The Evolving Newsroom

So the Fieldays Exhibitor is done and dusted for another year. Phew.

Here are the front pages:

You can see some of the stories at our new website, mediarts.net.nz, which aims to showcase the work of students of Wintec‘s School of Media Arts along with school events and some of the inspiring work our staff exhibit (more about that in a later post).

My intention this year was to get our stories and images online each day as we went – in true web-first publishing style. It didn’t happen.

The downside of being a school trying to make a daily newspaper for four days of the year is that those four days end up being crazy mad busy and things can slip away from you.

That said, we got some stories up as the week went on and learned a lot about how to go about it. Next year should see some slicker production both online and in print.

Not that I have any complaints about what we achieved this year. Far from it.

We produced 12 great print pages each day from Tuesday through Thursday and a whopping 16-page edition on the Friday. That’s really something.

The Exhibitor is a superb teaching/learning production that we run each year at Wintec, with journalism, photography and design students working hard-out for four days to produce a daily newspaper under extremely tight deadlines.

And I mean tight – much harder than anything I’ve done in a national daily newspaper here or in the UK.

The journalism crew and photographers  – who have done a stirling job – are based at Mystery Creek where the southern hemisphere’s biggest agricultural event, the National Agricultural Fieldays, is held each year.

It’s a  huge event that brings in millions of dollars to the Waikato economy, attracts 117,000 visitors, and provides plenty of story ideas.

Our team, based in a mobile newsroom/classroom known as the Artechmobile, hit Mystery Creek each morning at 8.30am and file stories by 12pm. My colleague Charles Riddle (often ably assisted by Jeremy Smith) then does an outstanding job as news editor/rough subber and sends the stories on to the production team at Wintec.

We then pull all the images, stories and pages together and get them to the printers by 5pm (okay, truth be known it was 6pm) for an overnight print run. The papers are picked up first thing and delivered to Mystery Creek by 6.30am for distribution to the 1,000 exhibitors setting up their stalls for the day.

We ran a new layout this year, which drew lots of positive comments and which I’m really pleased with. Our design students – Gemma, Kylie and Alison – should also be pleased with their excellent work on it.

Thanks must also go to Wintec design tutors David Gardener and Andrea Wilkinson for their patient input, and to photography tutors Stefanie Young and David Cook.

There are many more people involved both within Wintec and without who are too many to name but include valued sponsors Gallagher and the Print House, and the Fieldays organisers who allow us to take such a big part in their event.

Special mention must go to Venetia Sherson, the first editor in residence at Wintec (I’m the second), who has twice now kindly helped me pull this thing together in a wonderfully calm, supportive and good-humoured way.

We’re in the process of debriefing at the moment, with the aim of doing even better next year. Until then, that’s the Fieldays Exhibitor 2009 put to bed. Huzzah!