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UNC Reese News Lab publishes mobile journalism e-pub

February 26, 2013 in General Media, innovation, Mobile

The Reese News Lab at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has released an e-pub book about mobile news gathering: News On The Go. The book is priced at $4.99 and available in e-pub or pdf format. From the press release:

Americans are rapidly adopting mobile devices, transforming the way they obtain news. Nearly one in five Americans now access the Internet primarily using their phone, not a computer, according to an April 2012 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life project. In June 2012, the Reese staff – a team of designers, programmers and journalists – decided to explore how this trend could affect journalism. They created stories meant to be consumed on smart phones and tablets and launched WhichWayNC.com, a “mobile-first” project focused on North Carolina politics.

I just received a review copy of the book, and will update as I get through it. I hope to have an interview as well sometime soon.

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For the love of all that is hyper, stop with the misleading links!

February 18, 2013 in Back to Basics, General Media, Websites

Time once again for one of my pet peeves. In fact, it’s not so much a pet peeve as something that summons my rage to levels no mere listicle can, and especially when an online-only outlet does it. I’m writing, of course, about the profound inability of some web sites to actually do a hyperlink properly.

I’ve written about this again and again and again and again, and until outlets start writing links like they understand what the World Wide Web is for, I’ll keep on raging about it. So here’s today’s villain: Engadget.

Exhibit A:

As you can tell from reading, this is a story about an app called Fleksy. You will note in the first paragraph (#1) that Engadget refers to the company and the app, and the words are underlined to link to other content. Below that (#2), the article refers to an Android version of this particular app.

A savvy veteran of the World Wide Web, or even a rank noob who’d spent more than a day with a browser, would think those links would point you to, I don’t know, the app company’s web site (in the case of #1) or the web page for the Android version (in the case of #2).

But you, dear WWW browser, would be WRONG. Both of those links lead to other Engadget stories about the Flexsy App! In fact, if you want to find the actual Flexsy App link, you have to read down to the bottom of the article, where it’s buried as “sources.” (#3)

If you’re going to do this, just don’t put links in your articles. Put the sources at the bottom of the page and be done with it. Turn off your automated internal linking widget and stop perverting the idea of the hyperlink. If you want to link to an archive of your previous articles, do so in a parenthetical, like this: (previous coverage).

And, as usual, Engadget isn’t unique in this aberrant Web behavior. They are just the one that crossed my path this weekend.

I do realize that one of the largest sites, Wikipedia, does not follow this convention, but Wiki inline links serve a different function. If you click on a wiki link, you are taken to another page with an encyclopedia entry related to the word/phrase you clicked on. There’s no automated collection of articles from the past there. The inline links on most news web sites are just callous attempts to keep you on site.

And just so you know, with the exception of specific references to CICM archives, every one of those links above function as they should – taking you to the source.

Lesson for the day: If you’re going to make a brand name or a business or a government agency name into a link in your story, make it a link to the web site of the brand, business or government agency. It’s not your property, stop using it like it is.

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Morgan State U. Spokesman plans to go online-only

February 8, 2013 in College Media, College Media News, Websites

Afro.com is reporting that the student newspaper at Morgan State University is going online-only soon. Sort of. (story via, via) The decision was announced by Director of Student Media Perry Sweeper.

Sweeper oversees The Spokesman and the campus year bookThe Promethean. He is currently designing the paper’s website, which will eventually be maintained by a design team he selects.

Print journalism has undergone a digital transformation over the last decade, and most journalistic organizations have websites and mobile apps in addition to their printed publication.

The decision to transition to an online publication was made by the chairman of Morgan State’s communications department, Dewayne Wickham, and the supervisor of student media, Karen Houppert.

Although the Spokesman will be online-only for the rest of this school year, the print edition may not be gone forever.

I’d love to point you to the Spokesman’s web site, but the address on the MSU web site loads this:

I’m not sure throwing students into online publications when you don’t even have a web site running at the moment is such a good idea.

I’m also puzzled by the hedging in this announcement. Maybe the print edition isn’t gone forever. What?

Also, there’s this: “Morgan State has made three previous attempts to transition to an all-online newspaper, dating back to the early 2000s.” I wish the students the best of luck. I hope they have some say in what goes into this publication.

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AxisPhilly: new non-profit news initiative combines data, reporting

February 1, 2013 in General Media, Websites

AxisPhilly launched their web site yesterday. According to the web site, “AxisPhilly is a non-profit news and information organization whose mission is to educate and engage citizens on topics of public interest while empowering them with tools to participate in developing and implementing change.” The site has some serious journalistic history on its staff, and is worth watching to see how it fares in a market where the two daily newspapers are struggling under numerous challenges.

