What, you want me to teach reporters multimedia?

Culture can change as quickly in the newsroom as an editor can slap a new lead on a story.

Just a few weeks ago, I wondered if anyone outside our online team – which I had been banished from sometime last summer – got or cared about Web-first publishing or multimedia journalism or Web 2.0.

Then through a series of b-and-moaning (me) and firings (someone else, thankfully), I was assigned to Jill, full-time metro editor, part-time blogger and sometimes Tweeter.

In addition to keeping up with my little experiments, such as my live blogging jury selection of a capital murder trial on Twitter, Jill wrote me into our team goals as a “multimedia trainer.”  Evidently, Jill figured my last year of learning how to use a video camera, editing software and hooking up microphones to audio records should be passed onto the rest of our staff.

Beginning this month, I’m supposed to begin showing the three other reporters in our corner of the newsroom the basics.  It’s the beginning of a newsroom DIY-training.

It seemed only weeks ago people with the title “editor” were asking me to cut it out with the electronic toys, as they had told me in earlier years to stop developing narratives and stick to the inverted pyramid.

Culture can change quickly in newsrooms.  So if you sometimes feel like one of the only ones trying to do something new, don’t get frustrated.  Just keep plugging away.

It’s kind of like that project I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and now – because of a murder trial – has to be once again put on hold.  But news of the moment takes priority.  And there’s always news of the moment. Eventually, there will be time for enterprise.

Eventually, someone will grasp what you’re trying to do.

Meanwhile, follow my experiments on Twitter.  You'll hear about stoned "punk" jurors and what men facing a death penalty trial say about newspaper subscriptions.  Really.