The Changing Landscape of the News Business

While acknowledging that the traditional newspaper is rapidly vanishing, Desert Sun Executive Editor Greg Burton (left) told students Wednesday morning that "The core of this business will be the story. It was that way fifty years ago, and it will be that way 50 years from now."

Burton and Desert Sun digital reporter Brian Indrelunas (middle) were dialoguing with Matt Hamilton's journalism students about social media intersecting with traditional reporting and the opportunity and responsibility reporters hold in their hand.

"Our industry has really changed in the last decade," Burton said. "When I was a young reporter 10 or 15 years ago, we came into a news room and it wasn't wired like this," he said, pointing to banks of networked computers. "We sat down and talked about the news that was going on and set our timing for our deadlines for the monstrosity of a printing press out back. Everybody was focused on the getting the best story to put on the spools of paper that would be printed and delivered by the next morning at 6 a.m.

"Today, if you are waiting for that 6 a.m. paper on your doorstep to get your information, you're the last one to know what is going on."

Indrelunas is one example of a modern newsgatherer, spending some his time scouring Facebook and Twitter and other social media for trending stories.

"Instead of waiting for a 20-inch story to be written, processed, and edited 15 times, sometimes we only need a headline on our web site. And as we get details, we can keep expanding that story all day."

Burton called Inderlunas "the new model of what our industry has become."

The Desert Sun web site gets 200,000 hits daily.

Filmmakers in the Classroom Series Begins at CCHS

Playwright John Steppling (right) and Education Outreach Director Ken Jacobson kicked off the Filmmakers in the Classroom series in Matt Hamilton's Digital Storytelling Class at Cathedral City High School Friday morning.

As Steppling explained at the beginning of class, one of the purposes of the series is to help the students develop a critical vocabulary and learn how to analyze a film. "Art tends to ask questions," Steppling said in his introduction. "You don't have to answer those questions. The most important questions are those that can't be answered."

Digital Storytelling is just one course offered in the Digital Arts Technology Academy at CCHS.

After watching the opening of "The Killers," Steppling and Jacobson engaged the students in discussion of what they observed. "Film is a pervasive, ubiquitous art form, an all pervasive medium and an important one" Steppling said. "You add up all the hours of narrative, thousands of hours, and it's hard to create something that stands out from the tsunami of film of film."

The idea for this series, which will occur twice a month, resulted from a meeting Hamilton, Jacobson and Steppling set up during the summer.

"The Palm Springs Film Festival is interested in engaging the future filmmakers in our community, and my students are excited to have people who have been intimately involved in film share their experiences and expertise," said Hamilton