So Becky.com decided to take a leap today and put out early this morning that she wanted a discussion on traditional media in the Web 2.0 world.
The cool part of this expo is that you can propose any topic to discuss in a certain location - in this case she reserved a table at lunch - and then let people’s feet do the talking. If people show up, which they often do, a good discussion likely ensues.
In this instance we met a few people, but in particular Robert Wescott, vice president of audience development, and Scott Horton, multimedia creative director, for Opubco Communications Group, the company that does such sites as NewsOK.com, The Oklahoman newspaper and so on.
Oh, and a really cool new events site called wimgo.
There will be more that comes out of the discussion we had, but give props to Becky.com for coming up with the idea and following through.
By the way, we need to take a site visit to see how this media company functions. I think it would be beneficial. - Jason
From Becky.com
http://www.theslog.net is Scott’s blog. Very interesting.
Some interesting ideas that came out of our talks with them:
- They’ve set up a studio for online only content (podcasts etc., set up like a hip TV studio)
- They have a staff of maybe 12 that exclusively creates online content
- They operate out of one newsroom for all of their products (newspaper and niche)
- They employ a staff of talented developers and designers
- They evaluated the industy wages for online positions and pay very competitively (wink wink)
- The transition was not quick, took maybe 12 years to get to where they are from where they were as a traditional newspaper company
Very cool to meet some people who have been dealing some very similar issues to us, and they seem to be pushing full steam ahead with promise.
wediabuzz
tomaltman
wemediaguru
eibbtoddb
SarahF
Becky
borellit
http://www.theslog.net is Scott’s blog. Very interesting.
Some interesting ideas that came out of our talks with them:
- They’ve set up a studio for online only content (podcasts etc., set up like a hip TV studio)
- They have a staff of maybe 12 that exclusively creates online content
- They operate out of one newsroom for all of their products (newspaper and niche)
- They employ a staff of talented developers and designers
- They evaluated the industy wages for online positions and pay very competitively (wink wink)
- The transition was not quick, took maybe 12 years to get to where they are from where they were as a traditional newspaper company
Very cool to meet some people who have been dealing some very similar issues to us, and they seem to be pushing full steam ahead with promise.
This is VERY interesting. I the first 3 items you list really hit home with some of the suggests made here. We need to make sure we follow-up with Scott Horton and crew.
I will be happy to host a site visit. I am glad you were able to make contact with another potential Local Information Utility.
[...] Another local media company at Web 2.0 [...]
“They employ a staff of talented developers and designers”
Does this mean they develop and design with proprietary software or are they actually coding (text editor) and designing (illustrator, fireworks, flash, photoshop)?
Would it be beneficial to have training sessions held? I would be interested in being the trainer for CSS, HTML, XML, XHTML, PHP..etc. Based on current software used I am not sure of the immediate value however when we talk about third party plugins, widgets and apps we need to be able to step outside of BIM and Saxo and build these templates. We may also need to customize our own apps.
Let’s continue this conversation.