Convergence takes Festival media to the next level
- Posted on Friday 27 July 2007 - 14:2530 June 2007
AfricaNews - Elvira van Noort, Cape Town, South Africa
“We are blurring the lines between different media newsrooms and pushing cross-media to the limit,” says Peter Verweij, professor of online journalism at the School of Journalism in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Verweij is in Grahamstown at Rhodes University’s Journalism and Media Studies department to run a National Arts Festival weblog that brings together different media onto one platform.
Together with John Driedonk, cross-media professor at the School of Journalism in Utrecht, two fourth-year students from the same School, Sander Knura and Dennis de Vries, Elvira van Noort from Rhodes University, and a team of eight Highway Africa News Agency reporters from a number of African countries they produce, edit and publish the Festival weblog.
Converging different platforms
The team is converging Cue paper, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, Cue Online, Cue TV, Cue Radio, and Cue Pictures and bringing their content together on the Festival Weblog. The weblog not only re-purposes content, produced by the different Cue platforms, but adds to that by following-up and writing their own stories.
This experiment, to have multi-platform publishing using multiple-media like video, audio, photos and text is already a success. So far, three days into the project, the Festival blogging team has been able to quickly produce interesting news for a wide range of audiences.
“This is a new way of multi-media publishing for a cross-media product, and readers of this kind of blogs can choose the medium they want”, explains Driedonk. Adding that “the way we work is quite sensational because within a couple of days we organised a fully operational newsroom that is producing and publishing a lot of stories a day. Normally, it costs my colleagues and me more than a fortnight to do so”.
Verweij agrees, “I am very impressed that it all works in such a short period of time. If you look at it, we’ve already made our goals.”
The Nika system
One of the aims of the project was to work with the Nika editorial workflow-system that is used by Grocott’s Online, the local newspaper, and it is tested to see if it can be used in a true multi-media environment.
“We worked and experimented with the Nika system and now understand what needs to happen to make it even more useful for cross-media publishing” argues Peter, proving that the project has made its goals.
Dutch student De Vries says that “this project is already a success because of the enthusiasm of the especially African reporters.”
HANA comments
Levi Kabwato, a HANA correspondent and journalist for the Malawian newspaper the Daily Times says that “my presence here will also benefit the many colleagues and friends I left in Malawi as I’ll have a chance of imparting the knowledge I’m gaining here. For African journalism, I think that’s awesome.”
Ugandan David Musoke, the editor of the Rwandan newspaper New Times and HANA correspondent comments that “we are getting to learn new skills and we made good use of ourselves so far. We are a news resource on our blog and I think that is coming on well. Most important was the picking up of new skills, like TV, I’ve never done that before.”
This project was made possible with financial assistance of: Africa-Interactive, the Dutch Institute of Southern Africa (NiZA), the Utrecht School of Journalism, Skoeps.nl, 3in1 media and DrieCom & Partners.
Check out some of the pictures I made at the Festival here
Reactions
- Posted on Friday 27 July 2007 14:29Great pictures Elvira! cheers, Peter
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