About Colin Mulvany
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 Spokesmanreview.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.
I can be reached at colinm[at]spokesman.com
Source: masteringmultimedia.wordpress.comJanuary 25, 2009…11:49 pm
Are newspapers losing their multimedia mojo?
Around the multimedia blogosphere, the January doldrums seem to have kicked in. My usual inspirational haunts like Newsvideographer.com, Teaching Online Journalism, Multimediashooter.com have all slowed their publishing cycles. Even my own blog is in need of a New Year’s kick-start. With all the newspaper layoffs last year, over 28,000 from one count, I’m sensing a definite decrease in the multimedia mojo I felt just a year ago. Even the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest I run had the lowest amount of entries ever this month.I’m not saying there’s not good work being produced. There is. I just feel the recession and layoffs have forced the pace of newsroom innovation to slow to a crawl. I fear the brain drain at many newspapers, including my own, has left them frozen in place. Many papers simply do not have the staff or resources left to be competitive on two, let alone, three platforms anymore.
In the last round of layoffs at my newspaper, we lost many of the multimedia journalists who embraced the idea that the web would eventually become our main publishing platform. Talk of innovation has pretty much ceased at the grass roots level. Now, most in editorial are waiting for direction from higher powers to see what comes next.”
