Trinity Mirror is rolling out a multimedia training progamme for journalists across its regional devision as it unveils its new web sites.
The programme includes week-long video journalism courses and one-day online journalism workshops.
More than 50 Trinity Mirror journalists have already attended a week-long video journalism course run in conjunction with the University of Teesside, the group hopes to increase this to 70 by the end of this year.
Editorial director Neil Benson and head of multimedia Michael Hill are traveling to each centre in the group to host a series one-day online journalism training sessions.
“We see how web savvy they already are and explain our online and multimedia strategy to give them some perspective on what we’re trying to do,” said Benson.
They also show the journalists new online tools they could be using.
“Often we find that journalists are using the BBC and Google – all the obvious ones — but we want to feed in some other sites that are useful for them to do their research,” said Benson.
The session covers how to use the search engine Technorati to identify local bloggers, how to use social bookmarking sites like Furl or del.icio.us and what sites to use to identify the owners of local businesses or properties.
The training sessions on the courses have already led to the launch of some new newsroom blogs.
One Liverpool journalist, Echo assistant sports writer Andrew Greenhalgh, for example, has been blogging about his Christian faith.
“It’s just a matter of saying you don’t have to stay in your pigeon hole — if you’ve got other interests, come and talk about them,” said Benson.
The group has now appointed “multi-media champions” to each of its regional dailies to have special responsibility for promoting "the multimedia agenda" in news meetings.
The champions are generally be relatively junior newsroom managers, such as assistant news editors.
“We’re giving more clout to people who are really more knowledgeable rather than assuming that because people are xperienced in print, they will know about online,” said Benson.
The same system is now expected to be expanded to the group’s Sunday and weekly titles.
