Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World
Evan Ratliff, June 26, Wired magazine
Since Google relaunched the software in June 2005, the stand-alone Google Earth program has been downloaded more than 250 million times. The program’s seamless zoom-in feature has become ubiquitous on television news shows. And there are dedicated sites — such as Google Sightseeing and Virtual Globetrotting — built for scouring and saving odd and interesting finds from not only Google Earth but also competing 3-D globes like NASA’s World Wind and Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. Scientists, students, and government agencies use Google Earth layers to display their data to the public … (via Journerdism)
Quest for Maps, in which intrepid multimedia reporter Ron Sylvester relates his newsrooms forays into use of maps.
‘Get to a Newspaper,’ at Gangrey.com:
Dicker: “… You can take a look at these newspapers blogs. The bloggers seem to me, Pete, to be basically opinionated stenographers, writing basically for shut-ins. I can’t imagine who would spend their time reading these things except a very rarefied, small group of people.”
Hamill: “I don’t read them, because life is too short. But I advise the young journalist, don’t waste your talent on blogs. Get to a newspaper, no matter how small, where there’s an editor who will look at your copy and say this will be better if you do this. Go somewhere where you learn the craft. Most blogs are therapy. But they’re not journalism. People who write them, except for the professional propaganda blogs, are there for therapy.
“Writing for shut-ins”? Wow, where does that come from? So the 80-year-olds reading the printed newspaper — they are the vibrant lifeblood of society? And all you blog readers out there — you’re a bunch of lumps on a log, do-nothings, hardly worth consideration.
Just last week, I was e-mailing some student I’ve never met and telling him to start a blog rather than waste his time trying to sell his travelogues to established online media. It would be great to have the tutelage of a good editor, no doubt about it. But I have to wonder what your chances are, nowadays, of getting a good editor at a newspaper. Maybe there is a good editor, but will he or she have any time to work with you?
Plus, one really great list of resources and sites (from Mashable.com): Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources — I love/hate lists like this, because it will take me some time to explore all the leads! Lots of stuff here I haven’t seen before.
Technorati tags: maps | online journalism | online media | video | blogging | blog
Filed under: Flash, graphics, interactive, journalism, photojournalism, tools
It takes me eight weeks to teach Flash to undergraduate journalism students. That’s starting from zero. If they do all the homework and study all the examples, they can be very good at the end of eight weeks. Mostly it takes time and dedication, rather than any special talent or computer aptitude.
When I do training for professional journalists, I don’t have eight weeks. So I always face this dilemma: Do I begin at zero, and just get them started? Or do I begin at a later point, assuming they already know certain things? (Usually I have only three to four hours in a training session!)
The trouble with running a beginner session: At the end, the attendees still can’t really make anything on their own. The trouble with running an intermediate session: Too many people in the room don’t yet understand some of the key techniques.
Yesterday I did half a day of Flash training at a newspaper, and I developed a new teaching tool for the occasion. It’s called Simple Flash Project: Single SWF and the point is for you, the student, to download the FLA and use it as a learning tool. (Go ahead, look at the SWF and then download the FLA.)
I deliberately built the SWF to leave out everything that I consider “post-beginner” in Flash authoring. So it includes NO MOVIE CLIPS. No scenes. No externally loaded assets of any kind. It also includes nothing that was drawn — the graphics are all photos.
There are three separate segments, as any news graphic might have. The SWF is only 73 KB. The entire Timeline is 80 frames long.
There are three different animations, using photographs.
Most important, there are buttons and frame labels. You’ve got to have those if you are going to create separate parts in the package. People often ask me, “How to you make it skip from one section to another?” Buttons and frame labels. That’s how.
Here’s a list of beginner Flash journalism skills. These are the skills you have to nail down before you can build a journalism package.
- Simple animation, both tweened and frame-by-frame (Graphic symbols)
- Importing photos and other bitmaps
- Use of layers
- Use of keyframes
- Buttons — both making them and scripting them (Button symbols)
- Use of frame labels
- ActionScript: stop();
- ActionScript: gotoAndPlay(“framelabel”);
Now, I will be the very first to admit that not everyone in the newsroom needs to learn Flash. But somebody in your newsroom should learn it! Ideally, I would say that all your news graphic artists should know everything listed above. Then, also ideally, there should be one person — artist, photojournalist, online producer — who goes beyond the list and learns how to develop more sophisticated interactive graphics.
