Jim Loveno
February 10, 2009
On Feb. 10, 2009 Loveno came to George Mason University to talk to Communications students in professor Steve Klein’s online journalism course.
As an NBCWashington.com Editor, Jim Loveno hints to the road bumps that the media industry is presently going through are being dealt with, accordingly. The internet has come heavily into the picture, and has allowed for a different perspective from the audience this time. Looking back on what it has already influenced, music, movies, television shows (now you can watch full episodes of you favorite TV shows online, go to abc.com or nbc.com, even the video sharing site hulu).
At Penn State University, Loveno studied sports writing, taking a traditional journalism route, which resulted in him acquiring his first position as a journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review after graduation. From there, he continued with traditional journalism going into more print, radio and television. Then came the rise of the internet, and Loveno jumped on the bandwagon in its height of rising popularity, which as he states is the future of modern journalism.
After describing a bit of his past Loveno went into a discussion of tools and inventive new strategies for up and comers in the web journalism industry to use. One of these is Content Management Systems, these systems allow people with no knowledge of HTML to add and manage content on their page. This is especially useful for blogging and Wikipedia articles, as well as different kinds of web publishing tools such as Dreamweaver.
Link journalism, was created from these CMS, allowing for easier linking and a new type of journalism for web journalists. Now, small-time journalists and bloggers can have articles “pulled” by a major news and published, says Loveno. For instance, if a health journalist for USA TODAY, likes an article on your page, they can ask for your permission and place it in their lifestyle column as “user submitted news”.
Loveno now working at NBCwashington.com, discussed the sites new feature called “Hotspots”, which pulls in information about the D.C area from different news sites and blogs, and puts it on an interactive map, much like that of Google maps, but a little more in-depth. This allow for a more communal news experience for the consumer. Say you are hungry, one of your friends or a random web surfer could recommend a new restaurant to you on the go, while you are in the city, pin pointing its location, with directions, reviews and contact information of the venue
Now that information is more readily available to the consumer, there is a lot of pressure on credibility of news sources. Loveno made clear that NBC does a lot of background research on the different sources that they gather to make sure that they are credible. In agreement, “There is a lot more responsibility on your part now to be a good media consumer,” Klein said.
Now, that almost every media outlet has a website, in order to draw in users, so that the advertisers pay the big bucks to be featured on sites, the pages have to pop. The content has to be present, constantly updating. In order to keep up with this fast-changing, ever demanding atmosphere, NBC Washington redesigned their website for 2009 with some flashier updates. Including, Color coded navigation tabs, IPhone style image scrolling, Catchier, edgier content, meaning stories that relate to younger demographics. People read things on the go now, on their IPhones, Blackberries, smartphone devices, So podcasts and news bullets, RSS is necessary to keep the consumer happy.
With Web 2.0 rapidly approaching, the news industry is having to scramble in order to remove themselves from the traditional way of reporting and publishing the news. Individuals, here in this new era are who will make the difference.