PREPARING FOR BREAKING LOCAL NEWS: FROM MOBILE TO PRINT
TAKEAWAY: Learn to write the second day story on day one
Conducting a series of workshops this week at the Goteborgs Posten, in western Sweden. The subject? The path of a story, and how to organize the newsroom to take a local breaking story thru the various phases from alert (mobile telephone) to report (first online coverage), to print the next morning using a second day angle, and on to online again as the story is updated.
For an established newspaper, such as the Goteborgs Posten, more than 100 years old, with 600000 daily readers, the challenge is to embrace the new media, while continuing to give the printed newspaper a sense of vibrancy.
Today we do an exercise based on a fictional explosion inside one of the city’s most heavily trafficked tunnels.
Heavy discussions about the role of the printed newspaper (still important, but it has lost its first day advantage to electronic media), a possible restructuring of the newsroom (emphasize news, NOT the medium thru which it is dispensed).
By the way, every newsroom that is not doing so already NEEDS to engage in this type of exercise, what I call “the path of the story” in a multiplatform media world.
We will be conducting these 3-hour workshops throughout the week, putting all editors of various sections thru the training exercises.
Storytelling has not changed much since the days of Aesop’s fables, but we now have a variety of media thru which to tell those stories.
I can’t think of a better time to be a storyteller.