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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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The information sherpa: role for journalists on the web

February 1, 2012 in General Media, ideas

(Image by Flickr user Sistak, used under Creative Commons license)

Following up on my post yesterday about information overload, I wanted to expand a little bit on a term I used: information sherpa. I first used a similar term “video sherpa” in a post for a Carnival of Journalism about the future of online video. I wrote:

Perhaps a new form of journalistic curator will arise – the video sherpa, a journalist who guides others through the mazes of videos on various platforms like YouTube andVimeo to find the nuggets of related content that are worthwhile, a la Andy Carvin‘sNPR tweets about the Middle East.

I should specify that I’m using the term “sherpa” in a specific sense. Wikipedia captures that essence here:

Sherpas were immeasurably valuable to early explorers of the Himalayan region, serving as guides at the extreme altitudes of the peaks and passes in the region. Today, the term is used casually to refer to almost any guide or porter hired for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. Sherpas are renowned in the international climbing and mountaineering community for their hardiness, expertise, and experience at high altitudes.

Another way of looking at our age instead of as “information overload” is to look at it as a mountain of information. News consumers who want to be informed, to stay on top of events that are important to them, need to find a way to scale that mountain. And they don’t always have the tools or experience to do so. That’s where a modern journalist can carve out an important role. The journalist as sherpa guides the info-mountaineer through the dizzying peaks and passes of the mountain of information, finding and presenting just the right information to help reach and stay on top of the mountain.

But I want to be clear about some things that are happening that are not what I mean by an information sherpa. The sherpa is not the mountaineer. The sherpa is not the mountain. The sherpa is not the treacherous weather that attacks the mountain suddenly. I’ll explain what I mean:

The sherpa is not the mountain: As I mentioned yesterday, there are too many sites on the internet that aren’t really providing high quality information. They’re posting intriguing photos and blurbs, or they’re posting barely disguised press releases, or hastily re-written information provided by quality news sources to juice page clicks. Those people are part of the mountain of information. They keep piling up the heights before the information consumer.

The sherpa is not the mountaineer: This is not the first time the sherpa has climbed the mountain. The sherpa knows a path through the mountain of B.S. masquerading as information, and is guiding the person who’s trying to make it up the mountain. More than ever, a journalist can’t be a generalist. Generalists get taken in by misinformation, slant, faux controversies and technical jargon meant to obscure rather than illuminate. A journalist needs to do everything possible to become fluent in whatever topic she is covering, learning who’s got an agenda, and when that agenda is shading the information she’s receiving. A sherpa doesn’t take the easiest path, but the best path.

The sherpa is not the weather: One of the most dangerous aspects of the ascent of Mt. Everest is the extreme and quickly changing weather, which can include high winds and sudden storms. In climbing a mountain of information, an info-mountaineer can experience frequent wild swings of information that can knock one off the path – useless information, sudden Twitter storms and Facebook outrages, breathless reporting about silly products and gossip about famous people. A true sherpa isn’t the weather. A journalist worth his salt doesn’t traffic in such chasing the weather. A sherpa stays the course, is aware of the weather, and knows to avoid its traps.

Many others have focused on the analogy of journalist as curator. But I think I prefer this analogy more. I would love to know what others think. I also think this new paradigm should influence how we train college journalists for the future.

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College online media checklist for a new year

August 22, 2011 in ideas, innovation

Students are returning to campus for the new year. No doubt, the college journalists on your campus are excited to get back to putting out a product for the community. As I’ve done a couple of times in the past, I’m putting out this checklist of things to consider for your online presence.

  • Have you got your news org. online?
  • Do you have a content management system?
  • Have you posted any videos online?
  • Have you included any audio soundbites in a story?
  • Have you done a photo slideshow?
  • Have you put up an audio slideshow (perhaps using Soundslides)?
  • Have you used a map to highlight the location of a story?
  • What about a timeline?
  • Have you used weblogs on your site?
  • Have you uploaded source documents (PDFs, excel spreadsheets, etc.) to accompany a big story?
  • Have you used social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to market your stories?
  • Have you tracked what others are saying about you via Google Blogsearch?
  • Have you used the web site to post breaking news online FIRST?
  • Have you moved the online editor out of the back office and into a position of authority?
  • Have you allowed comments on your stories?
  • Have you encouraged writers to write for the Web and include hyperlinks in their stories?
  • Are you selling ads for your online site?
  • Have you tried something experimental?

