Nashville talks, BuzzMachine listens

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine is rolling out a series of posts in which he suggests tangible ways to nudge newsrooms into the internet age (most involve much more forceful actions than nudges). Today's post, suggestion No. 2, is to turn the newsroom into a classroom, and train everyone -- editors, copy editors, reporters, photographers, designers, etc. -- on basic web publishing tools. The idea is that, once the grizzled and surly news folks realize how painfully easy it is to publish online, they'll have a renewed sense of optimism about the web's potential for creating and distributing news content.

Jarvis goes on to proposition newsrooms to encourage their employees to follow their own creative web-publishing pursuits.

And then great and surprising things can happen. Newsrooms can be and should be creative and curious places and these tools can break out those instincts. I’ve seen that happen, too. I’ve seen still photographers get reenergized professionally and creatively when they can shoot video. I’ve seen reporters freed to publish quickly with links having a ball finding themselves in conversation — for the first time in their careers — with the folks who used to merely read them.

Jarvis devotes a whole section of the post to Nashville is Talking and WKRN's attempts to reach out to bloggers through its workshops and networking opportunities. Very, very cool.