We all know the problems inherent in creating digital news packages: reporting from disparate geographic locations not only bloats budgets but hampers the ability to make timely decisions; slow uploads and incompatible file conversions often lead to breakdown in communication and impede the flow of critical information; the absence of a centrally shared space further aggravates an already frustrating approval process.
Yet even in the face of the recent rapid democratization of media, coupled with the lowering price threshold on prosumer technology, a truly collaborative platform for news aggregation, collaboration and distribution has alluded us.
That just may have changed last Wednesday when USC Annenberg announced they would be the first major journalism program in the country to adopt Stroome, a robust collaborative online editing community developed by myself and award-winning journalist and documentarian, Nonny de la Peña.
Undoubtedly, my connection to Stroome as co-founder renders me biased. But there is no doubt that Stroome addresses a real pain in the marketplace.
Mark Cooper, director, Annenberg Digital News, put it this way: “Stroome fills a current, yawning gap and constitute[s] a powerful collaborative tool for university journalism learning labs and publications, for student media, for citizen journalism, for pro-am projects and, naturally, for legacy media moving into more networked new media.”
Collaborative platforms for news media is more important part of the successful future for any news media than any ipad-kind of news delivery platform.
