Competing Mediums Encroaching on Each Other

Yesterday I read an article in the "Convergence Newsletter" about a photojournalist who is now an online video journalist. ("Making the Transition from Photojournalist to Vlogger: Convergence in Practice",by Colin Mulvany.) What struct me was that someone with 17 years of still photo experience has jumped in to producing a video blog, he calls it a vlog, for his newspaper, the Spokesman-Review. To do this he's had to learn all about the equipment and video production process. I'm thinking as I read, wouldn't having someone who has 17 years of TV news videography experience been a better way to go? Telling stories with moving images and sound is quite a bit different than capturing the quitessential image that expresses the essence of the story.

Today at the Media Convergence Conference at BYU we discussed podcasting and it was mentioned that newspapers and other media are podcasting, as well as radio stations. What strikes me is that the various traditional mediums are reaching out to use techniques from the others in there foray's into online news. So newspapers are doing multimedia stories with video and TV stations are blogging.

Where is this going? I think that as this continues we'll blur the difference between the mediums of newspaper, TV and radio news. And what I predict is there will be a merging, a form of the converging we've been talking about at the conference, where large media organizations remove the walls of traditional mediums and just do it virtually. Forget the traditional separate enterprises we have now, who are tentatively partnering, but still in competition with each other. And wouldn't it be funny if something like Google made it happen outside traditional media. (This is a reference to the futuristic online video that satirises the future of news as a Google media property.)