Next time you hear some executive talk about cross-platform distribution, you might want to fire up this Senator Craig item, from Doug Clark at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. That's putting the multi in multi-media. Production credit is to Joe Barrentine, who shows up in one search as an intern in the paper's photo department. I guess that he put the slide show together to go with the lyrics by Clark, a Spokesman-Review columnist, The Spokesman-Review has a pretty lively blog report from the morning news meeting. Here's what they said about the Craig song parody:
But the really big deal this morning was Doug Clark's new song. Some callers called it Doug's "best perv song ever," although Smith "thought Barista was pretty good," he said.
On the other hand, managing editor Gary Graham and senior editor Carla Savalli brought up the point that by producing media to go with Clark's column about Craig, it's...
• an extra step in poking fun of a public figure that involves not just Doug Clark, but the time and energy of Spokesman-Review staff if the multimedia team were to blockade the men's room for music video production.
• Poking fun of a public figure in a way that can make us ask, Is this something a newspaper should be doing?"That's one step further than I'm comfortable with," Savalli said about taking columnist views to a new media platform.
Smith and others argued that ridicule of public figures is a standard tone in Doug Clark work, although they agree that "It is Spokesman-Review content."
Is "Cheesbuger, I hold" by Craig LaBan, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, doing the same thing? A columnist who grew up devoted to print turns to the music video format to get across an important point. Political scandal, cheeseburgers -- universal topics, important messages, cross-platforms.
In Spokane, Tony Orlando and Dawn provided the inspiration. In Philadelphia, it was the writer's composition. In both cities, online audiences found newsrooms working to make the most of the web.
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