Howard Owens: Every journalist should blog
Bobbie Johnson: Why NOT every newspaper journalist should start a blog
Both links via Andy Dickinson.
Both Owens and Johnson make some excellent points, so probably you should read them both (neither one is very long) and mull it over.
My two cents: If you (a) want to blog, and (b) think you can post once a day, Monday through Friday, indefinitely — give it a whirl. Why not? It’s free. You already know how to write. Try it and see.
After a while, as you get into Technorati, FeedBurner, stats, etc., you’ll find out if you like it — and whether you are able to build an audience. If you can’t build an audience, give it up.
I require my journalism students to blog just so they can find out, firsthand, what it’s like to write every day. To try to find something meaningful to write about. Every day. To try to get people to pay attention to you. To plug into conversations and informal online communities. Some of them find out they really like it. Others discover the opposite. Some of them are terrible at it. Some take to it like little ducklings tossed into a pond.
Technorati tags: blogging | journalists
Everyone except me is at the NPPA Multimedia Immersion Summit. Good stuff there. Go look.
Technorati tags: photojournalism | multimedia
I often run into journalists (and others) who have never heard of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This free online software suite can really come in handy for a variety of situations.
Basically, it’s like having your MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets online, but private and secure from prying eyes. Unless you choose to let someone else see them. And if you need to convert, either from Microsoft to Google or the opposite, that’s easy to do. Check the online Help files if you have any questions.
You will need a Gmail account, but I can hardly imagine that you wouldn’t already have one! (Still using Yahoo! mail? Good heavens, WHY?)
Here’s the latest thing I did with Google Docs that saved me a ton of time: I received a highly formatted MS Word file from a colleague. It had headings, italics, boldface, indents — all kinds of formatting, all over it. I had to put this thing on a Web page. I mean, I had to transfer the information to a Web-readable, proper HTML file.
The worst possible way to do it would be to copy from Word and paste into Dreamweaver. Because of the way MS Word works, this will carry all kinds of unnecessary and difficulty-causing code into your HTML — not at all what you want!
The usual way I would do it would be to copy from Word, paste into a plain-text editor, then copy from there, and paste into Dreamweaver. However, that method loses all the formatting. For a typical memo, this method works fine. For my super-duper formatted document, it would have meant hours of re-formatting.
Google Docs to the rescue!
I copied the document from Word and pasted into a new, blank Google Doc. Then I de-selected the text. And straight from the surface text (DO NOT view source), I copied, then pasted into Dreamweaver (Design view). Perfect! Headings, italics, boldface, indents — all preserved, in standards-compliant HTML.
Technorati tags: online media
Scott Kirsner of the San Jose Mercury News wrote about the inescapable fascination of keeping tabs on your readers (On the Web, audience size matters, May 27, 2007):
Andy Plesser, a public relations executive who publishes a video blog called Beet.tv, checks a Web page several times throughout the day that shows information about which other sites are sending visitors his way. “I look at it first thing in the morning, at the office during client calls, and before I go to sleep,” he says, via e-mail. “More alarmingly, I have it bookmarked on my BlackBerry, and I find myself hitting refresh repeatedly.” Plesser confesses to checking his stats even while he’s in the car commuting to work (only when it’s stopped, he insists).
Most people who have been blogging for more than, say, a month have — like Plesser — discovered the addictive properties of free stats software such as StatCounter, SiteMeter and Google Analytics. As Kirsner wrote, it’s “easy to see how readers are finding you — which other Web sites are linking to those popular posts — and to keep tabs on which posts generate the most comments from readers.”
It doesn’t matter if the audience is teensy-tiny — most bloggers will find their site stats irresistible.
[Guy] Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley author and entrepreneur whose blog, “How to Change the World,” shows up at No. 21 on Technorati’s list of the most influential blogs. He contends that all bloggers care about metrics, no matter how well-known or obscure. Via e-mail, he quips, “There are two kinds of bloggers: those that obsess about their Technorati rankings, and those that lie and say they don’t.”
I’m wondering whether the journalist bloggers (the ones who write a blog as part of their staff newsroom job) are fanatically checking their stats. I hope so!
(Found via the Social Media blog.)
Technorati tags: audiences | blogging | metrics | online journalism | online media
An article in the May/June issue of Digital Photo Pro magazine discusses changes in working life for photojournalists (pp. 118-126). Not only are audiences for print vehicles decreasing — even the top names in the business aren’t getting nearly as many freelance assignments as they used to.
The answer? Photojournalists must adapt.
The advice comes from Ed Kashi, who certainly could be put forth as a good example of adaptation.
What I learned from the article:
- Most paid freelance work isn’t photojournalism; it’s shooting portraits.
- The same magazine shooters who used to be able to count on $80,000 a year in fees would be lucky to pull in $30,000 today doing the same work (that’s from Dirck Halstead). This is partly because the photographer bears more of the costs of production — in time spent as well as software and equipment — in the digital world.
