04.30
Editor’s note: I’m not dead, just insanely busy so I know this is my first update in quite a while….
So I’m loving the new gig in the big paper’s newsroom. Despite the hype, I don’t think I’ve initiated any earth-shattering wizardry that will instantly “save the newspaper” from the perils that it faces.
Instead, what I have done is start with a series of baby steps, and mostly invisible ones at that. For one, I’ve been “fixing” the paper’s RSS feeds, starting with simply adding the reporter’s bylines to them. No, we didn’t have any bylines in our RSS feeds, go figure. Next up came photos: using Yahoo’s Media RSS extension I added each story’s photos to the feeds (yes, including the photoby 
).
This, while useful in it’s own right (it looks very cool in Google Reader), it is a “baby step” on the way to other things. Now if I wanted to, I could, say, pull stories by reporter — or current photos by story — and place them on other sites. If I wanted to….
I’ve also gotten to play the roll of agent provocateur, a roll that gets little “press” but I don’t mind.
Watching our now photo-capable RSS feeds update throughout the day really illustrated something troubling: we’re really slow with updating photos. We can break a news story in seconds but for photos we usually have to wait for the shooter to come back to the building. It only made sense that I jumped at configuring a Nikon WT-2a for wirelessly sending photo’s off the camera.
While it was originally poopooed, when it was shown to work, it got some interest and now the paper has invested in another unit (a WT-4a for their newer D3 bodies) and when I started asking about Bluetooth GPS adapters for the photographers, I got some real traction instead of, “who are you again?” (geocoding photos and stories is another “on the list” thing of mine).
Also, it was I who passed along the specs of the Nokia N95 and info on Qik (not to mention helping to configure them) to the photographer who ultimately took them to the Olympic torch relay.
So I’m doing my thing… slowly, in baby steps.
