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First Conference: Jim Iovino
Jim Iovino might have the look of a college super senior but possesses the experience of an energetic media news veteran.
As a guest for Steve Klein’s online journalism class, Iovino presented an informative lecture to George Mason journalism students about the innovative ways news and information can be attained by the public. With his position of online editor for NBC4, Iovino manages all the news content and attempts to capture the attention of the sites thousands of daily visitors with each story. “We’re not telling people how to think but informing them why the issues on the site are important,” said Iovino. Iovino completely understands the competitiveness of the news industry and conveyed to the journalism students that the key for success in online news is interactivity with the audience. “Interactivity is more approachable and easy to navigate for the users,” said Iovino. The youthful Iovino believes that the by giving the users the power to control and navigate their way through the site, users can immediately search for stories of their own interests which he hopes will make them loyal to the NBC4 site “You can choose what you click on and what you read. We're combining all this information and letting you do what you want to do with it,” said Iovino. Steve Klein wholeheartedly agreed with the importance of interactivity with the users. “Anything you can do to make navigation simple for the user is a good thing,” said Klein. Due to the unquenchable demand for information, NBC4 shares its stories with up to nine other NBC web sites from different regions so that each site can expand and share the number of users who traffic each site. This, however, does force Iovino to make sure that every link associated with the site is reliable. Klein also commented that because of the countless amount of information on the web, users have more responsibility to make sure that the information originated from an accurate source. At the end of Iovino’s lecture, he commented how he began in the news industry Iovino was a sports editor for the Daily Collegian and graduated from Penn State. After college he desired to be a traditional print sports writer but felt the strong pull of the revolutionary online wave, which eventually placed him in the position he is in today. Iovino also advised the students not to be narrow minded in the infancy stage of their journalism careers and always be open to new possibilities which could lead to surprisingly positive results. |
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