April 22, 2008 in Newsrooms, online software, Tech Talk
A few people have asked for screenshots of our online photo request system. Screen shots don’t really do a good job at showing what the system can do so I created this short video.
April 21, 2008 in software, Tech Talk
UPDATE: Rich Cameron has a few ideas for ways to use Sprout Builder.Â
Sprout Builder is another site that lets you create simplified multimedia projects and embed them into a website or on a weblog. The controls are relatively easy to understand (as compared to Flash). Here’s a sample widget I created a few minutes ago:
Sprout is similar to Toufee, a web-based Flash project creator that I’ve been trying out. The big difference so far is that Sprout seems easier to use and actually works. I’ve had problems with getting Toufee’s new interface to work.Why would this be of interest to college media types? Ease of use, built-in social networking publishing options, and training to think about multimedia projects and the stories they tell without having to get ugly with Flash and ActionScript.
h/t TechCrunch
March 27, 2008 in software, Tech Talk
Adobe just launched their free online version of Photoshop. Here’s a post from TechCrunch that talks in a little more details about the site.I tried to get a log-in this morning, and it took over an hour to get the verification e-mail. Also, I could not get the interface – a Flash-based interface – to load in Firefox when I tried it at first. Safari loaded it fine and I got my log-in. Here’s a link to the first photo I played around with.Most college media operations already have copies of Photoshop available, but here’s another potential for ways to get the non-photojournalist used to uploading and editing photos. It might even be a way to save funds on full copies of Photoshop for people who don’t do much more than adjust curves. As a side note, I’m always taking screen grabs for the weblog, and have to resize and optimize the images for the web using the “save for web” tool in PS. Online editing tools might be the way I want to go in the future to avoid that hassle.
February 28, 2008 in Flash, fun
If you want to get people involved in learning Flash, one way to do that is to make it more fun, and nothing is more fun than cartoons (at least, nothing you can do in print!).
There are a couple of editorial cartoonists out there who are doing flash-based editorial cartoon animations.
One is Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press. Check out his weblog and see some of the animations, along with his regular print editorial cartoons. Another is Grey Blackwell at the Raleigh News-Observer. Check out the videos here to see some examples of his work. UPDATE: Also, Nick Anderson from the Houston Chronicle. Check his work out here (look on the right side of the screen for his “channel”).
Update: Thanks to Mindy McAdams for reminding me about this topic with this post.
If you’ve got a good editorial cartoonist on staff, maybe they could be hooked up with a Flash designer, or use the opportunity to learn on their own, and create some Flash-based editorial cartoons for the web site.
August 26, 2007 in Tech Talk, Websites
This spring, Adam Drew from University of Texas at Arlington was one of the attendees at our workshop in Nashville. We spent a good part of Friday night talking about content management systems and the way the Shorthorn put their content on the web. The Shorthorn has always hosted their own site (since 1997), but was still inputting content manually into static web pages every issue.
This week, Adam told me (via Facebook wall, believe it or not) that the Shorthorn now has a new content management system – Joomla. Click on the image above to cruise around their new site. If you want a sense of what the old site looks like, you can go to the archives page. One thing you might also note is that the Shorthorn is at a .com domain, while the archives are at uta.edu. Don’t know if that was part of the migration to a new CMS or not.
For those who don’t know, Joomla is an open-source CMS. Open source means it’s free to download and modify. For those with the technical savvy and the want-to to do so, it’s one of the ways to get online I outlined almost one year ago here: Options for hosting an online news site.
July 30, 2007 in Flash, Learn, Multimedia views
Mindy McAdams posts some good thoughts on her blog (now with WordPress goodness!) – Thinking about learning Flash:
I’m suggesting that you set yourself up to succeed, not fail. And that means maybe you shouldn’t plan to finish that project on deadline, and then rush and gnash your teeth and feel stupid — and quit. If you’re a photographer — was your first roll of film worthy of Page One? If you’re a designer — was your first information graphic suitable for a section front? And if you’re a reporter — surely your first story was completely rewritten by your editor?
Why should learning Flash be any different from other storytelling practices?
She has a good point. Flash is a different animal than print journalists are used to dealing with. Timelines, actionscripts, and a confusing interface all call for a different mindset than Word or even InDesign or Quark Xpress. So there will be a natural learning curve.
This semester, I’m using Mindy’s Flash Journalism for an interactive media class for the first time. I’m glad students will have time to explore the strengths and weaknesses of Flash over the course of a semester before coming up with a final product. If you’re hoping to use more Flash in your college media operation this year, I’d suggest a similar stress on training before attempting to put out something for the general public. Let students learn to succeed, then use that training to come up with innovative storytelling.
June 19, 2007 in Learn, Tech Talk, Websites
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the new College Publisher “Ingest” video upload tool that is the key to CP’s Roo-based video functionality.
Fortunately for me, the folks at CP have produced a screencast that walks through the process. Check it out. For those of you on the CP platform, this is definitely something you’ll want to point out to your editors and web workers. Be sure to also get your hands on the PDF version, which explains some of the encoding particulars that you’ll need to check to make sure your video doesn’t get spit back because it’s incompatible. When I did the walk-through of the Ingest tool, I got one video to work correctly, and another one didn’t work.
CP says the video tools will be available to their partners by the fall semester.
April 3, 2007 in blogging, Multimedia views, Tech Talk
Megan Taylor, who’s spent far more time with Splashcast than I have, has found some great uses for mixed media RSS feeds, including breaking news coverage and collaborative news networks.
I’m thinking of putting some of our recent innovation interviews into the Splashcast stream as well.
March 28, 2007 in Tech Talk
In our continuing effort to clue our colleagues in to the latest innovations and web-based media gear, I’ve created a Twitter account for the CICM. (blame Jack Lail and Rob Pongsajapan if you must)
What’s Twitter? Good question, and good luck trying to describe it in a few words. Basically, I’d call it a text-messaging social networking tool. Some news orgs are already getting on board, including the Knoxville News (twitter page). Read more about possible journalistic uses for this tool from Jack Lail (here’s his twitter page). The software really hit big in the tech sphere during this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin.
If nothing else, Twitter is great at forcing you to condense your prose down to 140 words. And it’s free to use from the web-based interface.
I plan to experiment with using twitter this weekend during the CICM workshop, where I’ll be teamed with Lail and Lee Clontz showing attendees how to use web-based tools to improve their journalism. Follow the action on our twitter page. Or watch the widget on the right sidebar of this page.
March 8, 2007 in Learn, Tech Talk
Here’s an interesting web site: NGO-in-a-box Audio Video.
It is a collection of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools, documentation and tutorials that introduce you to the world of FOSS and the low-cost technology that is transforming the balance of forces in the realm of media production.
Many of the software tools are probably familiar, but if you’re looking to do audio or video on a shoestring budget, this looks like a good place to look for options. found via unmediated.
Sprout is similar to