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iPhone 4 HD video short

June 28, 2010 in industry news, video

“Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

via localnewser, a short HD video produced entirely with the iPhone 4. I’ve spoken to a couple of photographers who have used the new iPhone, and they say the video quality is incredible. Localnewser comments:

Check out the film. And think about the inevitability of one man bands working with small devices that capture HD video, sound, and can edit…and transmit the final product. And with Face Time, you can even go live and pitch to the package you fed in. Brand new world, folks.

I wouldn’t call this a “brand new world.” Many people have been live broadcasting using small cameras connected to laptops and wifi cards (or cell network cards) for a while now. The fact that it’s in a smaller package does make the iPhone a good tool for a new media journalist. The lock-in to AT&T’s network is major suckage, though.

I suspect other cell phone producers will up their phone video capabilities in the near future, however, meaning those who don’t have good AT&T coverage in their area will be able to do similar things with smartphones.

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CMA announces acquisition of CICM

June 28, 2010 in CICM shop talk

CICM front page

The first "home page" for the CICM.

College Media Advisers, Inc. President Sally Renauld (my colleague at Eastern Illinois U.) has announced that CMA has acquired the Center for Innovation in College Media. Read below the fold for the full press release from College Media Advisers, Inc.

Read the rest of this entry →

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The times are changing: A student’s first year conclusions

June 17, 2010 in industry news

When I first decided to become a journalist, I thought it would be a great way to be a writer and make money at it. I’m sure that half a century ago that would have been true. Now, being a journalist requires more than a savvy way with words; now we must diversify.

When I was younger, I often wondered why medical doctors’ yearly salary was so high, and they had to go to school so long. I later learned that besides the wide variety of skills they must learn in their long schooling, they must also keep learning. Half of a medical doctor’s time is researching in the field and understanding new developments in the industry.

In my first year in my college’s convergent media program and during my time in this internship I discovered that my education will not end when Missouri Western hands me that diploma. Well, if I want to be a successful journalist it won’t. In an ever-changing field, with multiple ever-changing fields impacting my industry (new Internet browsers, advancing cameras, new coding languages, and new mobile and wireless devices) I must stay as informed as a medical doctor on these changes.

The other part of working in an ever-changing field is applying those changes. It’s not enough for a medical doctor to understand new technologies, he must be able to cure his patients with them. Since every publication operates differently, it’s interesting how a weekly web site should operate compared to a daily or even a monthly magazine. At The Griffon News, we still haven’t decided whether we should upload out print content all at once or slowly over the week.

In the past two decades, being a journalist became more difficult and presented a new challenge across the board for staff writers of publications and editors, but it’s always good to be in something from the ground up. Even as journalism turns a new leaf, I’m excited for the path it appears to be taking. Even trying to stay educated on new advancements in the field is a challenge I am eager to meet.

Right now the general public identifies journalists with writers, but journalists must be much more than that. While writing is still one of their skills, the skill set required is diversifying and changing. The more you can do, the better journalists you can be, but quality is still preferred over quantity of skills. Here is what I have learned; educate, diversify, specialize, and apply.

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New hosting options for college media

June 17, 2010 in Media Companies - College Related, Tech Talk, Websites

Way back in the dark ages of college online media (2006), I wrote a post outlining options for college news media to host their online presence. At that time, the options were very limited. There was College Publisher or some sort of host-your-own CMS set-up, the main variable being where the site was hosted: on-campus, on your servers, or on an off-campus hosting solution.

I won’t rehash what I wrote in that post, since most of it still applies, but I will point to four commercial options available to student media in the wake of the closing of CoPress last semester. These are companies that are aiming specifically at the college media market, not a standard commercial web hosting service.

Also, this post deals strictly with the hosting/server end of the web site equation. I am making no judgment as to the relative merits of various content management systems. Perhaps I’ll write more about that later.

I should also mention that the Daily Eastern News is in the process of updating our web site design, so I’ve been examining these options over the past couple of months.

collegepublisher College Publisher: College Publisher is the CMS/hosting system run by College Media Network, a division of MTV, which is owned by Viacom. It is the oldest, and by far the largest, player in the college media web hosting universe. College Publisher is on version 5, which is based on a CMS created by Polopoly (now a division of Atex). Unlike the other options listed here, CP is a “turnkey” solution. Student media sites are hosted on College Media Network servers, and technical support is provided by CMN. In exchange for hosting the site, CMN sells advertising in the top ad positions on each student media site. Student media outlets are able to sell other advertising spots as they are able.

