links for 2009-08-20
August 20, 2009 in industry news
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Sports leagues grapple with the people who care about their sports and the moneyed interests. good story.
You are browsing the archive for 2009 August.
New site hopes to connect student journalists around the world
August 20, 2009 in College Media, social media
Global Student Journalists is an ambitious, aptly-named new project by Anna Rodrigues, a journalism professor at Durham College in Canada.
Professor Rodrigues was kind enough to answer some questions about the site via e-mail.
The backstory:
About 18 months ago I began hearing from employers that they were looking for interns with skills in social media management. I didn’t think that Facebook or Ning would work in a classroom setting so I began thinking about a way I could teach online community management without using the social networks already out there.
Durham College has a department called the Innovation Centre and its job is to provide support to faculty through workshops and courses. This department also funds innovative classroom projects so I wrote a proposal and applied for funding to create an online social network from scratch in June 2008.
The funding was approved and an outside website developer was chosen to build the site in December 2008. The website finally went live last week.
The goals for the site:
-This network will be used in my classroom to teach about online community management. The work and comments that are uploaded have to be approved before being posted so my students will take turns moderating the site.
-I’m hoping students will be able to see the craft of journalism through the eyes of other student journalists from around the world.
-The Resources page will hopefully become a handy resource area for student journalists. I will be posting links to reputable journalism training on the web; stories of interest to student journalists, interviews with journalists etc
The global perspective is welcome, and hopefully Prof. Rodrigues will update us as the site grows. Check it out and register if you’re a student journalist. Since I’m not a student, I don’t have access, so maybe some student out there could share some of their experience with the back end of the site.
SEC media relations crawfishes the social media policy
August 18, 2009 in industry news
Buzz Manager Blog has an interview with the SEC Vice Commissioner of Media Relations about their social media policy as they crawfish on the social media policy. Charles Bloom admits that the policy was originally pretty broad, but meant to protect the “television and media partners” video rights.
I’ll have more to say when I have more power for my laptop, but I’d like to hear what you think.
New School Year: Changes coming to the Daily Eastern News
August 18, 2009 in management, Multimedia views
This week, student journalists at the Daily Eastern News at Eastern Illinois University will begin an experiment to reconfigure the newsroom to better deal with the online future of news.
It’s something I’ve talked about a lot here: getting the copy desk and editors to put stories online, freeing up the online staff to focus on web-only content. Getting print reporters to gather links and prepare their stories with the online component in mind. But the timing for a transition in the newsroom hasn’t been right, until this year.
The online staff, senior editors, and I will lead the entire staff through training in writing blogs, posting items to the dennews.com site, and thinking more about how to add depth to stories through multimedia.
Training sessions begin tomorrow and continue Thursday. We’ll see how things go in the coming weeks and months, but it’s an exciting transition.
I know several student papers have already made this transition. We tried to do this when I first arrived, but the staff wasn’t quite ready. There’s a saying about leading a horse to water that applies here. But the future won’t wait forever, and hopefully this is the time.
We’re still pushing along with College Publisher 4 for the time being, so it’s going to be a little bit more involved than I’d hope.
I’ll update as the semester goes along.
Now if I could only convince them to get rid of the “Daily” in the masthead.
SEC climbs down from teh stupid?
August 18, 2009 in social media, Twitter
Jack Lail points out that the SEC is “rethinking” their lame policy mentioned in this earlier post. Jack points to a bunch of the blowback the SEC has received from fans and Internet-savvy folks.
The SEC posted the following on their Twitter feed (ironic, isn’t it?):
To our Twitter fans, we have heard you. We’re working on clarifications to our policy and should have something done soon.
Just so we’re clear, this was the “draft” policy:
Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or
disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including,
but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio,
reproduction or other information concerning the Event … .”
The best “clarification” I can think of would be the following:
We sincerely apologize to our fans for not getting the fact that paying customers who help promote our events are in our best interests as an institution supposedly promoting scholar-athletes. This policy has been deleted.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, since Div. 1 football without a real national championship is pretty lame anyway, but the principle stands: fans pay to support your teams. they “disseminate” information about games because they care. Trying to police their ability to talk to their friends during a game, or save a video of their experience to the web, or twitter their experiences to their followers is just a lesson in wrong.
SEC goes with teh stupid: tells fans they can’t tweet
August 14, 2009 in Multimedia views, social media
Image via Wikipedia
I continue to think that there is only so much stupid that can be brought to bear in the world of big-time college athletics. Sadly, the SEC is the latest to disprove my theory. (props to Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu on Twitter, for the head’s up)
Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event … .”
The SEC is getting some blowback for their policy. Not from the media, but from fans. If I were a fan paying premium prices to watch the tenant-farm system that is big-time college athletics, I’d be miffed too.
Of course, this isn’t the first, nor will it be the last, episode in the continuing series of “college athletics attempts to deny reality.” The NCAA has propagated the stupid for a couple of years now related to journalists reporting from games.
Now that one of their own has turned their attention to the fans, will there be some sort of “grasp of the obvious” coming from the heads of various sports entities? I doubt it.
To be clear, we haven’t seen this kind of push back from the NCAA at EIU, since we’re not in the conference with the big time money deals with major networks. Thankfully, we can practice new media coverage so far.
But rather than just castigate the SEC for their stupidity and short-sightedness, here’s a proposition for how to make lemonade out of the new media lemons you think you’ve been given: create a place on your site, or the site of your corporate broadcast overlords, where fans can upload their videos, tweets, whatever, to add to the texture of the games. In other words – surf with the wave, not against it.
Why does this seem so hard for some to get?
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I don’t do facebook apps: a note to my “friends”
August 13, 2009 in blogging
This is just a note to let people know that I don’t “do” Facebook apps. No matter how cute or interesting the application, I will not use it. Every time someone invites me to play along with the application (zombies, superpokes, classmates, rate movies, etc.), I get this pop-up message:
Allowing (application) access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.
As if Facebook doesn’t have enough information, they want me to give my information to any third-party company that thinks up a great idea.
No thanks, Facebook.
So I’ll be your friend, but I’m not doing the app thing. Don’t take it personally.
Blogging update
August 12, 2009 in CICM shop talk
Just for the record, summer is almost over, and I’m getting back into the blogging groove. I took a little break from the “death of media” circus. Expect more bloggy goodness in the coming days.
Mediashift post: colleges without an online news presence
August 11, 2009 in College Media
My latest post at PBS’ Mediashift is up here. Please visit and comment if you feel like it.
links for 2009-08-11
August 11, 2009 in industry news
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"Here are five possible applications for mind mapping tools in the newsroom. After a brief introduction to each, I'll talk about some useful online resources for learning more about mind mapping." – I don't know enough about mind-mapping, but it seems like a useful tool to have the box.
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Mindy McAdams sums up how to know if your brand is built.
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"The experience has made me realize something I should have done when I was an editor/publisher. I should have gone cold turkey on the print edition of my own and other newspapers for two weeks or a month and determined what life was like for those who were living solely in a digital world." – This would be a good exercise for college editors too.
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"In the research, MTV tested three types of online video ads and benchmarked their performance against a 30-second pre-roll. The 5-second pre-roll with the lower third came up the winner, even beating out more novel and unusual ad formats, Witt said."