David Cohn interviews Scott Karp, the bright mind behind Publish2, a link aggregating system for journalists. Listen to the interview, and find a way to use Publish2 in your newsroom. Note: As Dave mentions, Karp is another proponent of link journalism. Read this post to understand some of what he’s talking about. Longtime readers of this blog should recognize a recurrent theme: the power of links.

h/t Jack Lail

An interesting ethical question came up this morning when one of our reporters interviewed the university president. The reporter used a digital voice recorder, and of course asked permission to record the interview. At the end, he asked the president if he minded the Northern Star putting part of the interview online as an audio file. The president declined, and said he would have spoken differently had he known the interview might be put on the Web.

So the question is, are “print” reporters legally or ethically obligated to tell a source exactly how an audio recording might be used? My gut reaction is yes, ethically, because we’re still at a stage in journalism where if a reporter is not from a TV station or radio station, sources expect to see only a print version of the story. I’m interested in hearing other thoughts on this, though.

It has been a while since I wrote on XML. I’ve been pouring over material and thought I would put some new information out as well as ask for some feedback.

First, I need to make clear XML is a markup language, not programming language. It won’t “do” anything. Rather, it is a way to tag your content - words or pictures. So you can’t program XML to display a web page or interact with some database. You would use XML to tag the information for display on a web page or to identify information from a database but not actually to program anything.

How do you “create” XML? (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Update: Mindy McAdams comments more on the headline strategy.

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser offers up a list of tips for increasing search engine traffic to your web site. If you’re not familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this is a pretty decent place to start.

A couple of Glaser’s points stick out for college media: Links and headlines.

Links

As Glaser (and countless others, including myself) notes, hyperlinks increase your search engine “weight.” That’s a good reason to link to other stories within your site, and also out to other authoritative sources as often as possible. Glaser quotes Kevin Anderson of the Guardian UK:

“One of the things that drives Google rank is links, both internal and external,” said Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the Guardian. “Blogging is all about linking, although any good web journalism should be. When I’m being honest, as a journalist and blogger, I’ll admit that blogs have higher Google rank than sites with similar traffic based on the high level of linking…It’s one of those slightly counter-intuitive things that traditional journalists and media managers don’t seem to understand. Linking is not only good web journalism, it’s also good for SEO, hence site visibility.”

Headlines

Web headlines should focus on keywords at the beginning of the head, Glaser writes. Search engines place more emphasis on keywords that appear there. This means fewer cryptic, tabloid-esque headlines, but greater visibility for your content. In short, it’s okay to be cool in print, but give us the straight head on the web.

Too often, web headlines are just the print headline copied and pasted (”shovelheads”?) into the CMS. Allowing web producers to rewrite the heads for the web site helps your SEO and it also gives them valuable training in writing headlines on their own.

Image by karindalziel via FlickrI noticed a little icon popping up in a couple of RSS feeds yesterday (Specifically, Alfred Hermida’s Reportr.net), and started looking into the product behind the icon. It’s an interesting plug-in that may help make blogging a little easier: Zemanta.

The simple explanation is that Zemanta follows your typing and suggests related content - photos, links, and articles - based on what you write. You install Zemanta as a Firefox extension, and it shows up as a pane in your blogging screen. Every 300 characters, it refreshes with content that it thinks might be related. The photos displayed are Creative Commons licensed, so you don’t have to worry about copyright problems, and the articles (according to the company) are indexed from 300 internet information outlets (including wikipedia).

Below is an example of the “related articles” section that I created by clicking on the suggestions in the panel. As I’m typing, the photos in the gallery aren’t nearly as appealing as the article references.

To put this into an example for a college media outlet, let’s say you’re writing about the 21st Century G.I. Bill which has 57 co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate, but Republican presidential candidate John McCain won’t sign on to because he says it will encourage people to leave the armed forces and better themselves educationally. While you’re typing, Zemanta pulls up related stories that you can place into the blog post. Again, check below (story from thinkprogress.org about the G.I. Bill).

A word of caution: As with any content you pull from the web, you want to be sure about your sources. You’ll probably want to visit the linked references before placing them into your blog post. I don’t think Zemanta will replace a more robust Internet search for related content (at least not yet), but it does offer an added tool to provide context to content.

Paul Conley wrote something the other day that spurred this post, a late addition to the Carnival of Journalism (April edition).

Conley notes an Editor & Publisher article about newly displaced print editors looking for work as journalism instructors. Conley is succinct, as usual, in his assessment:

it’s not in the interest of journalism students for schools to hire people who either can’t or won’t adjust to the changes in media. Heck, journalism schools are already filled with people who don’t understand modern journalism. And there’s little doubt that those teachers have been producing graduates who are ill-prepared for the workforce.

Over the past 7 years as an adviser and instructor, I’ve watched the tide slowly shifting as professors and college media advisers have faced the challenges that impact their industry. Anecdotes are all I can offer, but I’ve seen some journalism professors who’ve been around for more than 20 years who face the future with a keen interest, and others who are still mired in the past. Ditto with advisers.

