Jane Stevens is showing the Kentucky Derby's website at the Online News Association conference. It pretty much waxed the Louisville newspaper's online coverage, begging the question: Who is the news media these days? The derby site has news, context, community, multimedia, entertainment ... taking advantage of the medium in ways the typical newspaper site, even in 2006, still does not. The keys to the Internet, she says, are being solutions-oriented, participatory, continuous and contextual. Good advice.
The backdrop of this is the struggle between sporting organizations and news media over coverage rights. As the NFL, PGA, etc., have discovered how to use the Internet to route around the middleman, they've begun to curtail access and place restrictions on use of information gathered by news organizations -- including not only photos and video, but even data.
Comments
It was to be expected...
Sam Whitmore of Media Survey summed it up: "We are all media."
The problem is for us that the model is turning upside down when the subject of new stories control the very access to news itself. It's the same sort of thing we're seeing with services like http://payperpost.com/ which ruffles my ethics feathers to no end. Bloggers as mercenaries...maybe "they" were right about the lack of ethics.
The boundries have been stretched. We're getting news from those who aren't necessarily newpeople. That's brought some good, but it also will lead inevitably to some of the same problems that had caused newspapers to hire ombudsmen, and for j schools to have ethics classes.
Whitmore had an interesting note a few weeks ago after a trip to China (he covers tech media pr). Chinese journalists expect to be paid for complimentary stories, and will often seek to be paid not to print the unflattering. Exactly activities that we'd never believe possible in true western journalism.