You'd never know from looking at my picture here or the other staff photos on this multiblog that they were taken in the unfinished open-air concrete shell of a hotel expansion in Hyderabad. Immediately after arriving in India at the end of 20+ hours of flying and little real sleep, the photo specialist in our integrated-media team disregarded the beckoning bed in his room and went instead looking for good light. He found it up some back stairs of the Kasani GR Hotel in a part of the building that is little more than dirt and wooden scaffolding. But it has big open holes where windows will be installed someday, making it an ideal impromptu photo studio. That combined with Brian Powers' skills in his chosen media specialization gave us these shots you could not fault next to the product of the most expensive portrait studio anywhere.
It also illustrates nicely what Brian and the rest of our team of journalists-in-training from Western Kentucky University are doing here in India and back at our home base in Bowling Green. They are integrating all of their individual media skills, each working in his or her area of specialization, and making maximum use of all the tools and environments available to us, to produce comprehensive coverage of the 2009 World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum. You won't realize half of what is going on behind this content. But know that the total far exceeds the simple sum of its parts.
This is integrated media - making the best possible use of text, images, video, audio, print, digital, mobile, web, social networks and more for each part of the story, and making each part of the story work with every other part. No one format or one part of the package has priority, except for whatever part is best meeting your need to know right now.
I'm Kerry Northrup and I have the pleasure of directing this WKU Integrated Media Team. My job is what we call newsflow coordination, which means I focus on the overall story we are presenting and watch for the opportunities to play each medium to its greatest advantage. Once we spot those opportunities, the specialists of our cross-format crew jump on them, and then just as quickly move on to the next facet of the package. Throughout it all, Rule No. 1 is always: It's about the story, not the medium, not the technology.