- Brian Storm sees educating the buyers as “a big part of our job” at MediaStorm. Syndication online plays a key role, because online multimedia projects cost a lot to produce. The buyer gets limited exclusive rights to host a project; syndication revenues are split 50-50 between MediaStorm and the photographer.
Kashi remains hopeful and positive:
As editorial budgets and revenues shrink for print publications, Ed Kashi thinks, at some point, publishers are going to wake up and realize more people are looking at their Websites than their printed editions. Not that print is going to disappear, but as this shift continues, publications will have to redesign their infrastructure, including ad revenue and subscriptions.
“Once that happens, and it’s already happening,” Kashi says, “then hopefully I’d love to see the day when more publications are calling me, saying, ‘Hey, we’d love you to do this story or we’d love you to propose an idea, and multimedia is the main component of it. And, oh, yeah, we’ll also have a print part of it as well.'”
Technorati tags: multimedia | photojournalism | online journalism | online media
A nice story-as-graphic from USA Today:
The future of car safety is avoiding crashes
Yeah, I know, it doesn’t sound sexy. But it incorporates video and informative animations and text in a classy, clean layout, and it’s nice and big — but not TOO big. The three tabs at the top organize the story neatly.
Technorati tags: infographics | information graphics | journalism | storytelling | video
Here are two spanking-new journalist blogs for you to sample.
Ron Sylvester of the Wichita Eagle writes the socks off just about about every other blogger in the known universe in Multimedia Reporter:
Stan grabbed a digital recorder and sat at my desk, which has a $17 phone recorder I’d picked up last year sometime. Stan called the director of public safety in Augusta, KS. He then passed me the recorder, like a baton in the multimedia relay, and headed out the door for the morning police briefing. Stan files more on-line stories before noon than most people in a day.
I used Audacity to edit the interview, trying to match up the descriptions with the pictures we had, and loaded it into Soundslides.
We had the slide show posted with Stan’s story by afternoon. Stan watched the show before he wrote, so he produce a story with minimal repeats that complemented the slide show. Once again, multimedia became the layers for the news.
From: Slide shows: They’re not just for photographers
The Inksniffer is written by a longtime newspaperman who goes by the nom de plume Sniffer Dog:
I go back to my Pew Research Center data, published this month in Editor and Publisher. In that data Culture and Arts (29%) is second only to local government (49%) in newspaper topics of most interest. Now it doesn’t say locally originated culture and arts, but you can’t differentiate if you don’t control, so I would have thought that a film critic, a central plank of credible cultural coverage, was worth hanging on to. Maybe ask her to broaden her beat a bit. But not completely lose her film reviews.
From: What one movie reviewer tells us about the critical condition of US newspapers
Read. Enjoy.
Technorati tags: journalism | journalists | blogs | blogging
You have eight talented journalists working for hours under deadline pressure. They produce one of the best-ever examples of online storytelling. You post it on your Web site. You link it very prominently to the related stories. You feature it in the printed newspaper. And rightly so! It is a great achievement. It is a work worthy of study and appreciation long after the news event dims in memory.
For heaven’s sake, give the thing a permanent URL. What the heck is the matter with you people?!
I have Times Select, the paid premium service that provides access to The New York Times archives, video, etc. I’m not asking to get something for free. But you can’t even bookmark this graphic. I have tried everything. And you can’t properly search for it. Just try. NYT Multimedia search (only videos and slideshows come up). Archives search (only text stories).
You can search for “Deadly Rampage at Virginia Tech”; “Viginia Tech shootings”; “Virginia Tech graphic” — all useless. You can bookmark http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/us/20070417 _SHOOTING_GRAPHIC.html — but it will take you to an April 17 column called “The TV Watch.” And if you bookmark the full URL (including all the numeric garbage following .html), it will work for about 24 hours and then revert to “The TV Watch.”
So the only solution I have found, so far, is to go to this omnibus page about the shootings, scroll down to where you read “INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Recounting the Events at Virginia Tech,” and click that.
Doesn’t The New York Times understand bookmarking? People like to bookmark things. They like to e-mail links to their friends and work colleagues. This is Online Usability 101, folks: Use permanent URLs.
Technorati tags: infographics | information graphics | journalism | examples
Davin McHenry of Bakersfield reports:
At first we thought reporters were going to edit their own videos, but we ended up with issues of quality and efficiency. It just came down to the fact that a seasoned video editor could turn out a video in half the time and it usually would be more polished….
On most days the flow of video is handled by two primary editors, who also shoot their own stuff as much as possible, so this isn’t a full time editing position. We also have a pool of 4-5 auxiliary video editors who can step in if needed. Most of those folks are on the web team, but a couple are night folks who have a keen interest in multimedia.
Logical, isn’t it?
(Via Ryan Sholin in del.icio.us.)
Technorati tags: video | reporting | online | journalism | editing | newspapers
I’m really fed up with award lists that do not have links.
> 2007 EPpy Winners WITH links!
It took me 22 minutes to make these links. Link to this post, and I will consider it 22 minutes well spent.
Technorati tags: multimedia | journalism | online journalism | online media | awards | examples
Teaching Examples 