Daniel Sato

The new year will bring about a lot of changes to many Gannett properties, not the least of which will be outfitting our reporters and photographers with iPhones, iPads and other accessories. Of course, this move has been met with mixed reactions within newsrooms, mine included. The usual qualms about being asked to do too much with too little … fear of the unknown for those that are less tech-savvy (will Gannett be able to read all of my personal communications seems to be the most prevalent concern).

Even a digital-first journalist such as myself has a few reservations, such as if the money used for the accompanying iPhone rig could have been better spent elsewhere. The allure of the iPhone is its portable, do-it-all nature … but hand a reporter the OWLE and a cheap tripod and suddenly the iPhone doesn’t feel like the freedom inspiring tool it is, and more like a ball-and-chain dragging slowing them down from the work they feel they should be doing.

In general though, I am all for our staff having smartphones. Reporters (hopefully) can begin to treat their Twitter account like their notepad, adding observations on the scene and returning to their stream when writing their stories (one of our reporters, Beth Miller, is already adept at this, and I hope that she can spread her knowledge to some of the more skeptical members of our newsroom). As a photographer/videographer, I can use the phone as a hotspot to send both video and photos back to the office wirelessly (currently I think we have two working wifi cards to spread among both reporters and photographers). And, as the main emphasis for this push seems to be a focus on breaking news, everyone can shoot video and upload it directly to our Brightcove account via a related app.

I have no idea just how this experiment will end … On it’s face, it seems like a no-brainer … replacing pen and paper with something smaller that can also act as a camera, video camera, audio recorder, radio scanner, etc. But perhaps it will end up as Gannett’s previous video initiative did, with only a few properties actively using smartphones. Follow-up to come in a few months…

“We’re not in it to make money. We’re probably not going to lose a lot, but we aren’t gonna make much either.”
-David Cole, San Francisco Examiner

This is my first attempt at using the Vuvox Collage app. I thought it might be a good idea to create something for the Drake basketball team, considering the great season they have been having. At first, I thought that using the collage would allow me to put all the galleries into one spot, letting viewers go back to past games and go through all of the galleries all over again. After talking with just about everyone I could (that I can reach on IM) I suddenly had all sorts of input on possible content to add. Obviously that content is not there yet, I haven’t even really proposed this to my editors, just built it first so that they could see it visually.

I am hoping to add game summaries for each game, audio interviews from the coach and key players on important games, videos as the Register produces them, and possibly a Vuvox express presentation that is linked to a rss feed of user submitted Drake basketball photos.

Any thoughts? Things I should add? Take out? It is pretty narrow within the confines of my blog template, but I chose to embed this here so that when I show my editors the presentation, it is clear that it can be embedded and integrated into our paper’s template easily.

After some initial problems with the feeds from the Register, I was able to create this simple slideshow of the latest Register galleries, with links to the gallery above each associated photo. I also put this on my facebook page using the Vuvox PhotoSlide facebook application. I am still trying to find a way to either, (a) add the PhotoSlide app to the DM Register facebook product page or, ideally (b) create a facebook app that uses the PhotoSlide app and would feature our gallery slideshow that could be added to our page as well as added by anyone else to their profile pages.