New Options

amm-logo-masthead • Alloy Media + Marketing: Alloy is an advertising and marketing company that aims at the college market, and they are providing a hosting solution similar to what CoPress provided. The set-up is much like what you would find on any commercial hosting service, except they hope to offer some added benefits to college media in the future (like an ad network, for instance), and they will be offering more focused support for the service. The basic cost is $250/mo. plus a set-up fee. They are currently supporting WordPress installs. Here’s a PDF that explains some of the technical details. The Cal Poly Mustang Daily is one of their clients, switching from CoPress.

townnews • TownNews.com: TownNews.com is the content management system company that runs the online sites for newspapers in the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain (the Decatur Herald-Review in Illinois is one such newspaper). The company’s CMS is named Blox. It’s built on PHP, and hosted on the TownNews.com servers. It’s a drag-and-drop system that has some pretty sturdy features. However, you are limited in the number of design choices you can make to their templates at the moment. The Iowa State Daily and the Independent Florida Alligator both run on a TownNews.com system. The company is currently looking to expand into the college market, and I would encourage you to discuss the price with them. Like Alloy, they charge a one-time set-up fee and then a per-month fee. Paul Wilson was the salesperson who I spoke with about the system. If you’re interested, you may contact him at pwilson -at- townnews.com

dsw_logo• Detroit SoftWorks: Detroit SoftWorks has a CMS, Gryphon, that was originally created for the State News at Michigan State University. The company also integrates a web ad management system, a photo sales system, and a new housing guide system into a total online package. Costs of the DS system are: $250/mo. for weeklies (up to three publications per week); $375/mo. for dailies. Set-up charge is $1,500 for a basic set-up, with a $2,000 charge for data migration (which means someone switching from College Publisher would have to cough up $3,500 in start-up fees). Clients include The Grand Valley Lanthorn, the New Mexico Daily Lobo, and the Eastern Echo at Eastern Michigan University, among others.

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Site matters: new plug-ins added

June 16, 2010 in CICM shop talk, Twitter, Wordpress

I’ve added three new plug-ins to the site based on some browsing through the CoPress WordPress plug-in wiki page recommendations. I hope these plug-ins will add to the usability of the site. Please leave a comment or send me some feedback if you like or dislike them.

Expanding Text: This is a plug-in that uses Javascript to hide certain content on the front page, and allow you to click and show the content if you want to read the full content of the post. The key here is that the plug-in expands the post on the front page, so the browser doesn’t have to load a whole new page with the full text of the post.

Print Friendly: This plug-in allows you to reformat the text in a format that doesn’t waste paper when you want to print out a blog post for future reference or handouts or whatever. Often, when I print out a blog post on someone’s blog, the header, footer and sidebars get printed as well as the actual content. This wastes paper with stuff you don’t need or want in the printed version. The button is at the bottom of the post.

Twitter Tools: I’m trying this one out to see how it works. This is supposed to integrate Twitter into your admin area of a WordPress site, so Twitter will be updated when you publish new content. It also shortens URLs using bit.ly, adds hashtags, and excludes categories.

Finally, just a reminder: At the bottom of each post is this button:

badge

This button allows you to suggest edits, grammar and spelling corrections to the post author using Editz (formerly known as GooseGrade). Feel free to use it if I make a mistake. I will regret the error. :)

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A curated baker’s dozen: links for 6-16-10

June 16, 2010 in industry news

linksMore links to interesting articles around the web. I’m categorizing these based on general topics, and starting with some personal productivity reads.

Productivity

• 21 Time Management Tips for Bloggers: There are some very wise words of advice in this list from blogger David Risley. And while his advice is aimed at bloggers, I’d say they apply to anyone who works in an office. Naturally, I haven’t been following all of these tips (Don’t check e-mail first thing in the morning, for instance), but I plan to try them out.

• Make Each Day Your Masterpiece: Trent Hamm writes a blog called The Simple Dollar, which focuses on managing personal finance. There’s a wealth of information in there about money matters, but this particular post is about former UCLA men’s basketball coach John Wooden, who died June 4, 2101. He was 99 years old. Hamm uses Wooden’s words to inspire us to “seize the day.”

Today is really the only day that matters. You can’t make your past self do anything. You can’t make your future self do anything, either. Your only freedom of choice is right now, and thus today is your one chance to paint your masterpiece.

• Don’t pull all nighters, says 37signals founder: Lauren Rabaino (awesome former CICM intern) recounts her personal experience as an overworked, underslept college student. I can attest to the drain that a lack of sleep can have on both physical health and mental acuity. And squeezing more hours out of the day doesn’t mean you’re more productive. Recently, I’ve been trying to make a point to get more sleep. Read the post and some of the reasons why sleep is important for productivity.

• Don’t Write That e-Book!: Georgina Laidlaw at WebWorkerDaily explains why it might not be the best thing to follow an online trend just because everyone else is doing it. Some good tips on developing your own path to success in the online world.

Journalism Related

• Journalist’s Resource: The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy put together this web site.

Journalist’s Resource is designed to promote knowledge-based reporting. The site provides access to scholarly reports and papers on a wide range of topics. Journalist’s Resource provides the user with a brief Overview of each study, Teaching Notes and links to other relevant material.

The site includes information about public policy, journalistic ethics, interviewing, style and ethics, and an instructor’s guide. Be sure to check out the section on math for journalists. That said, I’m curious as to why they didn’t create this site as a wiki instead of a WordPress site.

• News and media on the iPad: A mixed bad so far: Mark Briggs scans the horizon to see how the iPad is being used to consume news.

A paid app might offer an incremental revenue stream, but advertising is going to have to carry the water (again). The Craigslist iPad app (which costs 99 cents) has moved into the top spot among paid apps, so the desire to connect with local content – and a local marketplace – is apparent. The opportunity to create something of value, something people will use, without recreating the newspaper or TV news show experience on the platform will determine whether local media can seize this opportunity. Or fall behind and hope to play catch-up as we have done with the web for 15 years.

• iPad for Journalists: Not on the Wires (a blog by a group of multimedia reporters in the UK) posts a video blog with five iPad apps that show how the platform can be used by journalists. (via)

• Bad pageview practices: Marco Arment highlights a quote from Richard Dunlop-Walters about the sorry state of site design that cheats for pageviews. To wit:

Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you.

Be sure and read the rest of the quote, which contains some salty language. (via)

• Gannett plans to roll out hyperlocal sites: Gannett TV stations are going to partner with DataSphere to provide content to hyperlocal neighborhood news sites in 10 markets. With more newspapers trying to make the hyperlocal equation work, I’d expect more broadcasters to hop on the bandwagon as well.

Activism

• PayInterns.com: Anyone who knows me knows that I despise the practice of unpaid internships. PayInterns is a site set up by Matthew Zinman that seeks to end that practice and replace it with more equitable internships. From an e-mail he sent to me:

At first blush, one might assume that abolition would be counter-intuitive to fostering opportunity for students and employers. To the contrary, our Proposed Reforms take a sensible, phased approach to actualize societal and systemic change with an emphasis on stimulating opportunity, not stifling it.

General Tech Geekery

• Camtasia for Mac: Camtasia is a screencasting tool that has been around for quite a while for the PC. Now, it’s been ported for the Mac. Unlike most screen capture tools, Camtasia allows you to edit and add transitions to the screencast within the software. SnapzPro, for instance, will export the screencast as a .mov file, and you must edit it in another program like iMovie or Final Cut. There’s a free 30-day demo to try it out. I’m trying it for the next month. (Via WebWorkerDaily)

• Starbucks to offer free wi-fi, new portal: Starbucks, which prides itself on its hip brand, has always been a pain when it comes to wi-fi access. You had to pay for an AT&T subscription to access the wireless in store, and the few times I tried to use it, I had trouble accessing the Internet anyway. Now, they are going to be offering free wi-fi in stores, and also this:

Building on the Wi-Fi update, Schultz also revealed plans for a new online customer experience called the Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo!, which will debut later this fall.  This online experience – available only in U.S. company operated Starbucks stores – will be unique in its content offerings, allowing customers free unrestricted access to various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones.

While it’s nice to get some of that paid content for free, I don’t know exactly how this Starbucks Digital Network will be so “unique” as to distinguish itself from every other portal on the Internet. We’ll see. (via just about every tech web site on the Internet)

Online Trends

• Neighbors Online: The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study that shows more people are using the Internet to communicate within their communities. (via)

Face-to-face encounters and phone calls remain the most frequent methods of interaction with neighbors. At the same time, internet tools are gaining ground in community-oriented communications.

By the way, the Pew Research Center databank is a great place to get raw polling data, as they make most of their datasets available for download. I used this in a research methods seminar a few years ago. There is information to be gleaned from the data that isn’t presented in the formal polling results Pew publishes (like regression analysis).

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8 summer tasks can help start the new year fresh

June 10, 2010 in blogging

summer.jpgWhile most people think college professors and student media advisers(and k-12 teachers) spend the summer lolly-gagging around doing nothing, that’s not usually the case. After a school year spent in the trenches of teaching, grading, advising, attending committee meetings, presenting workshops, attending conferences, and doing all sorts of other things, summer is a time to catch up on some of the niggling affairs of professional life that get put off during the school year.