Technorati tags: Flash | Flash journalism | online journalism | online media | design | infographics | information graphics | training
I have been working for some time on ways to teach people how to manage bigger Flash projects. This is one of those cases where I’m finding it hard to figure out how to teach something I know how to do, because (a) the process is so holistic; and (b) every project is different.
So I wrote a document and posted it as a PDF:
Managing Large Story Packages in Flash (PDF file, 410 KB, illustrated, 6 pages)
It’s not hard to read, and there’s no code in it. What I need your help on: Is this what you need to know, when you’re at that stage of knowing enough Flash to build a little thing, but not sure where to go next? Am I on the right track to help you get to that next level?
E-mail or comments — either way, I’ll be grateful.
Technorati tags: Flash | Flash journalism | video | online journalism | online media | design | infographics | information graphics | training
Danny Sanchez has the news and relevant links at his blog. Or go straight to the shiny new home page.
I don’t know about you, but the new design doesn’t rock my boat. And I really don’t like the tabs.
Update: The midday video update is pretty good, but it seems kind of strange to have it halfway down the page, BELOW all the stories it covers. I like this kind of video update a whole lot more than the overproduced ones from Roanoke and Naples … probably a lot of people feel just the opposite, but this one I didn’t mind watching.
Technorati tags: design | online journalism | online media | newspapers | journalism
I’m going to keep my eye on Thoof, an upcoming news aggregation site, now in beta. It might end up getting taken over by technology wonks (like Digg) or being gamed (also like Digg) — but if not, it could be really useful.
Thoof’s founder, Ian Clarke, is:
obsessed with the fact that even when accurate information exists on the Internet, it often does not have the political impact that it should.
“I’m concerned that most Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “All of the information is there, but people are still ill-informed.”
He believes Thoof will provide a way to make sure accurate information can spread, and that he can profit in the process.
That’s from John Markoff, writing in The New York Times on June 18.
This is an interesting twist:
Based on data from comScore, which measures Web traffic, Mr. Clarke estimates that about 1.3 billion pages are viewed daily on news and information sites, generating advertising of roughly $51 million a day. But sites based on user submissions account for only about half of 1 percent of all news viewing on the Web, he said.
Thoof is negotiating with an advertising syndicator to put ads on the site based on demographic and behavioral data that the Thoof system will provide about its users.
Technorati tags: news | journalism | social networks | crowdsourcing
Mark Bowden relates how an enterprising online producer at the Philadelphia Inquirer transformed his 29-part series (!) “Black Hawk Down” into a Web site — in 1997. Early days indeed. It’s a fascinating site to look at today — imagine how much work went into this package. Tons of audio, lots of great contextual links …
In the case of Black Hawk Down, apart from all the multimedia razzle-dazzle, it opened up a global dialogue with readers, including men who had fought in the battle. They corrected my mistakes, pointed me to better information, and offered to be interviewed, allowing me to improve greatly on the story before it was published as a book in 1999. Mine may have been, thanks to Jennifer [Musser-Metz], the first book that ever benefited from this new journalistic tool. In a sense, the story was edited by the entire world.
But little has happened in the 10 years since. Surprisingly, the site Jennifer created is still in the vanguard of Internet story presentation.
Bowden provides nice commentary on where we’re headed — especially considering he is a self-proclaimed “old fuddy-duddy” who still wants to pick up his newspaper in the driveway every morning.
Technorati tags: online journalism | online media | design | journalism
Chuck Fadely, who shoots video for the Miami Herald, posted a long rant about boneheaded attitudes toward video:
The internet audience is growing and you want your staff — from the janitor all the way up to the M.E. — to contribute to the web product. Video! Let’s do lots of video! There was some guy at the publisher’s association meeting who said all you need is a point-n-shoot; let’s get ’em for everyone. How ’bout the photogs? Nahhh, they care about silly quality…. we won’t ask them about doing video… We’ll get the web people and reporters to do video.
