This cat can fetch (or when multimedia training catches on)

Posted on September 7, 2007 by Melissa Worden

A few weeks ago I wrote about how teaching your newsroom to create Web content may feel like training a cat to play fetch. Another way to get your newsroom excited about multimedia: Let a convert preach its benefits.

Steve Echeverria, Jr., a features reporter at the Herald-Tribune, gets it. He sees how multimedia can build upon his storytelling and better serve the reader.

And he’s sharing his knowledge with colleagues. A couple of weeks ago, he attended the NABJ 2007 annual convention and was a panelist in the session “Podcasting Your Way to 1A: Enhancing Print News with Podcasts.”

The session’ summary:

As newspaper circulation continues to fall nationwide and the news hole shrinks, newspapers are faced with an issue: how do they compete with the immediacy of television news while continuing to offer the depth of print journalism? The answer lies in audio and video technology.

Steve has been proactive in his multimedia storytelling and was among the first to record audio and video podcasts for HeraldTribune.com. And despite a lack of time and resources, he was the first to edit on his own, rolling up his sleeves and learning Audacity and iMovie. And he consistently sees these storytelling tools as part of his journalist’s toolkit.

I briefly spoke with him this week about how his presentation went, and how attendees responded. When he showed them samples of what we and other papers have done, their jaws dropped, he said. And they couldn’t wait to try it out themselves.

Love it. A multimedia producer can’t ask for much more than that.

You can watch a summary of Steve’s presentation here: