April 30, 2011 in industry news
“Kudos to The Crimson White, the University of Alabama’s daily student newspaper, for its comprehensive, real-time coverage of the tornado that tore through UA’s hometown Tuscaloosa two days ago and the death, destruction, and emotional devastation being grappled with in its aftermath.”
April 29, 2011 in industry news
“Kindle Blogs are auto-delivered wirelessly to the Kindle and updated throughout the day. They are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so they can be read even when you’re not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle contain full text content and most images.”
“Automatically collected tweets related to online newspaper articles. The Twitter feeds that most people are acquainted with are static, labor intensive, and unsorted. They are based on manually entered keywords and simple Twitter search is carried out without relevance ranking. With Crowdynews, the shortcomings of such typical solutions now belong to the past.”
Wired for Change – Remix – A Remix Video Contest
“Kansas State’s Digital Ethnography Project & the Berkman Center for Internet & Society invites you to create a short remix video with material from the Wired for Change event that shows what you think about digital culture & Internet rights. Enter your video & get a chance to win a free trip to next year’s conference!”
April 29, 2011 in video
I’ve been looking at a lot of video footage from the tornado outbreak that devastated vast areas of the southeast United States. Some of the footage of the tornadoes from Alabama (like this and this) has been absolutely breathtaking.
Second day videos have attempted to capture some of the scope of the destruction the tornadoes left in their wake. That’s a good use of internet video. But in the rush to show the destruction, reporters seem to lose sight of some of the basic principles that help make for strong video – especially Internet video. Watch this short clip from al.com showing devastation from Concord, Ala.:
There are some powerful images in that video.
The destroyed car.
The people picking through the rubble of their house.
The woman comforting the child.
The frustrating thing is that you never get to feel the impact of these visuals, because the video is constantly panning from side to side. Even as the video is panning, you only get fractions of seconds to view the scene as it passes by.
One of the first “rules” I hear from newspaper videographers about Internet video and I repeat ad nauseum in my multimedia classes is this: Don’t pan or zoom. Shoot steady shots. If you are trying to capture the extent of a horrible scene, shoot a wide establishing shot – steady, and then shoot a series of medium and closeup shots – snapshots of the devastation.
I don’t want to single this reporter out – I’ve noticed this frequently with breaking news videos. It’s easy to forget the basics when you’re staring at an event of a lifetime, or even of the year. Time is of the essence. Editors are tapping their feet for the latest images from the scene. Don’t forget the basics. If it helps, write Don’t Pan or Zoom on a strip of tape and tape it to the back of your video camera/mobile phone/whatever so you’ll see it every time you get ready to press the record button.
April 25, 2011 in industry news
Horizontalism and Readability « Thinking for a Living
An argument for horizontal web page design, in an interesting format.
Mozilla Drumbeat | Unlocking Video
“How can new web video tools transform news storytelling? “
7 things not to do when launching a new blog – Blogvibe
“The number of blogs launched every day is staggering, and the number of blogs that die out shortly after is most likely just as high (read our The Graveyard of dead design blogs for a sample). There are countless lists out there on what to do when your new blog is up and running, from submitting to search engines, to setting up social media accounts, to optimizing you site — lots of things to do. And that’s on top of actually writing useful content. But many fall into a trap of pushing it a bit too far, and we’ve gathered a few tips on what not to do when you launch that new blog of yours.”
April 22, 2011 in industry news
It’s been a while since I used Flock, but it was a good browser while it lasted.
April 21, 2011 in industry news
Times Company Profit Falls on Weak Ad Revenue – NYTimes.com
” For the first time, the Times Company provided information on how digital subscriptions were faring. The company said that since it started limiting the number of articles readers could read on NYTimes.com for free, it has signed up more than 100,000 subscribers. While it said the program was still too young to judge a success, “early indicators are encouraging.” Subscriptions start at $15 every four weeks, but many subscribers have so far paid discounted introductory rates. “
Why our small-town daily is adding a full-time curator | NewspaperTurnaround.Com
A very smart publisher explains a new position.
April 21, 2011 in industry news, photojournalism
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
(Reuters) – Two photojournalists — Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tim Hetherington and Getty photographer Chris Hondros — were killed on Wednesday after coming under fire in the besieged Libyan town of Misrata.
I saw “Restrepo” a couple of months ago. A powerful piece of documentary about war. Sometimes, watching the TV news talkers or seeing the keyboard wizardry of data visualization journalists, it’s easy to forget that there are some journalists who go out into the places where death is a very real possibility. And they don’t get the limelight, they don’t get the big salaries. But they get the story. The important story.
April 21, 2011 in industry news
Gabfire, known for making some nice WordPress themes is offering a new theme for free. The new theme is built on HTML5 and has lots of potential for a newspaper site. A lot of nice built in features like an advertising module (with category ads), media gallery template and a custom media module which allows “you to display a FLV video hosted on your server or to embed a flash video to your posts.”
I haven’t tested this out myself but since the theme is free, you aren’t out anything for downloading it. Plus, WordPress makes it very easy to switch between different themes, not to mention some really cool features which allow you to install plugins with out knowing a thing about FTP! Anyway, you can check it out at GabFire’s website here: http://www.gabfirethemes.com/snapwire/
Gabfire theme being offered for free
April 20, 2011 in industry news
Facebook Seeking Friends In Beltway – WSJ.com
“”Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said. ” – Way to go, Facebook / sarcasm
April 19, 2011 in industry news
Premium WordPress Themes and Web Templates – ThemeForest
Via Christine Drain at Pensacola College, a site with a huge number of relatively inexpensive WP themes.
“Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary” E-book by Nancy Kalow –
”
Visual Storytelling, the Center for Documentary Studies’ first e-book, is for anyone who wants to make a watchable short documentary using a consumer camcorder, digital SLR camera, or cell phone. Nancy Kalow, who has taught at CDS for twelve years and chairs the selection committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, has written a step-by-step and comprehensive guide to making a low-budget video with a one-person crew. The Visual Storytelling approach guides you through shooting and interviewing, editing, and the ethics of telling someone else’s story.”
Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers
“Ten years ago, a teacher in the Bronx launched DonorsChoose.org. Since then, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom project requests, inspiring $80,000,000 in giving from 400,000 donors who performed over a million search queries and made more than a million donations.
We’ve opened up that data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system’s budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We’ve got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking. “
10 Simple Truths Smart People Forget
“Some of the smartest people I know continuously struggle to get ahead because they forget to address a few simple truths that collectively govern our potential to make progress. So here’s a quick reminder:”
Davis Wiki – The definitive resource for Davis, California
Found via a conference at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. College Newspapers could do this kind of thing.
“And for the first time, a prize was awarded to reporting that did not appear in print: ProPublica’s online series “The Wall Street Money Machine,” which won for national reporting. “
Google’s Blogger to Close Legacy Accounts | Search Engine Journal
“Still, those who created content before 2007 and have since left those blogs up to accumulate traffic and dust will need to log in or lose access to all the content they created. The closure of all legacy accounts will happen on June 25th of 2011, so Blogger veterans who have been inactive for a while should migrate their account and avoid an unintended closure.”
