Jessica Haney | March 11, 2009
Multimedia guru Tom Kennedy explained ways to improve the media business to classes, faculty and student groups Monday and Tuesday during a visit to the School of Journalism. While he admitted that media companies and newspapers, specifically, are having problems, he offered his perspective on how journalism can evolve. “There could be a lot of catastrophic media failures to come,” he told students in associate professor Claude Cookman’s J360 Multimedia Storytelling class Tuesday morning. “That’s the national evolutionary arc.”
However, that’s not to say that journalism will expire. While the traditional print model for newspapers will have to change, he said, the complex and riveting content does not.
“Journalism is not the same as those media companies,” Kennedy said. “The craft is distinct from the mechanisms of distribution.”
Kennedy has spent years honing his craft. He was managing editor for multimedia at the award-winning WashingtonPost.com for 11 years until his retirement last month. Before that, he served as director for photography at the National Geographic Society and as deputy graphics director at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Larry Buchanan, art director at the Indiana Daily Student, said Kennedy’s expertise was especially helpful for the developing multimedia aspects of the IDS Web site. In fact, Kennedy said the print version of the paper should be secondary.
“He said the Web needs to come first,” Buchanan said, “but it’s going to take a while to get there.”
Kennedy related the fields of multimedia and broadcast journalism, but also explained their differences. For one, multimedia journalists tend to stay out of their stories and let the narrative unfold through the subject.
“It’s about showing the truth of their lives to other people,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy has traveled far and wide to pursue “the truth” of people’s lives—Russia, Japan, Korea, Central and Latin America—and has learned that there is no such thing as A roll and B roll, only X roll.
“We get the moment, or we don’t,” Kennedy said, “and we’ve got to move on.”
