With Wi-Fi, Deadline Is Always Now
Posted January 30, 2008
The first time my newspaper sent me to cover Macworld Expo, that top technology show focused on all things Apple, I was a primitive journalist by today's high-tech standards.
It was 1999, and my newsgathering tool kit consisted primarily of notepads and ballpoint pens along with a creaky, bulky laptop used mainly for word processing and a bit of Web surfing over a slow dial-up connection. Wi-Fi was so new that hardly anyone knew about it -- until Apple chief executive Steve Jobs demonstrated the wireless networking technology on the company's new iBook laptop at that long-ago show.
When Jobs picked up an iBook and strolled across the stage while maintaining an Internet connection -- amid gasps and applause from the audience -- I felt the ground shift beneath my feet, and realized that how I work as a journalist would be changing.
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Julio Ojeda-Zapata
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Fast-forward to mid-January 2008. I was again at Macworld Expo, this time in San Francisco instead of New York City, carrying an Apple MacBook laptop (the old iBook's successor) with integrated Wi-Fi for use with public high-speed networks I can find with ease.
Wi-Fi has allowed me to expand my work in ways that were unthinkable a decade earlier. I no longer focus solely on pounding out long-form text documents, sending stories to my editors in traditional once-a-day intervals for the following day's print edition.
Now I can do so much more, courtesy of the bountiful bandwidth at my disposal. I upload pictures and videos to the Web, post nonstop to my tech blog and the Twitter microblogging service, and carry on nonstop chats -- via e-mail, instant messaging and the Skype voice service -- with my readers, tech sources and press colleagues.
Publishing is no longer a sporadic endeavor, but occurs continuously. My deadline is always now.
Photos. Reporters have recently begun doing double duty as photographers at my newspaper and other metro dailies. This is not to say we have the training or talent of professional photographers -- far from it -- but we are now being encouraged to supplement their polished pictures with raw images from big events we cover.
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Julio Ojeda-Zapata
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So I had a pocket digital camera at the ready wherever I went at Macworld. My paper didn't send a shooter. I snapped lots of pictures that went straight to the Web. I didn't have time to do this manually, so I automated the process. My camera had a special flash-storage card, called the Eye-Fi, that incorporates Wi-Fi features. It piggybacks on a wireless network and automatically uploads photos to a photo-sharing service of my choosing.
I settled into a routine at Macworld. I'd pop into an Apple retail outlet near my hotel, plop into one of the store's theater-like auditorium chairs and activate my pocketcam. Then, while I worked on my laptop, the Eye-Fi pushed my pictures from the day into cyberspace via the store's Wi-Fi network. Oh, there was a glitch or two. My camera kept powering down, so I had to repeatedly reactivate it to get all my photos to upload. But, for the most part, this process went well -- and magically made a news photographer out of me.
Videos. Some reporters at my newspaper have become aggressive about supplementing their articles with short videos. I was determined to document Macworld Expo with moving pictures, in addition to still photos and stories.
But, again, I had to do it efficiently so it would not interfere with the all-important articles I needed to file every day -- that part of my job hasn't changed. I didn't bring a separate video camcorder: I simply switched my pocket camera into video mode to capture footage of reasonable, if not spectacular, quality. This got stored on the Eye-Fi, but that card does not upload video as it does photos.
So I dumped the footage into the iMovie '08 editing program on my MacBook. I had no time for elaborate editing while in San Francisco. I just grabbed interesting video snippets and uploaded them to YouTube. The iMovie program has a way to do this quickly and easily; so do a number of editing programs for Windows.
My real fun began when I returned to my newsroom in St. Paul. That's when I was able to take a closer look at my footage, select the best parts, and create a video collage that gave visitors to my newspaper's Web site a fuller sense of the scene at Macworld Expo.
Text. For all my recent emphasis on still and moving images, I'm still primarily a text-based newsgatherer. But what and how I write has evolved dramatically in the nine years since my first Macworld trip, when I only filed traditional news stories.
I now blog, for one thing. Blogging is big at American newspapers, which often have dozens of staff-written blogs on diverse topics. My newspaper is no exception, and my Your Tech Weblog was one of the paper's first years ago.
I wanted to increase the power and usefulness of my blog during Macworld, so I made some changes using the site controls provided by the hosting firm, TypePad. I started by designating the blog as the destination for all pictures being uploaded via the Eye-Fi. These were automatically organized into albums according to the date. I could then display visual links to these on the right edge of my blog's main page.
That's also where I displayed my Twitter "tweets." This is Internet shorthand for the blog-like microposts -- none longer than 140 characters -- that constituted a valuable secondary means for getting out information that didn't warrant a full blog post or newspaper article. Every time I posted to my Twitter account, the entry automatically appeared on my blog.
Along with the photos and standard blog posts, the tweets made my blog a sort of information central during Macworld. It was also a conduit, via prominent links, to my standard articles, thereby driving traffic to my newspaper's main site.
The traditional part of my job remains important. It is mostly those articles that will pay my bills for years to come, after all, despite all my dabbling with newer forms of reporting.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata covers consumer technology for the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, a MediaNews Group newspaper. Find his coverage at yourtechweblog.com and twincities.com/techtestdrive.
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