Digital Newsroom

For Feb. 29, please submit a 150-200 500 word story, news item or blog posting to the Boulder edition of YourHub.com. Registration is required. We will review the Your Hub postings. Feel free to replicate/use one of your two weekly posts to your blogger.com blog, however you must also post to your blog about your experience with YourHub.

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Michael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State, explains HTML, XML, RSS and the evolution of Web 2.0

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Web 2.0: Citizen journalism or field day for hacks?

Good audio slide shows tell a story. Audio helps set the mood, and background sound and narrative add a web-friendly dimension.

This Denver Post slide show on the Stock Show gave Kathryn Osler a venue to show more than the single image that appeared in print. The slide show was built in SoundSlides.

For Feb. 22, please complete a slide show (in the SlideShowPro Director Demo gallery or within your own gallery) consisting of 14-18 photos complete with cutlines. Audio is optional, but you can use something as simple as as royalty-free music. Go ahead and delete your sample and test albums in the SlideShowPro Director dashboard. Instructions for using SSP Director are here.

For Feb. 29, please submit a 150-200 500 word story, news item or blog posting to the Boulder edition of YourHub.com. Registration is required. We will review the Your Hub postings. Feel free to replicate/use one of your two weekly posts to your blogger.com blog, however you must also post to your blog about your experience with YourHub.

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SlideShowPro and SoundSlides are Flash-based slideshow builders. SlideShowPro requires Macromedia Flash, and works with Macs. SoundSlides is a standalone program (works wthout the Flash program), and is PC and Mac compatible.

The web-friendly interface for SlideShowPro is SlideShowPro Director, and is what you used in class. It works via a web browser on Macs and PCs.

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The embed code for your DigitalNewsroom.net gallery may require some tweaking to post on Blogger.com. Remember that every tag needs an opening and a closing (except for breaks and paragraphs). Some platforms (like WordPress) are very forgiving when it comes to HTML errors. Blogger.com is strict, so that means you’ll have to pay attention to the embed tags.

A great slide show with audio titled “Venus Rising” was produced by the New York Times about seven years ago using iMovie. This week we’ll build a simple slide show using SlideShowPro Director. (iMovie comes free with Macs. I’m not aware of an iMovie equivalent for PC’s. Let me know if you find one.)

And speaking of audio, we’ll discuss copyright laws relating to use of music in slide shows.

Also, please sign up for an account at YourHub. You will be posting a short news item on that site for the Citizen Journalism assignment.

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Most blog interfaces, including blogger.com, will transform photos during upload for web presentation. As shown in class, the important elements for using Photoshop to manually transform a photo include:

• checking Image–>Mode to make sure the image is RGB
• using Image–>Adjustments–>Brightness/Contrast if needed
• using Image–>Image Size to set the resolution to 72 pixels/inch.
• using Image–>Image Size to adjust height and width. Remember that an image can be sized smaller in a web page, but not larger.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, daily circulation peaked in 1984 and has fallen 13 percent (to 55 million copies) by 2003. Adjusted for inflation, advertising revenue stayed flat during the same period. This Pew Research Center study shows that even as print circulation declines, newspapers are least stemming the tide by grabbing a share of online news readership.

However, the study says that:

— the web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail.

— of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.

So how is the newspaper business model changing? And what about the future of journalism?

For a PBS Frontline piece, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks in a video about Google’s place in the new media landscape and Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com talks about the future of journalism.

And check Epic2015, a vision of the Internet in 2015 that includes the information monopoly “Googlezon.”

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Blog guidelines:

• your posts should pertain to journalism — ethics, technology, changing readership attitudes or trends, investigative reporting, or a topic of your choice.
• include lots of links to other stories or blogs, but also provide some analysis of what you’ve discovered in researching your topic.
• keep post and paragraphs in the post short; extra return makes blog easier to read.
• if commenting on your workplace, be very, very careful. Nuff said.
• do not use hotlinks to photographs (unless a fair use circumstance).
• use AP style (nine vs. 9).

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When does a blog become traditional media?

at www.digitalnewsroom.net. There’s lots more to come!

To save page loading time, video embeds examples moved to here.

Covering crime means two things: 1) Dead people and 2) grieving families. The National Victim Center endorses these guidelines for journalists:

• Advise victims that they can be interviewed “on the record’ or “off the record,” and that they don’t have to be interviewed at all.
• Avoid photographing crime scene details such as remains or removal of bodies.
• Don’t photograph crime victims in court or graphic crime scenes without permission.
• Don’t print information about the crime that may embarass or humiliate a victim.
• Don’t promote sensationalism in reporting crime.

Approaching crime victims; identifying rape victims; naming the accuser and the accused.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) have made your job as a reporter more difficult. Concerns for privacy have gained momentum due to fears of terrorism and increasing instances of indentity theft. We’ll discuss in class several scenarios where ethics, victims’ rights and strict interpretation of HIPPA and FERPA must be considered.

Links relating to covering higher ed on the Auraria campus include a redefinition of the size of the campus (by the campus police), Metro’s budget data book and two adgenda items from the Board of Trustees. Item 1 covers the institution’s demographics; item 2 is a snapshot of the budget.  (Scroll to the bottom for both.)

Covering a community beat means paying attention to the offbeat news sources such as community bulletin boards, church bulletins and nonprofit web pages. Community organizations and neighborhood bloggers may have an RSS feed as part of their Web site. Originally an acronym for “Rich Site Summary,” the term RSS is defined today as “Really Simple Syndication.”

You can grab RSS feeds and re-post them on your own web page or blog. I’ll walk you thru the steps.

• Grab a Denver Post RSS feed.
• Paste the link into Feed2Javascript.
  
• Take the Feed2Javascript output and paste it into your blog.

Other online resources for community news include craigslist.org and googlegroups.