But one reason I want to mention the site is the design of the front page:

axisphilly

It’s clean, well organized and easy to understand. Obviously, it’s early in the development of the site, but there’s only one other row of preview thumbnails below the one in the screenshot, and lots of white space. The design promotes stories, but also interactive tools for users. Check it out. There may be some ideas that you could use in your own site.

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LiveBlogPro Test blog

January 23, 2013 in blogging, innovation, online software, software, Tech Talk

In this week’s podcast, I mentioned a new liveblogging platform that just released to public beta – LiveBlogPro. Here I’m experimenting with the platform, and will discuss some of its features and limitations in the liveblog below.

 

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(Updated) Instagram’s new terms of service should trouble media outlets, photojournalists

December 18, 2012 in General Media, social media

UPDATE (5 pm CST 12-18-12): Instagram has posted a blog post declaring that they are going to be revising the revised TOS. “Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

Yesterday, Instagram announced some new terms of service, and the social media/journalism commentariat is abuzz with some of the changes. Among the changes that should trouble student media outlets is this one which has professional photographers and privacy rights activists alike worried:

“You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you,”

This even applies to minors:

If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf.

Seriously, every 14-year-old’s parents reads the TOS on every app on his/her iPod Touch. /eyeroll.

I am not a lawyer, but I don’t think anyone should be comfortable with signing over a blanket personal model release to a company to sell your image or personal photographs. Wil Wheaton outlined some of the troubling aspects of this in a blog post: regarding instagram’s new Terms of Service.

Here’s what I’m wondering: if Kaley Cuoco uses Instagram to share a photo of her and Melissa Rauch doing something silly, does that mean that Instagram can take that photo and use it to advertise for something silly without compensating them for what becomes a use of their likeness for commercial purposes? I can see that being a pretty serious shitstorm if it happens. I’m not a big enough celebrity for it to personally affect me, but I know a lot of people who are. If someone Instagrams a photo of Seth Green walking through an Urban Outfitters, does that mean Urban Outfitters can take that image and use it to create an implied endorsement by Seth? What if the picture is taken by a complete stranger? Who gets final say in how the image is used? The subject, the photographer, or Instagram?

For college media outlets, the problem is different. Your photographers are out covering events, taking photographs that are important to your news operation and your brand. Do you want some company using your photographs without permission or payment to promote their products? I don’t.

In the past, I’ve recommended that college media outlets get on the social network of Instagram to share breaking news photos and other images within the network (I’ve recommended similar things about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), but I’m reconsidering that recommendation until more and better information about this change is forthcoming.

I’m not sure how this will play out. Facebook (who owns Instagram) has a history of trying stupid stuff with their privacy policies only to walk them back when users pushed back. Maybe that will be the case with Instagram as well. For now, the new TOS go into effect Jan. 16, 2013. If you use the service after that, you’re agreeing to those terms.

For those who are concerned about this, here’s a post at Wired about how to download your photos from Instagram and cancel your account. Also, I’d suggest taking another look at Flickr. They just released a new iOS app with filters that are pretty comparable to Instagram’s, and more importantly, they give you a way to control how your content is used. Here’s a post from 2011 where the company (owned by Yahoo!) reiterated their policy: At Flickr, your photos are always yours.

See below for some of the media coverage of this change.

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Spinning songs and sharing music, digitally with Spotify

December 17, 2012 in College Media, ideas, innovation, online software, social media

Editor’s Note: We are happy to welcome Allison Bennett Dyche, Assistant Director of Student Media at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Ga., as a new contributor to the blog.

If you’re still waiting for new CDs to arrive via postal mail, either for use at your radio station or to review for your newspaper or magazine’s A&E section, it’s time to get with the program.

Spotify came to the United States during the summer of 2011. If you’ve never heard of it before, or aren’t sure how to make best use of it, now’s the time to check it out.

You may remember the wonder of Napster when it first debuted in the late 1990s (and the following depression when old Napster officially went under in the early 2000s). Apple’s iTunes, launched in the early 2000s, has been the go-to for years now, allowing users to input their own existing music libraries and purchase new music, one song or album at a time.