Obviously, I don’t expect you to be doing all of these at once if you’re not doing them now. But if you’re doing some of them (you have a site online, congratulations!), maybe it’s time to consider adding to your online toolbox.

Remember, your online presence doesn’t replace your print edition, but it adds depth to the stories you publish. Point people to your online site. Encourage them to “like” your Facebook page. Tweet and respond to people who tweet back to your Twitter presence.

If you’re short-staffed, pick one thing and try that for a semester. See how much you can build that one thing into a reliable skill for your student journalists. If it doesn’t work, try another thing. Above all, keep pushing.

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Radio reporting with the iPhone

April 5, 2011 in ideas, Tech Talk

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Neil Augenstein has a good post up at the PBS MediaShift blog about using his iPhone 4 for radio reporting. It’s worth a read because Augenstein is producing professional radio news with his phone, and it works.

So is it worth it? A year in, iPhone-only reporting isn’t perfect. While audio editing works great, with the phone’s built-in microphone I’d estimate the sound quality of my field reports is 92% as good as when I use bulky broadcast equipment. Getting better audio for my video is a real challenge. And if I ever have to cover a story from a subway tunnel or location where there’s no WiFi or cell coverage, I won’t be able to file until I resurface.

As digital equipment continues to morph I’m sure my tools will be substantially different within a few years. Every day, new applications open new opportunities for a reporter who’s willing to work around the limitations of iPhone-only reporting while maximizing the benefits.

This semester, we’ve been looking at using smaller equipment in our multimedia reporting class precisely because of the miniaturization of the news gathering equipment. I’ll talk more about the changes we’re making soon.

Is anyone out there in college media using mobile phones or iPod Touches (for instance) for gathering news on a consistent basis?

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QR codes and college media

February 22, 2011 in hope for the future, ideas, innovation, Mobile

UPDATE: See end of post for additions – ed.

One of the topics that came up two weeks ago when I attended the Mid-America Press Institute’s “Managing in the Digital Age” workshop was QR codes.

For the uninitiated, QR codes are square “bar codes” that can be read by smart phones. You can embed information in a QR code that will allow the smart phone user to access a web page, or an e-mail address, or send a text, etc.

Monday, I was discussing the topic with an advanced digital media class and we thought about some ways college newspapers could use the codes.

An obvious way to use them is in advertising. But another great way to use them would be to place them in the editorial content to promote content in their online presence. Think about it: when you promote online content in the newspaper, usually you are asking the reader to set aside the paper and go to a computer, type in a Web address, and find the content. With a QR code, the reader can scan the code in the publication and be right at the relevant content immediately.

After the class, I sent an e-mail out to the CMA listserv to see who was using this technique and for what purposes.

Newspapers that have been using them include the N.C. State Technician (ads), Minnesota Daily (ads, per Logan Aimone at ACP), Texas Wesleyan’s Rambler (editorial), the Northern Illinois University Northern Star, and the College of Charleston student newspaper (per Mandi Bryson, assistant student media director).

Here’s a sample of how the Northern Star has used them (thanks to Jim Killam for the PDF):

qrcode

The biggest issues with using QR codes in the student news media (as I see them) are smart phone adoption, and conceptual understanding.

In one class I did a survey and 1 out of 14 students had a smart phone. On the other hand, smart phones are becoming more common across the U.S. population of cell phone users.

But many smart phone users don’t even know what those square blotches of ink are supposed to mean. If you do plan to do something with QR codes for smart phone users, you’re going to have to add some informational content to explain what those things are.

Three years ago when I first heard about QR codes, they seemed like an interesting, but slightly opaque, addition to the use of mobile phones and the Internet. Now, when I travel, I see them cropping up more and more, and the trend is likely to continue.

Are there other college media outlets using QR codes in their publications? If so, drop a comment in the comment section or e-mail me at scmurley -at- gmail.com and I’ll update this post.

And for those who are interested, here’s a list of QR code generators. One thing I would caution: when you generate a QR code, make sure you have a smart phone handy to make sure it works before you put it in the publication. Nothing will abuse people of the desire to check out your QR codes more than it not working when they use it the first time.

Update 1: Susan Kirkman Zake mentions that The Daily Kent Stater has been using a QR code in their flag for the last week to promote KentWired.com, with additional info on how to use it. Here’s a screencap from the PDF version:

kentstater

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Free online tools to expand your story

October 30, 2010 in College Media, ideas, Links, online software, Tech Talk

links

I have created a page under the “Resources” tab at the top of the blog with a list of links to free online tools. This is a gathering place for links that I showed during a presentation at the National College Media Convention in Louisville (and also a couple of other workshops). I’ll be updating it in the future with other sites. Check it out here.

