Convergence. It's a term we're hearing a lot of lately.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines convergence as "several people or things that come together from different directions so as to eventually meet."

In journalistic terms, that means the art of merging several different information media (Daily Kent Stater, TV2, and Black Squirrel Radio) into one well-oiled machine.

That so-called machine is currently located in a room at the south end of the second floor of Franklin Hall. The sign outside the door calls it the "Student Media Newsroom," but can we really call it that just yet?

Before the School of Journalism and Mass Communication called Franklin Hall its home, the different media were housed in different areas on campus — the Stater in Taylor Hall, and BSR and TV2 in Music and Speech, all operating separate from one another.

Now all are housed in Franklin and have formed a new identity — KentNewsNet — the new converged web site for all three media.

WEB SITE HAS ATTITUDE

The only problem is that the atmosphere in the so-called "newsroom" does not currently reflect the attitude the web site displays.

As I walked into the "newsroom" for the first time, I immediately noticed that it seemed much emptier than I had imagined — and the Stater and TV2 video staffs were still operating separately, just on different sides of the same room this time.

My idea of "convergence" may be different from others. Maybe I'm just not getting the concept correctly. But I feel that in order to call that the "Converged Newsroom" everyone keeps referring to it as, it needs to have a smooth flow of content processing.

Maybe we're all so used to the routines we've formed as individual machines, that it's going to take a bit longer to “converge” the parts and get it working cohesively again.

It just might take a gigantic breaking news story to push us into super-converged gear, and feel like the media powerhouse we could become.

NEED A BIG EVENT

Something big happens locally, and we send out reporters and photographers from the Stater, videographers from TV2, and people to get audio from Black Squirrel radio. They all return and pump out a breaking news story with photos from the scene, video interviews and generic shots for editing, and audio for the radio.

To me, that's how a converged newsroom should operate. And thus far, I haven't seen it in action.

So what can we call that room at the end of the second floor hallway? A newsroom, yes. But the converged part is a work in progress.