Being at World Youth Day

It's the day before Pope Benedict XVI arrives at World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, and I'm home in Steubenville, Ohio. But I've spent the past hour or two listening to Fr. Roderick podcasting from World Youth Day on the Catholic Insider. I've also been reading posts from World Youth Day by Tim Drake on his blog, Young and Catholic.

Through these two "new media" forms, I have relatively intimate connections with the events in Germany. In a way, I feel as if friends are taking me with them. I'm not confused - I know I'm still in Ohio - but there's a new dimension of communication going on.

It's very cool!

Art Speaks

In late September, 2001, I participated in Visual Edge, a week-long hands on seminar on New Media reporting and production at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. We were divided into 2-person teams and assigned to cover stories in the Tampa Bay area. Using digital photography, digital audio recording and Macromedia Flash, my teammate and I created a story called Art Speaks.

I've remembered our story several times these past two weeks while working on projects for Catholic NGO Voice and wanted to share it. It's a little over two minutes long.

"Art Speaks"

"Current" Thoughts

Last week the new network Current made its debut. Regardless of your political views (Al Gore is arguably the most visible co-founder of Current), this new network is a showcase of new directions for journalism and media. As Steven Rosenbaum wrote in morph, the blog of The Media Center,

Al Gore’s “Current” vision is relevant and important both in its use of content and technology. We need to look past the network’s opening day difficulties. Three years ago, Al Gore looked out on the media landscape and saw a change. As he explained it back then, there were two forces on the horizon that would impact media deeply and profoundly. The first was technology; the tools to make media were going from specialized and expensive to ubiquitous and cheap. The second was an uneasy sense that more and more people were being disenfranchised by media organizations that were talking to themselves rather than to their audiences.

How do I know this is what Gore was thinking? Because he said so - to me and others working in the emerging areas of user-contributed content and audience-empowered media...

For media professionals interested in understanding where media is going, watching the evolution of Current is instructive, maybe even essential. For the staff of Current, embracing the production realities of the nascent user-content universe will be frustrating and at times will seem impossible. But they'll do it, because the alternative is to become another me-too network. Al didn't commit himself to making something average - he's shooting for extraordinary. In today’s media environment, you can't say that about many people.

My vote on Current: Stay Tuned for sure.

I first heard about Current this Spring in a podcast. If you're interested in our media future, at least read Steven Rosenbaum's whole post, then go and look for Current.