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Xtranormal: in ur text, making it video

February 6, 2010 in ideas, innovation

I linked to this site almost a year ago when I first discovered it, but I thought it was worth looking at again: xtranormal.com. The site allows you to produce an animated movie based upon the text you type into a script. It allows for various camera angles, characters, and actions. And, as with most online software, it’s free to sign up and use.

Here’s a movie I produced in about 30 minutes:

How is this helpful for journalists? I can think of a couple of uses for this. Suppose you are covering a court case where cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom. You could produce a “dramatic reading” with xtranormal. And editorial writers/cartoonists can have a field day with animated commentary.

For a writer who’s too shy to go on camera, this would be a fun way to “tape” a video of a story/column.

Who knows what other opportunities there are for a software like this. Experiment. Have some fun while doing journalism. Any other ideas?

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RTNDA’s social media guidelines

February 4, 2010 in ideas, industry news, management

twitter

Via Al Tompkins at Poynter, here are the guidelines for social media as proposed by the Radio and Television News Director’s Association.

College journalists should perhaps pay special attention to this one:

• Avoid posting photos or any other content on any website, blog, social network or video/photo sharing website that might embarrass you or undermine your journalistic credibility. Keep this in mind, even if you are posting on what you believe to be a “private” or password-protected site. Consider this when allowing others to take pictures of you at social gatherings. When you work for a journalism organization, you represent that organization on and off the clock. The same standards apply for journalists who work on air or off air.

A few weeks ago at the Canadian University Press Conference, I made this point during a session on social media. If you don’t want anything to embarrass you, don’t put it on the Internet, or share it via cellphone. At all. In these days of ubiquitous cell phone cameras, it’s almost impossible to control all access to something that might be embarrassing. If someone feels that they do want to share photos of themselves, they should use a personal account with controlled access. Even then, a photo could be “leaked” through other people who have access.

This is another handy set of guidelines to refer to when your media outlet is compiling social media guidelines.

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New software link dump

August 29, 2009 in ideas, innovation, online software

I come across new software that might be of use to college media outlets all the time. Most of them end up in the reinventing delicious account. Here are a few recent finds that might pique your interest:

Produle: This is an online Flash-based widget builder, sort of like Sproutbuilder. Also like Sproutbuilder, there are a variety of cost options. The free plan lets you have three widgets and 10MB of storage. You can’t track the use of the widgets, though, which is a little disappointing. The lowest-priced $$ plan costs $19/mo. for 15 widgets and does allow tracking. That’s $240/year, which might be within your budget if you don’t have any Flash whiz students on your staff. (thanks to @triptych on Twitter)

Jing: Jing is from the same company that produces Camtasia Studio and SnagIt, so it’s sort of a hybrid screenshot/screencapture tool that lets you share what you’re working on with others over the internet immediately. The free version records in swf video, while the “pro” version ($14.95/year) allows for mpeg-4 format and webcam recording, among other things. (thanks to @manfull on Twitter)

Blogo: Blogo is a Mac-only desktop blogging client, not unlike MarsEdit. The advantage of desktop blogging clients is that you can write blog posts when you’re not connected to the Internet, and – unlike using a text editor – desktop blogging clients have a similar interface to an actual blogging admin area. Blogo has drag and drop image editing and some other cool features. It saves drafts to your web server, which is also nice, and it will schedule posts in advance. If you like it, it’ll cost $25 after the demo period. I’ve been trying it out for the past couple of weeks and it works quite well so far.

logo_yugmaYugma: From the web site: “Yugma free web conferencing allows anyone, anywhere to instantly share their desktop and ideas online with others.” I found out about this software from Dr. James Danowski at the University of Chicago-Illinois, who shared his desktop to show me how to use a software program called Wordij. There is also a pro version.

gooseGrade: gooseGrade is a service that lets you copy edit any page on the web. If a web site owner has the gooseGrade widget installed, a gooseGrade user can highlight text that contains an error and add an edit to the text. This edit will then appear in the admin area of the weblog, and the site owner can approve/disregard the edit. Recently, gooseGrade opened up the system so you can copy edit any page on the web. The edits will show up in the gooseGrade system. This would be a good tool to implement to try to help your staff copy edit online stories after they are online. You don’t have to have a weblog system to use gooseGrade, but you’ll have to do the edits manually.


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