Eric Chaverou with Radio France is a multimedia reporter. We need more more multimedia reporters.

But I’m starting to see a theme here. Ten years into new media/online/interactive media, whatever you want to call it, we’re still struggling with integrating work processes and even more than that work cultures.

Eric said that Radio France created a small team of multimedia journalists because they were having difficulty getting their traditional radio staff to work for the web. He said:

The majority of radio people in Radio France told me that is not my job to make something for the website.

They spent a year following the recovery of one of the towns hit by the tsnunami. They went back every three months. Here is the result.

It is a really impressive effort, and they found that it was too complicated to ask their traditional journalists to do.

This morning, Dominique, talked about the tensions between the TV and interactive production schedules. TV still comes first.

Eric says the multimedia teams are now accepted six years. Before they were radio reporters so they had some legitimacy.

Now, he says it will be difficult to fold the multimedia teams to be folded back into the radio teams, although he thinks that is how it should have been from the start.

A colleague from Radio France asked them if it was difficult to juggle the demands of multiple media.

Eric replied that the reporters focus on the sound first and still photos second. They do not shoot video.

“I don’t want to pit radio against the internet.” he said.

Why is this still internet versus radio or versus TV? We’re still thinking in terms of platforms and not in terms of content.

We talk about cross platform content but what about cross platform thinking?

There is still a lot of thinking to be done about how to tailor content for best presentation on multiple media not to mention multimedia platforms, but this isn’t about technology or organisation structures, this is about the business cultures.

More about that in the next post.