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 Recently, American Consolidated Media, home to more than 80 print and digital publications in nine states, launched the second class of journalists involved in its Digital Reporter Project.
ACM is headquartered in Irving, Texas. The Digital Reporter Project puts an iPad2 workstation in the hands of the reporters involved as a tool to allow them to provide news updates and multimedia coverage on their newspapers' websites from the field.
In the second phase of the project, four journalists in Texas are featured. Brad Keith, sports editor of the Stephenville Empire-Tribune; Pete Garcia, sports editor of the Alice Echo-News Journal; Ofelia Hunter, managing editor of the Alice Echo-News Journal; and Pedro Perez IV, reporter with the Valley Town Crier in McAllen, are four of the 11 journalists involved in the Digital Reporter Project 2.0 class. The first class of the Digital Reporter Project included 10 journalists in ACM.
The iPad2 workstations come complete with applications that will assist them in providing quality print and digital news from the field. The reporters will shoot, edit and post video using the iPad2 HD video camera and iMovie editing software.
"The goal of the Digital Reporter Project is to see if a reporter can take advantage of a tool like an iPad2 and be able to do all their job functions solely with that workstation," said Rick Rogers, director of product development for ACM. "Our content strategy states very clearly that we want our reporters to provide the basic details on our websites as news happens, and follow up those initial reports with what print newspapers have been doing well for for more than a century -- detailed, in-depth reporting. It is no secret the digital reader and the print reader are two different species, and we at ACM feel these iPad2 workstations will be a good first step to allow our reporters to be able to feed both sectors of our readership the news they want."
Rogers continued, "It is my vision for this test that each reporter will be able to increase their time spent in the field gathering content by at least 30 to 50 percent because they will have complete mobility and be able to submit news back to the office from anywhere they can get cell service. We want our reporters in the office as little as possible. News doesn't take place at their desks, it takes place in their communities."
Texas-based reporters involved in the first class of ACM's Digital Reporter Project included Micah Moore, reporter for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune, and Matt Cardenas, reporter with the Nueces County Record Star. |