Enter European digital streaming music service Spotify. The application allows users to input their own libraries of music, and also listen to a massive catalogue of music (reportedly more than 20 million songs) available at their fingertips. The biggest differences between iTunes and Spotify are the cost and the social media aspect. Spotify is available for free (with commercials) or for a small monthly subscription fee (with no commercials and availability on additional platforms, rather than paying by song or album).

And unlike Pandora, rather than just typing in the name of a couple of artists that you like and letting the site’s Music Genome Project algorithm handle the rest, you can build your own playlists, and share them with your social networks and the Spotify community. Making your playlists public will also allow for others to subscribe to your playlists, allowing you to share your music tastes with friends and strangers alike. But Spotify also offers an algorithm-based music suggestion feed through Spotify Radio. Listeners can choose a song they enjoy, and the application will choose and play similar music and artists.

For college radio station DJs, having a paid subscription to Spotify is a good way to not only build playlists for shows without having to fumble with CDs and vinyl, but also to be able to share it with the audience after the show is over. Sharing playlists on social media allows for a broader listening base to get a taste of the music played on your station during your shows, and allows those from outside your listening area to also support your station.

New albums and singles are available under the New Releases section under the “What’s New” tab, so your student media operation can start playing or reviewing new music it as soon as it drops.

Barack Obama's campaign playlist

• CBS This Morning songs from the shows

• Victoria’s Secret store playlist

• Snoop Dogg’s mixtape

So how can your student media operation get started with Spotify? Start off easy by building some playlists.

• Create playlists documenting their top songs of 2012, their top songs of fall semester, etc.

• Create playlists that include a sampling of the kind of music listeners can hear on your college radio station.

• With students traveling home, create an ultimate road trip mix, or have students put together a playlist of songs representing the cities/states where they’ll spend their breaks.

• Create an anti-holiday music playlist for when you just cannot take another rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Some playlists related to college:

The Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon started building and sharing weekly playlists on their site during fall semester.

Seventeen magazine shared an ultimate list of music to cram for college finals.

With more than 20 million songs at your fingertips and the ability to create and share as many playlists as you want, there are endless possibilities for how to incorporate Spotify into student media.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post in 2013 about new features Spotify is launching, and examples of how national and international media outlets are using Spotify apps.

Allison Bennett Dyche is the Assistant Director of Student Media at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Ga. She advises the online news organization District, the literary arts journal Port City Review and the SCAD chapter of the Society for Collegiate Journalists, and DJs a weekly show on SCAD Radio.

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Notes from Chicago: OR Magazine – interactive iPad magazines and user interaction

December 4, 2012 in design, ideas, industry news, iPad, Tech Talk, Websites

During the ACP/CMA convention in Chicago, I got to spend about 50 minutes with the students who developed OR Magazine as part of a class at the University of Oregon. The designers have now moved on to produce interactives for Flux Magazine.

For anyone producing student magazines or longform web publications, I’d encourage you to download the app and check it out. While the articles are laid out like traditional magazine articles, there are interactive elements in each one, ranging from video to touch/slide photo slideshows to interactive explanatory graphics.

It was hard to find fault with the overall graphic design of the product, so we talked quite a bit about user interaction, and that’s sort of the focus of this post.

I’m a big proponent of usability testing: getting some audience members to interact with your website/app/magazine/whatever and troubleshooting potential problems. Usability testing is especially critical for touch-screen media.

One reason for this is that people are developing new “habits” in terms of how they interact with content.

There is also this issue: People are still learning about tablets. By now, there’s a sizable user base of people who are familiar with navigating tablets. But there is also a sizable user base of people who have just got an iPad or Android tablet, and are still finding their way around.

Just a few points I’d like to emphasize here:

1) Don’t do touch interactives just because you can. Yes, it’s nice that you can touch a spot on the screen and it changes photographs. But make it worth my while as a user to click on that spot. Don’t give me one photo switch, for instance. If you do that, you’re training me to expect nothing but bells and whistles, no substance.

2) Don’t go too far off the UI path. Remember, people are still figuring out what works and how to use their tablet devices. Just as web sites developed the icons people are familiar with (the “play” button onYouTube and every other video site, for example), app designers are in the process of “training” users to recognize icons on their apps. As much as it might be a challenge, try to see what others are doing in the tablet UI field, what’s working and what’s not. If something’s become a de facto “standard,” maybe try to put your stamp on that instead of reinventing the language.

3) Remember the orientation. Tablets work in both landscape and portrait modes. Unless you’re going to set up your publication so that it only works in one orientation (which would be sort of silly), be sure to usability test in both orientation. Areas that might work in one orientation can act differently in the other, and might frustrate users who use certain portions of the screen.

