Online Journalism

Remember, your final HTML packages are due by NOON on Monday. I will return your beta (draft) packages by Thursday night, which gives you three days to fix any errors I identify. Please talk with me in advance if you will have problems completing this deadline.

Be prepared for a short presentation – three to four minutes – on Monday, in which you:

• Describe the project and text story
• Show your multimedia project
• Describe challenges putting together the multimedia portion
• Talk about what needed improvement
• Explain what would you have liked to have done with more time/skills.

For your last blog post, I’d like you to use the following question as a jumping off point: After learning of opportunities and challenges of news on the Web, what aspect of digital journalism do you find most attractive? What parts of it do you dislike? How will trends we’ve discussed in class this semester affect your career plans?

Class, remember that your beta CSS packages are due next week before the start of class.  Zip the entire package up in a folder named “yourlastname” (insert your name, obviously), and email it to me.

Also, remember that we have a quiz on CSS/HTML next week.  Use the HTML/CSS guides linked at right to study.  Quiz is closed book, but if you’ve reviewed those it should be pretty easy.

Next week, we’ll be talking about digital innovators trying to define the future of news.  To prep for that discussion, you have two readings.  Well, one reading and one video to watch.  Both are linked at the top of the reading list at right.  The first is a video by Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism talking about the “future of news.”  It’s about 20 minutes. The second is a blog post by Clay Shirky examining how old business models for media are unsustainable in the Web era. Great read.

Keep the Shirky piece/Rosenstiel talk in mind as you write your blog posts this week.  I’d like you to find and write about an innovative project helping to redefine Web journalism in 2010.

This project need not be related to your news organization.  This can be a small project or a big project.  It can be an innovative application of technology to journalism by an organization or a startup.  It could be a revolutionary online business model (For example, Spot.Us, but don’t write about that site).

In your post, I’d like you to make at least one reference to a thought from Shirky or Rosenstiel.
Where do you find a project to write about?  They’re all over the Web, but I suggest you might look at Nieman Lab, Poynter’s eMedia Tidbits, or winners of the Knight News Challenge. Do some research on the project/idea you select, and answer these key questions:

• How is it innovative?
• How does it take advantage of opportunities offered by the Web?
• What need does it fill?
• Why do you think it will work?  Why won’t it work?

No readings this week.  For your blog entry, as we discussed, review your site’s use of interactive elements — searchable databases, interactive maps, polls and whatever else you can find.  What’s working well, what’s not?  What has particular journalistic value, and what seems like fluff?  And how successful are these elements at driving user engagement?

Remember to bring your multimedia files to class next week, and your package of HTML and CSS files that we worked on yesterday.  The next class will be a full lab period, after a short discussion of your blog posts.

Everyone please remember to bring your current resume to the next class. We’re going to use it to do some coding work.

Be sure to review the two HTMLDog tutorials linked at right (one on basic CSS, the other on basic HTML) in advance of next week. It will rehash some of the discussion today, and will provide a nice refresher before our next class. Each one has about seven short pages.

For your blog post this week, use your notes and the two design tip sheets linked at right (Smashing mag and UMD Newsline) and review your news organization’s Web design. Pay particular attention to how well they score on ideas of unity, simplicity, harmony, contrast and proximity. Provide screen shots to show examples of these techniques in action. What are they doing well? What are they doing wrong?

Two blog posts are due before our next class.  As we discussed, both are due Friday, March 19.

1.  Shoot, edit and post five photos to your blog.  The photos should be taken at some sort of newsy event or happening, though I’m very flexible on what event you choose to shoot.

You should shoot more than five photos (probably closer to 25) and select the best five.  Remember the elements of good news photos we discussed: rule of thirds, capturing a moment, emotion, perspective and graphics when shooting and editing the photos.

When editing, crop, resize and correct levels.

The Photoshop tutorial and the elements of good photography tutorial are linked at right if you need a refresher.

For each photo, include a brief paragraph that explains how it meets one or more of the elements of good news photography.

