PRNDG → Field Kit → How-To's → Manage a System for Multimedia News

It may be happening at different rates of speed, but it is definitely happening: radio newsrooms are going multimedia. In particular, they are using their websites as another vehicle for their news and this requires adjustments on many levels.

Here is a simple way to categorize your aspirations for your radio station’s Web site:

  1. Radio Online. This basic approach uses the web as a platform to deliver radio. It is less intensive than the other categories but remains very viable. The most sought-after content from a radio web site is indeed the radio service itself (the “streaming audio”). The approach includes the online posting of your radio stories for on-demand playback (“audio archive” service). This approach gives the public another convenient way to get what they could have gotten on the radio.
  2. Added Value. This approach is where most stations are headed now, seeking to augment their on-air service with multimedia content online. It still offers “Radio Online” (see above), but makes fuller use of the website. For example, you can hear the rest of an interview, see photos of the newsmakers, watch a video clip of the main event, or click links to original documents and supplemental resources. In this scenario, the radio station drives listeners to its website by promoting and providing added value.
  3. Stand Alone Service. This is a highly evolved Web site that seeks its own identity as a unique destination. While it may fully share station management and resources, it doesn’t mirror the station — and may create an audience appeal all its own. Clearly this is the more speculative aspiration of the three here but worth articulating as Web platforms develop their own strengths and become primary news (and community connection) vehicles.

Each step up this ladder of multimedia aspirations requires an increasing level of dedicated staffing and skills and technical infrastructure. Yet even the smallest station can enter the game. For starters, there are numerous free online applications.

The biggest challenge facing News Directors growing their online presence is to still grow — or at least maintain — their on-air quality. As demand for online content increases, ND’s understandably feel the burden of having another mouth to feed.

The keys to meeting this challenge — short of adding new Web staff — are in setting a clear vision for going online, adding the necessary multimedia skills and in creating cross-platform efficiencies.

In a nutshell, the multimedia skills are these:

  • Shooting with a digital still camera; editing with photo software; and publishing photos to a site.
  • Shooting with a digital video camera; editing with video software; and publishing video clips to a site.
  • Recording digital audio; editing with audio software; and publishing audio clips to a site.
  • Writing, editing and layout of copy (headlines, captions, fonts, text) to a site.
  • Using web-based tools to create graphics, animations, maps, timelines and slide shows.
  • Familiarity with databases, hyperlinks, file types, wikis and other common methods of connecting/sharing information.
  • Also familiarity with blogs, discussion forums, social networks, crowd sourcing, chatting, commenting and other methods of enabling two-way involvement.

You can find efficiencies by co-planning radio news and Web news. It helps to see how information becomes available during the journalistic process.

For example, consider the ways in which radio and Web complement one another in this coverage plan:

radio-web

As the example above shows, your gatherers still gather news in traditional ways except they now think beyond audio. They also gather pictures and other materials for the Web. At the editor’s desk, there’s a simultaneous balancing act seeing that both radio and Web are current.

For an excellent model showing new technologies changing the journalism process, see Outside Help → Paul Bradshaw’s News Diamond.

Major media companies are rapidly moving to a multimedia newsroom model. The BBC, for example, stresses its “360 degree” ability to be at the center what people want and need from online media (ready reliable information and the pathways to find it — plus to inform it themselves). NPR is making similar moves but concentrating on delivering in-depth journalism as its core mission — radio or otherwise.

Local public radio newsrooms can move in the direction of multimedia news distribution by growing the skills of their employees, using readily available technology, and adding specialists in the digital distribution department. All the while, News Directors must retain their responsible oversight of their local journalism no matter what delivery methods are employed.

For a handy guide to the tools needed to post extra content to a website, see
Outside Help → John Proffitt: Web Toolkit

For more on digital skills training, see Outside Help → Knight Digital Media Center

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