Colin Mulvany is a multimedia producer at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. A still photographer for the first 18 years of his career, Mulvany transitioned to shooting video and audio slide shows for his newspaper’s online site Spokesman.com in 2005. He doesn’t claim to be an expert on multimedia. Like everyone else in the newspaper biz, he’s just trying to find a comfy spot in the online world.
He can be reached at colinm38[at]gmail.com
Mastering Multimedia 
do you offer rss?
It seems like most of your links are broken?
I thought you might find our website interesting and if you have time, I’d like your reaction to one quick question.
We (a couple of us in our newsroom) thought it would be good to open up the system.
We came up with an idea that would let people watch a lot of the news around the country unedited. We thought it should be called http://www.LiveNewsCameras.com because we weren’t interested in anything but news and news on the internet is rapidly becoming video.
We launched it as an experiment on Super Tuesday and it sort of took off. We streamed Obama’s campaign event in Chicago for six hours straight just as one of the many election feeds from around the country.
The cool thing is that I’ve heard from all sorts of journalists all around the country that are using it to watch the candidates live since we carry stuff the cables and network newscasts do not. As we learned recently, sometimes it is the warm up speaker for the candidate, the person rarely seen on television, who can generate attention.
We are not Fox focused and now we are not even TV focused. We are getting in touch with what I guess you would call non-traditional broadcasters. For example, I’ve been trying to find city state and local agencies that stream their meetings for a government page and so on. Our new weather page doesn’t even have “reporters”…just live streams from radars around the US.
Here’s the quick question. Do you do LIVE video? We’d love to link to your efforts.
We believe that if a newsroom decides they want to start taking webcams out and start streaming news live, if they let us know about it, we can link to them and everyone wins. We can even show them what we have learned. Live cameras on air and on the web does not require an ENG truck, a team of people and towers etc. You know that.
We also believe that if journalists don’t work together and aggregate their work and share in the success…someone else will.
It’s still just a little experiment…but we see something here that is different and challenges all sorts of assumptions. Love to get your perspective on where this could go.
One last thought, we can’t use the perfect motto… “Veritas odit moras” It is from line 850 of Seneca’s version of Oedipus. “Truth hates delay.” Unfortunately it is used by Arts&Letters Daily… a great website if you haven’t been there.
Pingback: New Version of Soundslides multimedia software | E-flections
I’m in the process of convincing my colleagues that our company should produce an open blog about corporate activities. However, it would be nice to hear from you the amount of traffic you experience on your site and what kind of outsiders (as well as corporate insiders) who tend to follow your blog. I guess you’ve experience a substantial growth in the traffic since the startup of Mastering Multimedia?
Colin! Haven’t talked to you in forever. how are things? Great Blog!
Stephen
Vegard,
Mastering Multimedia is not associated with my newspaper The Spokesman-Review. The points of view in this blog are my own. That said, the S-R newsroom management has always been open to us bloggers. I am careful not to use Mastering Multimedia to personally attack people I work with and I try to keep my bitching to a minimal level.
As for traffic, this blog has done well. I get about 300-400 visitors a day. Not bad for only posting once a week. Most of my traffic is from other people doing newspaper based multimedia storytelling. I also get a lot of links from academia and other bloggers doing video storytelling.
Pingback: Digital Journalist « Broadcast Newsroom Computing
Pingback: Better digital photos « newstraining
Pingback: Video Journalism « chloeemmerson