Tom Abate attended this year’s Knight seminar on multimedia at UC Berkeley Gratudate School of Journalism (where I was the keynote speaker last year) and four of my former colleagues from the Ventura County Star spoke about multimedia and video work at the Star. The program has grown a lot in the past three years.

Abate writes:

I love that sense of experimentation. I’ve covered Silicon Valley as a reporter since 1992. This same freedom to make honest mistakes is a prime characteristic of the region’s startup culture. In Silicon Valley, if you’re not reaching then you’re resting — and one of your competitors will stumble past you.

We started small in Ventura. The program continues to grow and the quality continues to improve.

I keep arguing in favor of starting small and inexpensive so you can build something worthwhile — a position that gets a surprising amount of pushback from readers of this blog and other media bloggers — but the strategy is working in Ventura and elsewhere. Of course, 2007 is probably the last year that newspapers can afford to start a video program with a start-up attitude and still keep pace with competitive demands. The longer they wait, the high the price of entry. Newspapers ignore video at their own peril.
(via Jack Lail)

UPDATE: You can find a QT vid of the Star staff talking about the multimedia newsroom on the seminar’s site.  I’ll have to go back and watch that presentation and  the others later.