4) Test, test, and test again. If you have a general purpose magazine tablet app, test that app with experienced users, newer users, and even people who’ve never used a tablet other than on a display at the Apple store. Find where the bugs are, what features they liked, and which navigation caused them to stumble. And then remove those barriers, squash those bugs, and beef up the interactives. And then test it again. Sometimes, when we fix one thing, we create another issue.

I would encourage anyone producing magazine style journalism to experiment with tablet presentation. It has unique challenges, but the format is a fertile field for long-form journalism. The OR Magazine was created using Adobe Creative Suite products like InDesign, so it’s not beyond your reach.

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Post-Industrial Journalism: New Tow Center report

November 28, 2012 in General Media, innovation

This is going to be some required reading for me after the semester is over. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism released a report yesterday, Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present, by C.W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky.

This is from the introduction:

This essay is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry anymore.

There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.

If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity.

Best of all, it’s freely available in PDF and E-Pub formats.

One interesting side-note for me is the conclusion title: Tectonic Shifts. I recently spoke at the University of Tampa, and the title of the talk was “Digital Tectonics: How the Internet has shifted the informational topography and the role of journalists and media professionals in charting new courses through the eruption of information.”

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Guest Post: Gargoyle’s lessons learned since going online-only

November 5, 2012 in College Media, innovation, Multimedia views, Websites

Editor’s Note: I asked Brian Thompson to share about the experiences of the news outfit he advises. Here’s his guest post.

By Brian Thompson
Adviser, Flagler College Gargoyle

To the big guys: don’t laugh. Yes, our visitor stats are small potatoes when compared to large university newspaper sites. But, hey, a milestone is a milestone. And sometime in November our small, online-only newspaper, the Flagler College Gargoyle, will mark 100,000 visits for 2012.

That will be the first time we’ve notched that many visits in a single year.

For us, a small online publication at a small, young college in northeast Florida, that’s a lot. It¹s also an indication that going online-only in 2010 was a good move for us.

Not that it didn’t come with its share of grumbling, hiccups and hurdles. But we’ve been more successful than we expected and doubled traffic from our days of print when we were only seeing 49,500 visits to the site a year.

So what have been the biggest lessons we’ve learned since diving into the Web-only world?

Lesson 1: Technology doesn’t have to trump journalism.

That’s one of the biggest concerns people voice to me when I mention we’re an online-only publication: that going online might make us tech-focused, but journalism-light. But we’ve actually found the opposite to be true. In fact, back in the days of print, my top editors spent more time trying to lay out a print newspaper than working on their own stories.

Only, the ease of the Web actually gives us the time to focus more on in-depth, issue-based stories. Proof might just be in the awards. For example, The Gargoyle had only ever won two regional Society of Professional Journalists awards before moving online-only. But in the last two years, we’ve won nine SPJ awards – including best independent online publication in 2011.

Lesson 2: The Web allows you to think bigger, not smaller.

This was another thing I found. In print, we wrote stories about issues on campus that didn’t always affect a large number of people. They were small in scope and had little reach. But the Web opened up new avenues to attract readers beyond our St. Augustine campus. We do more coverage of the local community, and have seen readership grow as we do more stories and opinion localizing larger issues with more wide-reaching themes. Not only that, it gives our students better clips for awards, as well as internship and job applications.

We had a story last semester about a basketball student who went on a religious fast in the middle of basketball season. It was picked up by a site that focuses on religious issues and had more than 7,300 pageviews – one of our most popular stories ever. That energized the staff to keep looking for local stories that would connect with larger audiences.

Lesson 3: Find ways to build enthusiasm for the Web.

Maybe this is the most important lesson. Crazy as it sounds, most college journalists still have a print-centric mindset, even though few of them still get news from print newspapers. For whatever reason, they’re so attached to the idea getting published in newsprint themselves.

But if you get them excited about the possibilities and opportunities online, they will embrace the Web. Getting 7,300 sets of eyes on your story doesn’t hurt. Neither does winning awards, and that fires up others who want to follow in their footsteps.

We also set goals for awards and growing Web site traffic, then we celebrate those accomplishments. We talk about how news media are looking for these skills in future employees, and play up the successes of newspaper alums who are now working in the industry. It has created a culture of enthusiasm that is critical.

Sure, we’re still small potatoes compared to a lot of others, but for a publication our size, it’s all cause for excitement.

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