“The newsroom system now has to be able to support RSS feeds and broadcasting to mobile phones. You have more and more distribution methods, but customers want to use the same amount of people, if not less," says Johnathon Howard, director of on-air product management for software company Avid.

Some recent, print journalist-friendly innovations are:

- Avid Active Content Manager – Allows user to separate content from display, so one can write once but publish to several websites or mobile phone platforms

-Apple Final Cut Studio – Editing and graphics software, allows user to repurpose a piece of content for the web, podcasts, etc.

- Vizrt Viz-Multi-Platform Suite – Links with Vizrt’s broadcast-graphics tools, delivers real-time graphics and video to the Web and mobile devices. May provide opportunity to deliver advertising as well as news graphics.

- Chyron WAPSTR System – Allows user to upload still images and videos from mobile phones directly to a newsroom. Useful for bringing in user-generated content.

-Avid’s Instinct System for Avid iNews – This program allows journalists to create video sequences while editing text. As media converge, it is becoming more common for print journalists to also produce video. With Instinct, the text drives the video editing process; the program uses a vertical storyline instead of a horizontal timeline to measure video. For reporters and editors used to editing print only, this could be useful for understanding the relationship between video and text and producing multimedia news productions.

-Template-based graphics – Graphics providers like Vizrt, Chyron, and Avid are now making template-based graphics that allow journalists to create simple graphics themselves on a PC. This can include the reporter’s name and an organization logo, or other text. This could be extremely useful to newspapers looking to brand photos and video on the Internet. Previously, including graphics like this required an experienced graphic designer; now, the process is at journalists’ fingertips.

Though the multimedia convergence may seem daunting to newspapers, these and other innovations will make it possible for print journalists, even those inexperienced in new technology, to produce content for many media platforms. Newspapers will be able to produce Web content in their existing newsrooms, on existing computers with existing staff.

Source: Broadcasting & Cable through Media Bistro