Seattle Post-Times

A big journalism confab to kick off 2010

Before we all disappear into the holidays, I want to put in a plug for a conference I'll be attending shortly thereafter, here in Seattle. It's called "Re-Imagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" and is organized by a national organization called Journalism That Matters. Actually, they're billing it as an "un-conference," which means the agenda will evolve over a period of days:

An overall convening starts with several hundred people, then quickly self-organizes into a series of smaller interest groups which report out ideas and action steps to the whole.

It will be held Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 7-10, at the University of Washington. You need to register in advance.

Two visions of electronic-tablet magazines

If you're wondering where it's all going, here are two similar visions of how the magazine format might be revived by the tablet platform pioneered by Kindle and soon to be enjoined by Apple.

This first video, by Bonnier R&D, is the most artful and simple imagining of the experience:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

You might already have seen this vision, of Sports Illustrated:

There's no reason newspapers and other news media couldn't adopt this format. (Even the annual SI swimsuit issue "coming to life" in this demo.) I foresee an explosion in Web development and design to accommodate the tablet/touchscreen form factor.

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As bullets fly, the Seattle Times tweets

In the age of Twitter and streaming police radio communication, the bar for a newspaper is high when news breaks. Over the past couple of years we've come to see that crowd-sourced journalism is well suited to fast-breaking news. Thousands of eyes on the streets (or ears listening to the police scanner) can be a substitute for authoritative reporting — to a point, at least.

Meanwhile, among news outlets still practicing one-to-many journalism, television has long held the edge on timeliness, with helicopters and live pictures.

So when four Lakewood, Wash., cops were slain in the Tacoma suburb of Parkland this week and a manhunt ensued, news junkies of course turned to Twitter to find out, to report, and to opine. The first person to report the apparent capture of fugitive Maurice Clemmons was a scanner-listener. Out in the real world, the helicopters were scrambled and the microwave masts were raised and press conferences were broadcast. A typical 21st century response to news.

But in the end — no, come to think of it, from the beginning — the story of four dead cops and one dead suspect was owned by our legacy ink-on-paper monolith, The Seattle Times. With as big a newsroom bureaucracy as they come, the Times turned a nimble double play by providing deep reportage and super-timely alerts, many from the streets.