So the reporters start doing video. All of a sudden the story they used to be able to write blindfolded, in five minutes while doing the office football pool, takes ’em six hours of work to get the video into their computers, figure out why Movie Maker keeps crashing — I’ve got 128 megs of ram, fer krissake! — and finally re-compress the file into the right size on the third try.
Now, to be fair about this, Chuck is a newspaper photographer. And he’s got a lot of experience, so you ought to listen to what he says. But he’s also lumping all those reporters who shoot video into one mushy basket. And that’s NOT fair.
The truth here is that video has a heck of a lot of facets. It’s like TV — you gotcher Planet Earth (pure awesomeness) on one channel, and on another channel, you have Cops, from that bastion of quality journalism, Fox.
Newspaper publishers, editors and owners who think video online has one easy solution are totally kidding themselves. Wishful thinking — that’s all it is. And simplistic. Fatally simplistic.
It’s exactly the same mistake so many newspapers made on the Internet when they started out, whether that was in 1993 or 2003. Looking for a cheap fix, a turnkey solution, listening to some consultant who’s just blowing smoke out of a place far south of his mouth.
Link via Angela Grant at News Videographer.
Technorati tags: video | storytelling | reporting | newspapers | journalism | online journalism | online media
Overall top-scoring schools in the 2006-2007 Hearst Journalism Awards Program — the Pulitzers of college journalism:
- Arizona State University
- University of Missouri
- University of Florida
- Western Kentucky University
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- University of Montana
- Syracuse University
- University of Kansas
Arizona State! I’m disappointed that the Gators are No. 3, but I’m very proud of my colleagues down in Tempe!
Technorati tags: journalism | education
After I had viewed this multimedia package (which was reported, shot, designed and programmed by Jerry Wolford, staff photographer for 20 years), I had to ask Jerry some questions about how he managed to get it done.
If you look at a lot of the journalism multimedia out there, such as the excellent St. Louis Blues package I linked yesterday, you’ll see a long list of names in the credits. This makes perfect sense, because these packages take time to produce, and usually a broad range of skill sets is required. But Jerry produced this package as a solo effort, working closely with one editor and pretty much no one else except a copy editor (always a good move).
Jerry works for the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, which laid off 41 people last week (in news: 11 full-time, six part-time), with declining ad revenues as the reason given.
What goes into it
“I spent at least 60 hours programming, but I was learning,” Jerry wrote in e-mail. It wouldn’t take as long if he did it again, he noted. “I am really a hack programmer. Not a scratch of training. I am pretty slow at this. Stubborn enough to not give up, I guess.”
He estimated he put about 20 hours into the video. “Again, I was learning. I did more hours than I want to admit on my own time.” It would have gone a lot faster if he wasn’t running Final Cut Pro on a three-year-old Apple PowerBook.
Jerry’s description of how he got the work done echoes the stories I hear from a lot of the new multimedia journalists.
“I was given time on this, in part, as a training exercise,” he wrote. Greensboro’s director of photography, Rob Brown, supports “where my paper and the industry need to go with video and multimedia”; Jerry said Brown protected him from getting too many “print side” assignments while he was producing this project.
While editing, he worked with a Life section editor, Mike Kernels. “He was a natural,” Jerry said. “I tapped him for the job because he is so rounded and easy to work with. I knew I would need an editor’s help navigating the minefield of working on a Klan documentary. He had many good ideas, did storyboarding. Very unlike me to do that. He … helped shape the intro clip, pull the best quotes and heads. I sort of work solo and in a vacuum, so having a partner to give feedback was good…. We will work together again.”
That was my favorite thing in all that Jerry told me — the idea of the print editor working side-by-side with the photographer – turned – multimedia – journalist. That’s where we are headed, where we need to go. I don’t mean it always has to be a photographer, but rather that we need to get this kind of collaboration working for our newsrooms.
How he did the interviews
With minor edits, this is what Jerry wrote:
I interviewed the Klan guy once before. I knew the whole story and ended up not using any of it in the end. I did use some outdoor footage and the “tight” thumbnail videos from the first shoot.
