Construction and bubbles of information

Today we were able to take our first official tour of the Newseum, watching two films (one a documentary on news coverage and the other an amazing 4-D film on milestones in journalism in which little bubbles of video and text leapt out at us) and the interactive media gallery (which has an ethics laboratory, lots of fun touch-screen games and a mock broadcast station). The Newseum is still putting the final touches on many of the exhibits, and we tiptoed carefully around workers in construction mode.

Scholars, speakers and staff at the Newseum's Annenberg Theater.

The day's speakers hinted that journalists should be in (re)construction mode as well -- building new skills for online multimedia projects, developing better habits in news accuracy and fact-checking and restructuring the way we view our roles in this ever-changing media landscape. Mark Briggs made a lot of interesting points that really stuck with me. The most profound? "When you enter your newsrooms, you will be working for a news corporation, not just a newspaper, and you will need to do more than traditional journalists," said Briggs, interactive media manager at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.

I have virtually no experience doing multimedia projects, but Briggs showed some examples of fairly simple projects that have a great impact, such as this one. ("If you think hard enough, you could come up with something amazing with just text.")

Catalina Camia's lecture on accuracy showed us that sometimes the Internet can't help us solve everything. She gave examples of cases where reporters made simple errors because they simply failed to check all the facts. As hard as it is to believe, you can't Google everything, and Camia, politics editor at USA TODAY, encouraged us to look for other ways to back up our facts in reporting.