Reportr.net

As the Online Journalism Symposium draws to a close, I wanted to draw attention to the keynote on Saturday by Ramón Salaverria.

He is a professor and vice chair at the School of Communication, Navarra University, Spain

In his address, he tackled the illusive topic of convergence. In his view, convergence is very different to integration.

Convergence was a process, whereas integration was a possible effect of that process. The two should not be confused, especially by management, he warns.

He outlined four areas for convergence:

• Technological convergence in journalistic production and also in media usage
• Management convergence, from cross promotion of content to coordination and integration
• Professional convergence, from one task for one medium to any tasks for one medium or one task for any medium. And now moving to any tasks for any medium.
• Content convergence, from monomedia to many media to multimedia

Salaverria argues convergence means shifting from:

• many media to multimedia
• Uncoordinated newsrooms to coordinated newsrooms but not necessarily integrated
• Redundancy of content to complementary content
• Medium ruled journalism from content ruled journalism

This is a smart way to approach convergence. But often convergence in the media is confused with integration, and driven by an economic rather than a journalistic imperative.