I enjoy collaboration and using new high-tech tools as much as the next guy, but when it comes to doing interviews I prefer simply to talk to sources on the phone so I can focus on listening closely to what they have to say and taking copious notes on that commentary. This is important so that I can produce detailed and accurate stories based on these conversations.
So I was struck when a company with which I accepted a meeting recently seemed uncomfortable with the fact that I wanted to do a plain old audio interview rather than taking part in the company's multimedia demonstration of its collaboration tool.
This situation was kind of ironic for two reasons. First, you have a reporter who is covering multimedia collaboration, but doesn't actually want to collaborate beyond using the phone because it's just too hard to jump between the presentation and the Word file to take notes. Second, you have a company talking about how its collaboration tool is personalized, so users can customize it based on their own personal needs, but it is uncomfortable expressing its message without employing live conferencing capabilities.
Maybe I should just stop taking notes and record these meetings so I don't have to worry about moving between applications and doing a lot of typing. Or maybe new collaboration tools and unified communications will make it easier for me in the future to take details notes while still being able to experience a real-time multimedia presentation.
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