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

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

As explained in class, audio for the web (and podcasting) has several styles. Audio can be as simple as narrating the news, providing color to an opinion piece, or a full-blown news or feature story with background sound and soundtracks.

For next class. prepare a two-minute audio segment and link to it from you blog. You can use Audacity and FTP to your digitalnewsroom.net account, or sign up at ClickCaster and record and post an audio piece via the web.

Your audio should be something other than just reading a news story. You can re-purpose one of your previous blog posts, and simply narrate the post. Or you can record and edit some new material into an NPR-like report.

Minumum expectation is two minutes of audio, single track (meaning that it doesn’t need to have multiple tracks with audio and natural sound) & linked to from your blog (same process as if you were linking to an html documment or web site).

This week’s assignment is to construct a simple nested table (a table inside a table) on your blog page. Incorporate an image and at least two lines of text. Hint: put a complete table inside a <td> (table data) tag.

It’s important to know how tables function because a lot of web pages rely on tables and div tags (a Cascading Style Sheet term, which we’ll go over Friday). Multimedia skills also require knowing how to properly place audio and video elements, troubleshoot problems, and modify code (HTML) to get things to work.

A helpful tool in table construction is to turn on the border in the initial table tag. In this case, the border is 1 pixel (border=”1″). Other table tags can be found here and a tutorial on tables can be found at w3schools.

<table width=”600″ border=”1″ >
<tr><td width=100%” colspan=”2″ >
<h1> Table division one spans two columns (divisions) </h1> </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td width=”50%”>
Table division two</td>
<td width=”50%” rowspan=”2″ background=”#CCCCCC”>
Table division three spans two rows </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td width=”50%”>
Table division four </td>
</tr>
</table>

Denver Post blogger Al Lewis has 114 comments on this blog posting about the idea of airlines charging overweight people for two seats. Should comments be moderated?

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.

Knowing the rules, including how a meeting is run, who (really) runs the meetings, and what rights you have in reporting a meeting. These three sources are worth review:

• Roberts Rules of Order
• Colorado’s sunshine law
• Ottowa: Public servant vs. city staff definitions
• Colorado Revised Statutes

Obviously, the Ottowa example is specific to that community. Smaller communities in Colorado are governed by Colorado Statutes. Incorporated (home rule) cities have their own statutes, which must conform with state law.

Compare these three sources of information:

• A newsletter produced by a local couple.
• The city’s web site.
• The local community newspaper.

Explaining polls, PollingReport.com, DenverPost.com sports poll

A typical budget (PDF), ways to report it, and following the money.

Questions to ask politicians and politicians who won’t answer.

For Metro State students

Groups will research a topic related to the Auraria campus, or Metro State, and post the resulting article as a topic at wikipedia.org. The article needs to be 400-600 words, and must have two subtopic links of at least 300 words each.

Your topic and subtopics should have 8-10 links each to other Wiki topics or to outside web sites.

You must take extra care in researching and writing this assignment. Secondary sources need to be included at the bottom of the Wiki post. Grammar and style must be perfect. Include information from primary sources (interviews), but do not quote primary sources in the post. Submit a list of the sources to me at the time of the group presentation in class on March 8.

Post a link to your group’s topic in the Links section of your individual blog prior to class on March 8.

Your group presentation needs to be 20-25 minutes and should include a visual element, such as a PowerPoint presentation.

Please e-mail me if you have questions.