Journalists from the Web sites of The Washington Post, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun.com and other news organizations gathered in Weschler Theater Thursday night to discuss what they've learned about online journalism in the past year in "A Year in the Digital Trenches."
Jody Brannon of usatoday.com, adjunct professor with AU's masters program and member of the Society of Professional Journalists organized the conference, which is the first of its kind. SPJ and the Online News Association sponsored the event.
Reuters.com's Robert Basler gave the packed theater a sneak preview of the site's newest feature, "News-room," which will open officially in a few weeks. The site allows users to go behind the scenes with first-person essays, raw footage and "the juicy stuff that didn't make it into the articles," said Basler.
Washingtonpost.com's Steve Fox explained a feature called "Faces of the Fallen," that displays profiles of all of the U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq.
"There's been a lot of reporting on the numbers, but when you go [to the site] and see their faces and see how young they are ... and then you realize that you have 10 pages [of the site] to go through, that really hits home," Fox said.
Ron Coddington and Denny Gainer of usatoday.com described their coverage of the NewSong Music Festival, the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention. Each of these events is captured online in video, sound bytes, articles and photos, as well as interactive features.
"You can spend a good deal of time going through all the tabs. There's just so much content. That was part of our goal: to see how deeply we could go into something," Gainer said.
Baltimoresun.com's Matthew Baise described how its parent company, Tribune, used technology to transfer news content to their Web site and among their print publications, using the Florida hurricanes as examples.
Peter Roybal and Jana Steiger of cq.com explained the evolution of CQ's technology from a simple news database in the 1980s to a Web site, multiple newsletters and a news alert service.
Brannon said that she thought the event was successful at "instructing and de-mystifying, and giving us a context in which to see online journalism as we move into 2005"
