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Windsor Digital

Handmade digital strategy from the heartland.

The “new newsroom” is being created one reporter at a time

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(Cross-posted to Nieman Journalism Lab)

What does the journalist of the future look like?

PR whiz Steve Rubel says he looks a lot like Peter Abraham, who is not some vaporware demo from 2015, but a flesh-and-blood reporter covering the Yankees spring training camp in Florida.

Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for the Journal News in Westchester county (a NYC suburb). According to Burrelles Luce, it’s the 94th largest newspaper in the US with a daily circ of 100,000 readers.

Abraham is on the scene in Tampa where the Yankees are training and he’s doing it all – in addition to filing regular reports for the paper that appear in print. Here’s an inventory of his social media footprint….

First, he has a blog with a full-text feed that includes several posts/day and hundreds of comments/day from readers. It dates back to 2006.

In addition, Abraham has a Facebook group that has about 1600 members.

He is posting photos from spring training using his iPhone. Note the gear the others are using by comparison.

There is a podcast up on iTunes that right now is updated daily with audio.

Finally, today he was using both CoverItLive and Mogulus to have a live video/text chat with readers.

While Abraham is still a bit of an Edge Case, what’s really heartening is that, with each passing day, stories like this become less amazing, as they become more common. What examples have you seen in your market or nationally of journalists redefining the profession?

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Comments

  1. I think it's a recent development for most newspapers to be experimenting with these Web apps that are hosted elsewhere and not customized in-house. The Web and IT approach, for years, seems to have always been either about building the capability in-house — or not doing it at all. Meanwhile, bloggers have been lapping us by using all these great free tools.