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Whitefish Pilot editor Richard Hanners realizes the northwest Montana community “isn’t a sleepy little town.” Still, he doesn’t have time for multimedia.
“The technology is constantly changing, and I don’t have time to fiddle with it,” he said, adding that the small-town paper near the Canadian border has only two editorial employees, barely enough to cover the town of 5,000 people.
It is a similar story across the country. Small publications that lack the money and manpower cannot keep up with their big city counterparts that are creating a noticeable online presence with multimedia.
There are, however, exceptions to every rule.
Just 15 miles from the Whitefish Pilot down Highway 93, it’s a different story at the office of the Flathead Beacon, a paper based in downtown Kalispell, Montana, a town with an estimated population of 20,000. Created in 2007, the weekly paper stands out among small newspapers in Montana with its online presence and multimedia. The Beacon is also in direct competition with the town’s daily newspaper, the Daily Inter Lake.
Having good online content has been important for the paper since the beginning, according to editor Kellyn Brown, a 2002 graduate of the UM School of Journalism.
While some newspaper websites, especially those of weeklies, feature just the content that is produced for the paper, Brown works hard to keep the online aspect of the company as up-to-date as possible.
“We’re kind of a different animal in that we put out a weekly paper, but we want to keep our website fresh,” he said.
To do this, Brown heads up a staff of three writers, one photographer and one designer.
That small staff is the nucleus of an impressive effort to bring new media to the Web, including photos, video, blogging and Twitter feeds.
One of the people leading that effort is Lido Vizzutti, a virtual one-man band of photography and multimedia.
Vizzutti wears many hats when it comes to illustrating the news both in print and online. On a sunny spring morning in March 2010, he sat and edited photographs at his desk in the open newsroom at the Main Street office. But there is no such thing as a normal day for Vizzutti, and moments later he grabbed a Nikon camera and an extra lens or two before heading out the door with a reporter to walk a few blocks to a meeting with local business owners and Sen. Max Baucus. Then he rushed back and edited the photos to be put online immediately following the story’s completion.
This is much of Vizzutti’s day: rushing in and out of the office, camera in hand, to shoot another story before coming back to edit images and talk to reporters.
“Every day is a little different,” he said.
With the work of illustrating an entire weekly paper left to one man, you might think that Vizzutti would have time for little else.
However, these constraints haven’t stopped him from trying new things such as multimedia slideshows on the website, which combine still images, audio and, in some cases, video.
But Vizzutti himself can only do so many pieces along with the more pressing issue of shooting images for the paper. At the end of the day, the paper is still the most important part of the business, according to Brown. “My preference is online,” he said. “(But) our print is still our bread and butter.”
That “bread and butter” requires 15,000 copies of the Flathead Beacon in print every week. That number is about 1,000 fewer than the Daily Inter Lake’s circulation, but both are much more than the Whitefish Pilot’s circulation of 2,900.
That is why Vizzutti tries to shoot at least one multimedia piece a week, including simple slideshows. Some of Vizzutti’s most recent and proudest work was a “Best of Preps” slideshow that featured portrait shots of some of the area’s best high school athletes. Spliced between the pictures of the students was a time-lapse video of the entire photo shoot. Another piece combined audio and photos of an area family cutting down their own Christmas tree.
Both pieces have been wildly popular, Vizzutti said, although it does come with a price.
“Multimedia is time-consuming, and it can be tough to produce when you have many other responsibilities,” he said. “In all honesty, we don’t do as much as we should, and it’s honestly because of time.”
It takes time, he said, because he doesn’t just want to put out a mediocre piece.
“To be frank, I’m not interested in cranking out multimedia for the sake of cranking it out,” he said. “I think there is a difference between quality and just getting stuff online.”
Brown agrees that creating online content for the sake of looking advanced or to fill space is not what they are interested in.
“I like to think that good video is great, but it’s hard,” he said. “Doing video for the sake of video is a waste of time … It’s tough, but we do the best with what we got.”
To find inspiration, Vizzutti spends a lot of his free time searching the Web for various multimedia examples. He said that some of the best he has seen have been from the San Jose Mercury News. It’s an example of what he’d like to see the Beacon’s own multimedia look like.
“I said there are no boundaries; we can do anything we want,” he said.
And Vizzutti tests these boundaries in hopes of bringing more interest to the paper’s website and online content.
“My hope is that when I produce something, it drives viewers (to the site),” he said. “For me it’s just a fantastic way to tell stories and that is why we do what we do: We tell stories. It’s a very exciting way to tell a story. It’s very exciting for our viewers.”
Vizzutti said that at the end of the day, multimedia is still just a small part of what they do at the paper every week.
“When multimedia first came about, it was going to save newspapers and the visual people wanted to believe that, but the fact is it hasn’t,” he said.
He has pondered adding short ads to the front of multimedia pieces. However, he believes the clip must be truly interesting for someone to sit through the advertisement.
The future of journalism and how multimedia will play a part are just two more things that Brown, Vizzutti and others of the noticeably young staff have to ponder.
“I think that youthfulness helps very much, especially in a start-up, because you have fresh perspectives and ideas,” he said. “When you start from scratch and you have a young perspective it’s easy to involve non-traditional forms of media.”
