD players, turn off their Flat-Screen TV's that unfortunately don't have HDTV capabilities, pick up their out-dated camera phones they bought 3 months ago, call the Powers That Be and let out a collective, "Slow the hell down!"

I wish I could make an educated prediction on the future of the digital newsosphere. I wish I knew enough about the subject. I love the idea of being a journalism junkie during this supposed age of unparalleled innovation and media convergence. But I don't know enough yet to guess what'll happen with it in 10 years. It would be just as relevant -€“ or irrelevant, if you will -€“ as anyone else's.

Instead, I seem to only have enough knowledge of the people who will be using it. And at this point, I just don't think people care or know enough for it happen as quickly as EPIC claims.

As things are beginning to gear up for the fall semester, I have found myself fondly reminiscing about our first year in the multimedia newsroom, from the very first class and the design and development of the TV web site, to our big plans for convergence.

The first year in the newsroom was about getting our feet wet, figuring out what it really means to work and learn in a multi-media environment. I can tell you, it's not what I thought it was going to be. Nope. It's much better. I was lonely this summer, plugging away on several projects, and helping with the summer Multimedia Reporting class, but it's just not the same as being part of a noisy, chaotic newsroom.

This fall we're going into the newsroom armed with more knowledge and more experience. We have some returning students who will put their multimedia skills to the test, and a whole slew of new students to introduce to the world of multi-media and online journalism. Perhaps we won't solve all the world's problems this year, but we will tackle a lot of interesting and relevant journalism topics. And, in turn, we hope to motivate and inspire tommorow's journalists.

Welcome to a new year.

Since our newsroom was built, we've been anticipating the arrival of our high-tech, wall-mounted TV screens. This week, they're finally being installed.

It took two days to get both screens onto the wall. Apparently our wall is particularly evil.

Halfway through the second day, the workers from F&O were still trying to run the wires through the wall.

By the end of the day, they put the screens up and said they'd come back to figure out the wiring on Friday, leaving a bundle of cables dangling from the ceiling.

If we stay on schedule, everything should be installed by the time classes start -- and I'm sure we'll have more pictures of the finished project.

The TV web server is back up and running. We actually ended up having to install RedHat because there weren't any SuSE drivers for the RAID controller...long story short, after more than seven days I believe our server is finally in tip top shape. For now. We've already had several RedHat OS updates to install, and getting php recompiled and talking to the KU Oracle database was no small feat. In fact, it involved an army of people including Jeff Long from Academic Computing Services, Rory Petty (our hero), a friend of Rory's, Bryan (our former programmer) and my husband. It was Jeff that finally got our server to talk to the database.

Now that the server is back in business and the site has been restored, we can get moving on the redesign. If you check the site today, it will greet you with the new KUJH logo and "We're coming back soon." Barring any new diasters, the brand new KUJH-TV web site will launch August 22. School starts in a week, students and faculty are starting to slowly appear. We look forward to a new year full of new and exciting developments in the Multimedia Newsroom. As always, stay tuned...