So here’s a list of some things that you can do over the summer to prepare for the new year. Some of these are directly related to “work,” but others are meant to provide a little extra inspiration for the new year. This is really more my own list of resolutions, but it might be useful for others as well, so take it for what it’s worth to you.

  1. Clean out your e-mail inbox: A couple of weeks ago, I had over 7,000 unread messages in my in-box. Most of those were from e-mail lists that I had subscribed to, but never read (lots of washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com e-mail editions, for instance). But there were a few of those “I’ll respond to that in a few days”-type e-mails that slipped off the first screen of my browser before I responded. This week, I’ve whittled down over 2,000 unread e-mails, and I’ll be slowly working through the backlog all summer.
    Some people have declared “e-mail bankruptcy” by just starting over, saying “if you’ve sent me an important e-mail, please send it again.” Obviously, we can’t all do that. But cleaning out the unread items can lead to a fresh start. I’m also making a habit to either read or delete everything that comes into my inbox as soon as I see it. I wish I could get into that habit with my snail mail.
  2. Unsubscribe to junk e-mails: Related to the first suggestion, this is a big one. I don’t know about you, but I’ve conducted quite a bit of business via the Internet (booking airline tickets via Orbitz, for example), and somehow, every time I do this, I get signed up for a company’s e-mail list (even if I check the “no, I don’t want to receive special offers” button.
    So this week, I’ve been using the “Unsubscribe” option on all of these junk e-mails that I never read. As I’ve done so, I’ve searched my inbox and deleted all the previous e-mails. Not only does it remove clutter, but it insures the clutter will not return. Likewise, in the past, I’ve subscribed to various tech-related e-newsletters that never get read. I’m cutting some of these off as well. ZDNet is a notorious offender, sending way too many tech updates every day.
  3. Catch up on your RSS reading: This semester, I found a lot of interesting articles via people I follow on Twitter. But Twitter is a real-time social network, and I’m not on Twitter all the time. So a great deal of good material slipped through the cracks of my attention span. This summer, I’m devoting some time to clearing out my news feeds with the goal of getting down to a fresh start by the beginning of fall semester.
    If you don’t have an RSS reader with some good news feeds, now might be the time to get one. I’m also pruning out blogs that haven’t been updated since the last time I checked my reader, and trying to find some new voices to add to the stream.
  4. Read a few books that have nothing to do with your field: This summer, I finally started reading Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, about the early Puritans who settled Massachusetts, for instance. This doesn’t have to be fiction. It could be non-fiction, as well. A few years ago, I read The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (1865-1929), and the paperback has numerous dog-eared pages that have inspired some of my thinking about what it means to innovate. The point being: don’t just confine your imagination to your field.
  5. Clean off your desk: If you could see my desk, you’d understand this one. Over the semester, a variety of books, papers, committee reports, assignments, etc. winds up stacked high on various corners of my desk. It has ever been thus, unfortunately. At the end of the semester, I file the books away and sort through the papers, chucking a great deal of stuff into the recycle bin. This is obviously not the most organized way to do this. But come fall, I will have a fresh desk to work with. Maybe next year …
  6. Rethink your courses/Rethink your advising system: This summer I am totally rethinking a couple of courses that I’ll be teaching in the fall, based in part on experiences in past semesters, and also based upon changing technology and cultural implications. I realize this is work, but it’s the kind of work that hopefully will bring a fresh excitement for the next school year. I actually do this every year, even with a course that I’ve taught multiple times. Such is the changing nature of the media business.
  7. Spend some time outdoors: I tend to be an indoors-type person, especially during the school year. Now that the days are longer, I’ve started walking a little more in the evenings, and spending time outside. They say a certain amount of sunlight is good for you, as is the fresh air. It can’t hurt.
  8. Learn something new: I’ve known several web workers (Greg Linch comes to mind) who have made it a point to try to learn a new skill or topic over their summer break. This summer, there are a number of topics I’ll be refreshing my mind on (like Final Cut Express), and some that I’ll be learning for the first time (like HTML 5). I may not get through everything on the list, but at least I’ll get started. Don’t feel like you have to learn everything at once. Start with one thing, even if it’s a small thing like Twitter (yes, there are still people who aren’t on Twitter).

So there you have it. Eight things you can do this summer that will likely make your return at the beginning of the new school year a new adventure.

I sometimes tell my students that the beauty of the academic world is that you go to class for 15 weeks, struggle through the material, and then it’s over. You get a fresh slate next semester. The “real” world doesn’t work that way.