My sense of things now is that even if someone is entirely dismissive of new media (online media, multimedia, whatever you want to call it), they are not as prone to display their contempt as they were, say, three years ago.

I would add to Paul’s comments by saying that people leaving the industry shouldn’t look to academia as a place to hide. Right now, academic journalism is pushing forward to keep pace with the industry, even as the industry’s pace of change ramps up further. In our department, we’re trying to figure out ways to get students engaged with online/multimedia tools early in the sequence so that they are skilled when they leave. If a retiring editor doesn’t like using blogs in the workplace, I can’t imagine they’ll like using blogs for class assignments (which I see more and more of, btw).

For most of the past five years, I’ve followed the academic journalism job market pretty closely, partly out of my own employment concerns, and partly because I ran the job board for College Media Advisers, Inc. The trends during that time showed a lot more desire for people who could understand, teach, or research in the area of multimedia or convergence. There were lots of positions open for Public Relations/Advertising, a good number of broadcast TV/radio positions, and multimedia positions. Print positions were not as well-represented, and the competition in those areas is already fierce.

In the advising sphere, it’s not much better.

College media outlets are scrambling to replace declining ad revenues just like their “professional” media counterparts. They have the challenge of training students for the skills they’ll need in the future while maintaining their traditional media imprints - no small feat with a mostly volunteer staff.

And a final word of caution for an editor hoping to make the jump from industry to academia (especially in an advising role), there’s an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In most student media settings, advising is mostly a post hoc enterprise. The adviser doesn’t “tell” the students what to put in the paper, how to write the stories, where to go for coverage - unless the adviser is asked.

That could be a heavy transition for a newspaper editor to make.

With all of that said, I’m keen to see the day when some of the multimedia whiz kids return to colleges to do some advising, teaching and research. But I suspect that won’t be for a while. The industry needs that young blood and is willing to pay more for those skilled practitioners right now.

You’d think a company valued at $15 BILLION could afford to hire someone to design a document for them. But you’d be wrong. Facebook just released “The Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing” as a PDF document (see the document at TechCrunch). I haven’t looked at the content yet, but the design stinks.

The cover is a plain page with a headline at the top. No effort whatsoever into making the first page appealing. I suppose people will just see the word “Viral Marketing” and want to read this tome.

And, there are no screenshots. If you’re going to talk about applications and specific pages on your web site, it’s helpful to have screenshots of what those pages look like. Not everyone likes to read page after page of instruction text.

Beyond that, the font is Times New Roman (for headlines and body text - exceedingly mundane) and the formatting reeks of “hurry up and get it out the door.” (the info screen for the PDF says it was produced in Microsoft Word - a sure sign of design quality /snark).

As a for instance, take this page:

Notice the topic subhead “Events.” It’s at the bottom of the page, all by itself. Where’s the information? It’s on the next page, of course. Why not put the subhead with the information?

And since this is a PDF, you’d think they could make the URL hyperlinks actually work, but they didn’t even bother with that.

I’m sure someone will tell me it’s a “white paper,” which must mean that it has to be ugly. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Spend a couple of bucks for a decent page designer to make your documents look like you actually thought about the people you’re inflicting them on.

VideocuePro is a new software to me. Really cheap ($80) teleprompter program with some added features.h/t Rachele Kanigel

We have 48 records in the Multimedia Examples database right now. I thought I’d pull a couple out and showcase them on the front page. If you have an example you’d like to submit, do so here.

Timeline-ness

The Washington Square News at NYU published a timeline of their coverage of a student council scandal using Simile, a timeline program created by some students at MIT. Simile uses xml files to create the sliding timeline. It’s a bit complicated, so if you’re not up on xml and coding, you can do something similar with xtimeline This is a good way to recover some of your reporting on an ongoing scandal without linking to each previous archived story in new story updates. Just add the stories to the timeline, and put the link to the timeline into each subsequent story.

Election interactive

The Marquette Tribune created an interactive Flash graphic of the presidential campaign, with a variety of interesting features. Mouse over the map, and it shows primary results from each state. Mouse over the names below the candidate photos and you get a window with information about the candidates.

A quote from one of those “out of discipline” books I grab every so often to read for inspiration - “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri:

To award prizes is to attempt to control the course of another man’s work. It is a bid to have him do what you will approve. It affects not only the one who wins the award, but all those who in any measure strive for it. It is an effort to stop evolution, to hold things back to the plane of your judgment. It is a check on a great adventure of human life. It is negative to the idea that youth should go forward. It is for the coming generation to judge you, not for you to judge it. So it must happen, whether you will it or not.

If you want to be useful, if you want to be an encouragement to the deserving young artist, don’t try to pick him or judge him, but become interested in his effort with keen willingness to accept the surprises of its outcome.

This being the first year of the CICM multimedia contests, I hope we did alright by our entrants.

Contests are something we all have to face in journalism, but the key is not the contests, but the content and the creativity we use to tell stories. And ultimately, if the story is great (like the investigative stories published by the Washington Post that won them 6 Pulitzers), but nothing changes, then that big shiny medal isn’t worth a damn.