TBABJ Multimedia Workshop - Tampa Tribune

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.

TBABJ MySpace page

MacArthur awards Open Source $250K for Internet Based Tools and the Production of a Daily Radio Program

Congratulations to Chris Lydon, Brendan Greeley and the whole gang at Open Source!

from Brendan:

I spent a lot of time at the Integrated Media Conference in Boston last week answering questions from public radio people about what we do. MacArthur has decided to support us for the same reason; we’re developing tools at Open Source that are going to be useful in the future to a lot of people. People in public radio, people in public television, people tiptoeing toward that fantastic beast we’re beginning to call “public media.”

So expect a lot of development activity in the next two or three months. If you care about the structure of the community, by all means keep letting us know what improvements you’re looking for.

When can we bring these guys to Tampa?

Latest Reading: "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

This book by usability guru Steve Krug arrived this afternoon from Amazon.

It came highly recommended as a "must read" from a slew of webheads at the IMA. I hope to get to it by this weekend. Will report back.

Interview with Steve Krug.