WHEW! ...we've finally finished the redesign of the Sound Symposium website. It's been rebuilt from scratch with a new content management system, on a new server, that will allow for online presentations and performances as well has house the the massive audio, image, video and artwork archives that Sound Symposium has collected over the past 25 years. The digitizing of this analogue collection has been going on since last summer (I think we are up to S and T now) and with any luck it will start appearing online by the end of this year.
Special thinks to Kathy Clark-Wherry and Jean Donelson at Sound Symposium, the Tech Elves at NL PRESS and the wizard himself, David Schmidt at Fusix.
Pollster Nik Nanos says Canadians still trust TV news more than any other news sources. Internet news sites are last!
THAT doesn't bode well for the online news media and kind of does in the business plan. But
maybe, traditional business plans just don't apply in the new online
world. They certainly don't seem to be working for "traditional"
newspapers.
I guess this means newspapers AND the internet are dead when it comes to news delivery to the general population. ...I don't think so, but maybe the internet is for a new market and let the old mass media have the old masses?
According
to a Nanos/Policy Options poll completed this week, television is still
the number one source of news for Canadians, by a wide margin over
newspapers, radio and the Internet. TV is also, again by comfortable
margins, the most trusted source of news.
The research suggests that traditional media still have a
significant credibility advantage over the Internet as a conduit for
news information but that newspaper content providers have been
comparatively hit harder than TV news providers.
Thinking of the power of the Internet as a vehicle for enriched long
form news content and interaction, it's not surprising that newspapers
have taken a hit. Conversely, it could quite well be that short and
punchy TV news content may be comparatively less vulnerable, at this
point, to the Internet.
Primary News Source Question: Which of the following would be your primary source of news? [Rotate]
Television 48% Newspapers 21% Radio 15% Internet 14% Unsure 3%
Most Trusted News Source Question: Which of the following news sources do you trust the most? [Rotate]
Television 42% Newspapers 23% Radio 16% Internet 11% Unsure 9%
Newspapers - Paper vs. Online Question: Thinking about newspapers,
what percentage of content would you read in paper form and what
percentage would you read online?
Paper 67% Online 33%
Television News - TV vs. Online Question: Thinking about television
news, what percentage of content would you watch on TV and what
percentage would you watch online?
NL PRESS gets some press of its own in The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emrates. The story by Toronto based correspondent Blake Lambert talks about NL PRESS and AllNovaScotia.com and looks at the emergence of online news services as traditional newspapers and magazines die off.
One of Newfoundland’s
premier sporting events took place Saturday night and it was a perfect
illustration of the power, flexibility and range of new media over old media
and how the web works in the new news world.
The online coverage by Newfoundland media outlets of The Herder
Memorial Trophy hockey final was mixed.
The hands-down winner was The Sports Page. They put together
a team to televise the games live on the web. Streaming video to their website
and mirrored on the NL PRESS website, they averaged more than 8,000 viewers per
night from around the world who tuned in on their computers. Not to mention
having a parallel chat room where those people talked to each other while
watching. It was amazing to watch Newfoundlanders, supporters of the rival teams,
going at each other from the far flung parts of the worldas they watched the game together over the
internet.
The Sports Page also updated their website with still photos
and commentary throughout the night. Their full Herder story, along with a feature
story on the injured Jeff Oates, with a large selection of photos, was up on
their site an hour after the game.
Thirty minutes after the game finished NL PRESS had the
results and photos of the post game celebration on the front page of their
Newfoundland news website and available through their news service to
subscribers.
About the same time VOCM radio posted the results on their
website and followed up on Sunday with interviews and reaction from
Clarenville, home town of the winners.
The CBC had reporters, cameras and audio recording gear at
the game but as of Sunday night nothing is on their local website.
The Telegram newspaper, a major sponsor of the event, had
reporters and photographers on scene but as of Sunday night there was no
coverage, not even a photograph of the winners or their publisher handing over
the trophy. Only a paragraph with the results of the game and a note to readers
to get full coverage in the Monday Telegram. That would be more than thirty
hours after one of the biggest events in Newfoundland
sports. I’m not sure sports fans will
wait until Monday to get news of Saturday night’s big game …and they don’t have
to anymore.
With no Sunday Telegram anymore this was the perfect
opportunity for the Telegram to use the web to deliver Saturday content to
their subscribers in a timely fashion. When the News is still new.
This is what people mean when they say that “old media”
doesn’t get new media and why most of their online offerings are still framed
in an old media mentality.
Deadlines and production schedules don’t mean anything in
the new world order. Deadline in now! If you don’t have the talent or the will
to keep up you get left behind.
The combined website traffic stats on Sunday morning for The
Sports Page and NL PRESSsay more than
12,000 people either got their Herder hockey news, or watched it live, on these
two websites. For a small website covering a provincial sporting event, in a
small province in a small country ….these are big numbers.
The traffic/viewers can be tracked by city, country,
referring site, operating systems and what search engines and keywords they
used to find it.
This is a marketing and sales staff dream, if they know how
to use it. It’s also 12,000 people that
saw the ads on these website and not on The Telegrams website.
As wonderful as all that may be the most telling event of
the night was when I saw a guy talking pictures of the game with his cell
phone. I asked how his pictures were coming out and he said he was shooting
video on his 5 megapixel phone and posting them to his FaceBook page so his
buddy, who was working in Edmonton,
could see some of the game. I told him about the live broadcast on The Sports
Page and he posted the link to his friends …right from his seat in Mile One
Centre.
The SportPage, Newfoundland's local sports magazine and website has been expanding. It signed on early with NLPress.ca news agency last year and it began offering podcasts of local sports a few months ago. Now, it has launched a sports phone-in show ...live online.
Produced by Jim Mallay at Bioproductions, a video service company, and broadcast live from a suburban rec room in Mount Pearl, host Carl Lake and his guests talk sports and field calls. The next show is tonight, March 8 at 8:30PM (NST). NL PRESS is streaming the show on its site or you can find the direct stream here.
Now, webcasts are not new in Newfoundland. A number of years ago Sussex Place, Inc launched CFOG, an online broadcaster with audio and video pieces as well as providing webcast production to corporate clients. Alas, as with many things in an emerging technology, timing is everything and sometimes when you are ahead of the curve you have to wait for the rest to catch up. Then, net connections were finicky, bandwidth hellishly expensive and few consumer computers were capable of taking advantage of high-end multimedia streamed from the web. Times change. It's just a matter of where you are on the timeline when they do.
A little bit more of Newfoundland media history will be made this week. The new news medium of the Internet strikes again.