I interviewed the FBI guy and then knew how to really get under the skin of the Klansman. The second interview with the Klan guy was the charm.
I spent about an hour on each interview. 15 minutes or more setting up. I use a Sony HDR-SR1 camera set to record at 720 x 404 pixels with MPEG2 files. [The HDR-SR1 saves directly to a hard disk. Video later sampled down to 480 x 269 for online.] Hoping for a real camera soon. Sennheiser G2 wireless lapel for audio.
I asked all the questions and shaped the interview. I had a reporter with me at the FBI interview. A couple of his questions may have made it into my piece. I am very controlling at that phase. You can’t do a traditional Q&A. In general, reporters don’t get how this has to be done. I basically have a subject refine their response to my questions. Most things are just live, but I ask them to insert names and dates, etc., when they talk about things. I ask them to go over things once, twice, or more to get them to clarify and condense. I let them tell their story, but I ask them to help shorten, or lengthen with details.
I thought the lighting was really good, so I asked Jerry about that too. I have no clue what most of this means:
The lighting set-up may be a little funny to some. I used a big photo soft box with a handful of those new compact fluorescent light bulbs. They are very bright and do not get hot. I have one with a “grid” and reflector rigged for feathered lighting that I use for a hair light. I bought the bulbs at the local hardware store for $60 — 90-watt bulbs with output at 5500K (color). I use the little cheap clamps. I can stick a strobe in there with them and shoot stills if needed. I actually did that. Not very elegant, but until I can figure out what I really want buy … I like those new LED light panels, but this is pretty easy and very flexible.
A good reporter should never repeat jargon, but I know all you PJs reading this will eat it up (smile).
How the newspaper played it
The package was part of a Sunday centerpiece with a print promo to the Web feature. The project went online Sunday, with a promo image on the front that ran until Tuesday. Then the package went to the second slot on the home page, with only a text link.
Reaction from the public? None, really, “and not really big numbers,” Jerry wrote in e-mail. But he says management at his newspaper has noticed that good online work has legs. Projects such as Jerry’s Deeds of Discrimination from a year ago still get hits every day.
Critique of content, functionality
I wouldn’t call The Dragon and the G-Man a perfect package — my biggest complaint was that you were forced to sit through a very long video before you got to choose anything for yourself. It bothered me the first time I opened it, but on second and subsequent visits, it was maddening! Multimedia packages need to be designed for repeated viewings. They need to have a nonlinear structure so that people can skip around inside. (Jerry has since fixed this, adding a Skip Intro button. Whew.)
I give Jerry a heap of credit for making the package look awesomely good. He’s clearly one of those people who loves to tweak images in Photoshop (e.g., for photo illustrations, not dishonestly), and the results are beautiful. Jerry made all the cutouts and composite images. He wrote: “The gun pic had the mug shot dropped in. I added borders and cropped the historic images. The Klan and torches [image] was a file photo. I shot the other stuff. Clips were from our archives.”
Jerry also deserves a standing ovation for making all the video and the photo zooms work so smoothly. The functionality really stands out in this package, and that’s not an easy thing to get right.
I found the story very interesting. I liked the video interviews with both men. I loved the way the interviews were intercut. Don’t underestimate the quality of the on-camera interviews. They really are exceptional. You won’t see anything better on 60 Minutes or Frontline, in my opinion.
But I really, really yearned for shorter segments and more helpful text cues. The interviews are so good, I don’t blame Jerry at all for slicing them up and offering so much video. But I need more information before I click on the individual segments.
This is something I see in lots of online journalism. Packages are constructed as if the producer thinks people will just click everything, or maybe, will be content to click randomly. Well, journalism is not YouTube. I need a hint or a hook or a tease that’s informative enough — provocative enough — to make me think, yeah, I want to know more about that. Or, hey, what is the answer to that question?
I’m not ragging on this package, though. Take some time with it, and you’ll see why I feel so much admiration for it. Sure, it could be improved. But that’s for the next one. Well done, Jerry.
Technorati tags: Flash | Flash journalism | video | online journalism | online media | design | examples
Teaching Examples 