2.  Review your news organization’s use of Web video, paying particular attention to rule-breaking video.  Are they pushing the envelope or sticking to standard stuff?  Are they making use of user-contributed video?

Download from Flickr each of these photos for tonight’s Photoshop exercise.  Follow the link, right click the image, select “save as,” and save it to your desktop.

• Protest
• Rugby

A team playing rugby

Photo credit: U.S. Embassy New Zealand

For your blog post this week, please review your news organization’s forays into crowdsourced journalism.  Ideally, you’ll find a project similar to one of the crowdsourced projects we discussed in class this week.   Pay special attention to steps editors have taken to minimize some of the problems inherent in crowdsourced projects.

If you cannot find a true crowdsourced project, choose from one of these two options:

• Review how the site handles user-generated content of any sort — comments, for example.  Does it place a high priority on user-generated content?  What steps have they taken to deal with some of the problems inherent with user-generated content?
• Contact site editors to ask why they have not undertaken any crowdsourced projects.  The answers are likely to be revealing.   Work with your team members to set up interviews with editors.  All four team members need not attempt an interview with the same person.  Work together on questions beforehand. One or two of you can conduct the interview with one or two editors, and share the answers.

For reading this week, everyone should take the free, NewsU online course on photography.  For those of you who have not taken the slice multimedia class, please review the other readings linked at right.  Those of you who have taken that class (or are taking it now) will likely find some of it repetitive.

Class: good discussion about social networking for reporters this week.  Remember that by next Monday night I need three ideas, in budget line form, of possible story ideas for your multimedia project.

For your blog post this week, I want you to find a reporter for the organization you’re tracking and analyze how well they’re using Twitter for distribution and reporting, using the resources we discussed in class.  You should make a good faith effort to contact this person — ideally on Twitter — and discuss their use of social networking.  This means not waiting until Friday night.

Also, I want everyone to write a minimum of 10 tweets this week related to your news site.  Retweet stories of interest, tweet with people involved with the site, ask questions of your followers (probably a small pool at this point), and do some of the other things we talked about in class.

Readings for next week are at right, to set up our discussion next week of new models of Web journalism.  There’s one article from OJR that outlines crowdsourcing, and four Web sites or projects I’d like you to get familiar with.  Three are crowdsourced projects and the fourth, Spot.US, is a new Web-based funding model for investigative journalism.

Class: great discussion today about the demands of the online news cycle and social networking strategy.

To make up for lost snow time, there are five readings at right to prepare for class next week.  You only need to peruse the first one, the Mashable “Guide to Twitter.”  It’s a good resource if you’re totally new to the medium, and worth coming back to over the next few weeks.  The rest you should read pretty closely — they’re pretty short, and will prove especially valuable in setting up next week’s discussion.

As mentioned in class, you have two blog posts due by Friday.

The first should use John Cutter’s talk as a jumping off point.  Pick something he touched on — social networking for reporters and editors, SEO, the online news cycle flow, new media job skills, or something else — and write a post around it.   You could write about how it ties in with your future career plans, how his talk solidified or conflicted with your expectations of a modern news job, or something else entirely.  Totally up to you.

The second should build off of the group exercise reviewing your news organization’s Facebook strategy, both on the social networking site and integration with your organization’s own site.  Based on the general outlines I offered in class today, discuss what you think they do well, and what needs improvement.  Please continue the discussions with your classmates, but you should each write your own post.

A reminder: two comments on one of your classmates’ Facebook strategy posts are due by Sunday night.

Class: before next week, read the two articles linked in weekly readings at right: Andrew Sullivan’s excellent, passionate argument in favor of blogging, and this journalist’s guide to search engine optimization.

For the weekly blogging assignment, due by Friday night, I want you to review your news organization’s use of search engine optimization to make its content more visible.  In order to write your post you should:

• Review headlines, ledes and story tagging.
• Find an article or two and search Google News for related keywords to see how highly the site’s story ranks.
• And find two articles or blog posts with headlines that have poor SEO, link to them, and re-write the headlines.

Also, be sure to post two comments to a classmates’ blog by 7 p.m. Sunday night.