Sunday, March 04, 2007

TBABJ Multimedia Workshop - Tampa Tribune

Ken Knight(L) and Eric Deggans (R)Saturday morning I attended an online multimedia workshop sponsored by The Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists.

The workshop was held at the Tampa Tribune, and was moderated by Ken Knight, TBABJ Treasurer and multimedia editor for the Tampa Tribune/WFLA-Ch. 8/TBO.com; Eric Deggans, TBABJ president and creator of The Feed media blog and Steve Echevarria, feature writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

The event was well attended, with local newspapers, radio stations, bloggers and independent journos represented. The discussion began with an intoduction to the nuts and bolts of daily blogging by St. Petersburg Times TV and Media critic Eric Deggans. Donavan Myrie from UT talked about convergence and synergy. Steve Echevarria presented his 'path of least resistance' approach to producing multimedia content and talked about the timeline for development of several interesting projects including an online version of the special issue What is Hip Hop.

There was a lot of talk about expanding multimedia offerings on traditional platforms and some talk about the advantages of a blogs (ie. interactivity, immediacy, community). Eric, Ken and Steve kept things moving and still managed to entertain a few rounds of good questions ranging in topic from content choices to editorial process to the best free open source audio editor to the best feed generator.

This was a great way to spend a Saturday in Tampa - and a fine opportunity for folks in this community who are thinking about and producing multimedia content to put their heads together.

Special thanks to Eric, Ken and Steve, The Trib and TBABJ for hosting and providing a such cool forum for networking and the exchange of ideas. Great job guys.

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