Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
 Photo courtesy of here.
Online infotainment centers the latest technological advance in bringing you commercials.
On Sunday, April 29th, The Enquirer got its own news several months too late—issuing this report about it’s new approach. Ben Kaufman had reported the same thing at CityBeat in December, 2006. The several pages of Sunday columns devoted to this issue looks like the mustachioed Tom Callinan’s way of staying relevant since getting “promoted” from Executive Editor to “Vice President for Content and Audience Development,” whatever that means. So here are the adpaper’s latest strategies for bringing you commercials, while pretending to care about news.
Check out Callinan trying to get readers excited about “content and audience development”:
In the past, newsrooms tended to be set up for a once-a-day printed newspaper, a model out of line with modern social and readership trends. The Local Information Center is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week approach that uses new technologies and techniques to gather the news and get it back to you through whatever form of delivery you may want.
And we want you to partner with us on the news as well. The Local Information Center values the interactivity of blogs, message boards and information provided by the public to enrich our community conversation. So please read all about it. And let us know what you think.
For a point of comparison, here is Kaufman writing on the same topic almost five months ago:
Changes have begun at The Enquirer. It must be exhilarating for some and scary for others. There will be casualties as traditional jobs are redefined.
Unlike ridicule that in 1982 greeted Gannett’s USA Today as “McNews” or worse, the 24/7 information center is eliciting mostly positive, if sometimes guarded, responses from media commentators. Success won’t go unnoticed by other papers that embraced USA Today’s innovations as it matured into one of the better US papers today.
The Gannett reorganization promises micro news at the neighborhood level, a renewed commitment to watchdog journalism, greater interactive Internet conversations and potentially valuable “crowd sourcing” that invites the public to dig into problems and share what they know/learn with reporters.
Nothing like timliness from Callinan’s 24-hour-a-day approach!
Several Enquirer staff added to the cacophony of fluff for Sunday’s paper, including Julie Engebrecht, who wrote this piece:
We used to have a single goal: Put out the best possible newspaper for our readers to enjoy over breakfast the next morning.
That’s so yesterday.
Today we are working around the clock, seven days a week, to provide the information you want and need about your world. And get it to you now - on the Internet with audiocasts, slide shows and videos, as well as in the newspaper so you can sit down and read what you want, when you want.
The frenzy with which corporate news has tried to imitate and integrate the tools of bloggers into their structure is notable—at least for their stunning lack of originality, combined with their attempt to market themselves for the electric age. (One can’t help but wonder what the print industry—with its indefatigable desire to imitate blogs by colonizing bandwidth—would do if suddenly the blogs started imitating them by printing newspapers!)
For some reason, the newspapers seem to like using their own bandwidth for hosting videos, while the rest of us figured out we could save money and server space by outsourcing to places like YouTube or Google Video—which also optimizes content for search engines. Sites like Flickr and Scribd offer outsourcing, too. These are great tools for the citizen journalist. We encourage you to use them. And we encourage you to watch all of The Enquirer’s videos—over and over again. Tell your friends. Just close your eyes during the commercials.
Here is Kenneth Amos tooting The Enquirer’s horn about this:
And, in a break from traditional newsroom boundaries, reporters and editors have been invited not only to embrace but to flex their visual muscles - filming companion video pieces to complement their written words, as well as telling riveting visual stories that stand on their own. To date, we already have produced and showcased nearly 350 videos.
Locally, I am proud to know that The Cincinnati Beacon’s very own Justin Jeffre was the first citizen videographer to get out there capturing multimedia content. Without Jeffre, we never would have gotten footage like this—featuring a huge labor march that got ignored by The Enquirer and their enormous team of multimedia experts just waiting to bring us the latest and most up-to-date news.
Wait a minute…
Anyway, thank God The Enquirer is there to deliver advertisements in even more creative ways than previously available!
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