New Roles in the Full-Media Newsroom

This multiple media convergence is much more complex than just an additive model, and it demands collaboration and coordination that were not necessary previously.
• Newsflow coordination. 1. Directing news coverage across all appropriate content formats and all required delivery services. 2. Ensuring service to variety of news consumer profiles in the marketplace 3. Integrating multiple products to generate a unified editorial brand
• Story building (no longer story telling) Provides content at a bunch of different levels of coverage and kinds of content for users to customize and get at the particular level they want. Local news is where he sees this thing being the value added. Increasingly the info must be deliverable by mobile.
• News resourcing. Spectrum of activities that this kind of person will engage in. The person is rooted in journalism, but with expertise in graphics, database, etc. Like the idea of a "CIO" to capture and use information.
• Multiskilled journalism. This can be a bone of contention in some union contexts. It really means the idea of a writer who has ideas for photos, rather than actually shooting the photos. I personally see that pressures of ubiquitous and cheap tech and cost of labor make the multiskilled person very desireable, and increasingly the multiskill will replace the monoskill. There may be issues with quality, such as using photos from phonecams taken by writers or bcasters, not photogs.
Mindsets that need to change
• Current training to be a "lone wolf" who has his/her own news sources and can't work in a team, or leave sources for others to use must be altered. Young J's need to learn to work as a team, and view resources as belonging to the team, not to an individual.
• Story budget or agenda is often created in Word and cut & pasted. There are better software tools for group collaboration and idea sharing to make news production work better--leverage the intell of all the people in the newsroom instead of just a few folks. This is more the case in bcast than in print because there are fewer reporters, and they have to share info more effectively.
• Service biz now, not in production biz. Must change mindset of privacy of newsroom, even making it hard to find newsroom numbers, to "call me, I am at your service" The client/news org relationship will become more like a personal relationship--e.g. personalization of info both in geography, etc. rather than a product relationship.
• The source sharing is a big issue for the print folks--"poisoning a source" fears promote the secrecy, but Northrup argues that a reporter who won't share, wouldn't be hired in his newsroom. This appears to generational as well as be diff for bcast vs. print. I think online will be more like bcast. "you're on the same team" mentality