Any other suggestions for summer projects? Leave a comment.

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links for 2010-06-10

June 10, 2010 in industry news

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Now you can know the future of media!

June 9, 2010 in General Media, industry news, Multimedia views

Yesterday, the folks who run I Want Media (which I get in a digest form every day) held (yet another) panel discussion about The Future Of Media: 2010. Panel participants were: Dan Abrams, NBC News legal analyst; Josh Cohen, Google News senior business product manager; David Eun, AOL Media president; Jonathan Geller, Boy Genius Report founder and editor; Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post founder; Cindi Leive, Glamour editor in chief; and James Pitaro, Yahoo Media VP. I Want Media Founding Editor Patrick Phillips was the moderator. Here’s the video of the event (if you want to skip the boring introductions, you can skip to the 7:00 mark) :

Watch live streaming video from iwantmediatv at livestream.com
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Curated links for summer browsing

June 8, 2010 in Links

The 2009-2010 school year is over. Summer is here, and you might have some time to catch up on what’s going on out in the world. So here are a few links for your perusing pleasure.

hearstwinner• Hearst Collegiate Journalism Multimedia Winners: The projects for the top three winners for the multimedia awards are linked from this page. Winners were John W. Adkisson, UNC-Chapel Hill (1st), for a package on the economic hardships facing the southeast region; Alexandra Garza, University of Kentucky (2nd), for a package about Kentucky’s tobacco farmers; and M. Colleen McDevitt, University of Missouri-Columbia (3rd), for a package about survivors of rape. Congrats to the winners.

ottawavids

• Ottawa University (in Kansas) has been using student-produced videos (link to Facebook video page) as a recruiting tool Social Media Specialist Annie Noll describes the effort:

Ottawa University has a new student Facebook group called BravesTV. Their purpose is to create videos for our Facebook Fan page. We have noticed that we have many high school students and parents as our fans. These videos are serving as in-direct recruiting tools.

Our tag line is “What if you gave eight students Flip Cams to show what life at Ottawa is really like?” Braves TV is a student group dedicated to making videos for our Facebook Fans. With these videos, Braves TV members do everything from create video events that get the entire student body involved to simple day-in-the-life videos. This is Ottawa in real life.

small-U• UPIU’s Building the J-Future Blog should be on college journalists’ reading list. They have recently been focusing on international student journalism. Recently, they held a live chat for international college journalists. The archive is here.

• Last month, Len Witt interviewed Jesse Villanueva, who won the first National Sustainable Journalism Concept-2-Reality competition sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Journalism. Villanueva’s company aims to create a content management system that will publish content across multiple smartphone platforms. Read the interview for more.

voice15 • Dan Reimold at College Media Matters continues to crank out a wealth of material about what’s going on around the nation on college campuses. But recently he also focused a six-part series on the first student newspaper in Iraq. Part one is here.

• Just for fun, Daniel Bachhuber points to the Super Analyzer, which analyzes the data on the music files in your iTunes library and gives you some information like which albums and songs you listen to most, and what words are included most often in the songs, etc. Pretty nifty Java app.

• Also from Bachhuber, CoPress has open-sourced the College Publisher-to-Wordpress conversion script.

Right off the bat, I’d like to say that the most awesome bit about the conversion script is its ease of use. Granted, you do have to run it on the command line and it does often throw mythical, unintelligible errors if your data is screwy, but it’s about 100 to 1,000 times easier than what Sean Blanda or Brian Schlansky had to go through. Furthermore, it spits out WordPress eXtended RSS files that WordPress imports natively. Depending on the size of your archives, you could even do the entire migration in less than a half hour.

• Alfred Hermida remarked recently about the BBC’s revised guidelines for social media use by staff. It’s always useful to see how media organizations are adapting to the changing face of social media.

•  Mindy McAdams recently put up a series of posts about the transition to HTML5 (it’s what runs the video on iPods/iPhones/iPads) – I’ll be reading these in the next few days: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. I’m not sure if she’s finished with the series yet, so check for future installments.

• New software to try: Also via McAdams, two pieces of software to try out. typewith.me, allows several users to “collaborate seamlessly on documents in your Web browser.” It is somewhat like a GoogleDoc, although, last time I tried to use a Google Doc to collaborate with several people, it would only allow 10 users at a time. I haven’t tried typewith.me yet, but a plan to in the near future. And Feedly, a browser plug-in that repurposes your RSS reader into a magazine-style format. I’ve been trying it out and it definitely has its attractions once you figure out the user-interface. It’s not unlike Google Reader, but more visually appealing.

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