Sonoma Country Life

Author of The Digital Journalists Handbook on Print Newspaper Strengths

Northern California's East Bay-based New Media man-of-the-moment Mark Luckie has a razor sharp approach to cutting through a lot of the white noise going on in and around the rapidly changing face of journalism.

Luckie, author of the excellent and easy to read The Digital Journalists Handbook hits the nail on the head for lots of us who have one foot in web publishing and the other still quite firmly planted in our beloved print newspapers and magazines.

Check out this post on Luckie's 10,000 Words blog and in particular, scroll through some of the comments. A great platform for differences of opinions on the likelihood of certain sections of the traditional newspaper surviving the onslaught of a digital future. 

Multi media and interactive story producer for The Center for Investigative reporting, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, the Contra Costa Times and former crime and justice reporter for the Daytona Beach News Journal, Mark Luckie has served as a multi media skills trainer for the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley as well as lecturing at various collegiate groups and professional news organizations.

Revelations of an Ever Evolving Web News Frontier

Stakes are high that you are reading this post on a hand-held device. In fact, the majority of regular readers who've responded to my blog have done so by replying to the email in which they read that particular daily post directly on their cell phone.

Research continues to ramp up into the way that we receive our news. The younger you are, it appears the more likely it is that you take in your news stories from specific sites that you've bookmarked as favorites on your phone.

According to an associated news report (that I, incidentally, read in the news print version of the Santa Rosa PD today), about 43% of Americans under 50 are estimated to look for news on their phones. Pew Research Center's recent survey shows that almost 60% of people who participated in the research program routinely obtain news from online and offline sources, perusing four to six favored sources per day. Over 80% of participants, the research showed, receive news in an e-mailed link.  

As traditional newspapers and magazines scramble to preserve their platform in this ever evolving news frontier, how will it all shape up?

Your answer is as good as mine. And that's why I'm totally stoked to attend an upcoming, innovative Web Publishing for Independent Journalists fellowship workshop at U.C. Berkeley's Knight Digital Media Center later this month.

In the meantime, fearless investigative-reporter pal, fellow P'Town blogger Frank Simpson has been diligently at work of late in attempting to decipher the blistering state of affairs within the hard-core shedding of the standard American news scene. On where to stream alternative sources, Frank offers tips on 'how to cope with the web' with additional words of encouragement in a tantalizing  Tweet' from Wordsworth. 

Over the past couple of years a virtual newsroom of independent Sonoma County-based bloggers has provided an invaluable source of humor, support and encouragement for the otherwise lone writer's wanton foray into web publishing land.

Though it seems that even the most ardent on-line reporter draws the line at excessive hyperbole of escalating social networking resources. Here's a snippet from one such enlightening interaction with our Frank, partaken over at the cyber-water cooler and posted with his permission:

"I do not understand Facebook at any level," says Simpson. "My High School Alum Class of 62 persuaded many of us to join and I did so--What I now see when I look at it is akin to a Dickensian Nightmare--faces from High School, faces from college, faces from grad school, faces from law school, faces from Petaluma. I mean who wants to see all of that in one place...at the same time?
 
Sorry but I just don't get it. Likewise with Twitters & Tweets To me it is all just so much noise and chaos."

Equally as overwhelming for the online writer as the online reader. So much to process. So little time. If the concept of reading a print newspaper at the breakfast table has fast become a relic of the past, how will we keep pace with developing technology? By understanding the demand for personalized news sources, vibrant, new voices, unfiltered, first hand reports.

In the past few months the emergence of regional independent news streaming sites such as Bay News Network  a directory of Bay Area community sites and bloggers and real-time local news gathering at FWIX
begins to make more sense of an otherwise bottomless pit of potential news providers.