USA Today Harnesses Digital Journalism

In the Washington Post writer Steven Mufson writes about Larry Kramer taking over USA Today and how he sees digital journalism's place in the news driven world. Kramer is an entrepreneur that has had many successes in business, his website MarketWatch, and as editors of prestigious newspapers. Mufson had asked him about his opinion on digital journalism and how USA Today might harness its power. “This is like a Gutenberg moment,” he said. “We're reinventing storytelling on a digital platform. Suddenly, we can use every form of storytelling in one place — pictures, graphics, words. If we need an interactive map, show me the map. If it's a plane crash, show me the video. We see a new art form that's going to be a much more dominant form of storytelling. That's the exciting part for me.”

Kramer is very aware of the direction that digital journalism will take the news world. He understands that our society is turning to digital innovations for many aspects of our life, things like television, movies, music, sports, social networking, and of course news. All of these are available to the public with a simple search and we can have it all on our homepage of our iPad.

Many people say that journalism is a dying field but Kramer sees it as simply changing and offering new platforms in which to tell our stories. With digital journalism, we are able to actually experience these stories through media other than simply words and a few pictures. Now, we can access interactive stories, videos, and infographs. We can now see the winning home run on video when reading about the game coverage online.

There are many different ways to tell stories and many different and new ways to help make those stories real to the readers. Kramer, as new publisher of USA Today, hopes to bring these into reviving this particular newspaper as a prominent news source.