The Toronto Star Creates A Better Experience By Linking Off-Site
Part of my morning ritual is to eat PB&J for breakfast while reading my hometown paper, The Toronto Star. Been reading it since I was in grade four, when I'd get up before 7a to make sure I could get in sports, world news, comics, and the editorial page while slurping down Honey Nut Cheerios before school.
That's why I was psyched to chat with a couple of people from The Star's digital unit, who were quite sharp, while at the Mesh Conference in May.
So today, I was both saddened and tickled to see this on the front page of TheStar.ca:
Saddened for the obvious reasons, but tickled because The Star is comfortable adding significant depth and texture to the story by linking off-site to Flickr and YouTube coverage of the fire.
Remember--it's not all about content anymore, it's now also about aggregation and context. The status quo is the newsroom often goes something like this: "we tell YOU what the news is". Overcoming that is no small feat.
But nobody has the answer to how old and new forms of media fit together, which means that experimentation is key to understanding. And experimentation requires changing the status quo.
So right on, Toronto Star, for taking a great first step towards figuring out where you fit in the new media landscape!
btw here are the Flickr slideshows:
And the YouTube vid:
Technorati Tags: aggregation, sassafraz, toronto, toronto star, youtube
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I had a great conversation in the fall of 2005 with someone of high editorial rank at the Toronto Star (it may have been the Editor-in-Chief if memory serves me correctly) at the AP's We Media conference in NYC. He told me that they were recommending (requiring even?) their journalists to record all interviews on mini-disk so that they could be easily converted into podcasts if appropriate. I found that really interesting...what a natural (and simple) way for a newspaper to get into broadcast media...and to do so via new forms of distribution.
P.S. My condolences re: Sassafraz!