Innovation in College Media

Image via WikipediaFor a long time, I labored under the impression that the ability to extract audio from a video clip was non-existent in iMovie ‘08. Turns out, that’s not the case. There’s a way to do it, but it’s less straightforward than in iMovie HD. Colleague Doug Lawhead turned me on to this relatively simple explanation of the process.

I still dislike the interface, but iMovie HD is buggy and not being upgraded. I’m using iMovie ‘08 in the beginning multimedia class for the first time. We’ll probably be moving to Final Cut Express for our classes in the future.

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A few weeks ago, a group of college news web editors and a couple of advisers got together to discuss content management systems. The result is CoPress.

From the about page:

Student newspapers, at colleges and universities, fare no better than the pros. In fact, they’re generally worse off. Few student publications have much technical talent at all on staff, and what they do have is spread very thin. Most are stuck with bad content management systems — either clunky commercial products or simple blogging tools — that take much hacking and “programming” to fit the complex needs of a modern news Web site. As a result, developers spend inordinate effort fighting their CMSes, leaving minimal time to innovate on top of the platforms or build engaging online material. To date, most publications have struggled individually to reinvent the wheel.

They’re trying to reinvent the wheel with a new cms. Per the comments, Daniel Bachhuber points out that they’re not developing a new cms, but trying to  gather info to make an informed decision on a cms. Read his comment for more explanation. That’s a tall order, but it’s an interesting development that sprung from the ground up.

They are in the process of collecting data from a survey of college newspaper web sites. Be sure and contribute to the data set if you are an adviser or an editor for your college newspaper. Follow the developments on the web site.

For those with an interest in college media advising, the College Media Advisers web site has been upgraded. The new site is run on Drupal, upgraded from Joomla, which I helped transition the site from a College Publisher site in 2005. Click below for the new features. Many of these features were discussed when we moved off CP, but we didn’t have the resources to add them until CMA hired Bill Neville part-time to do web site development. (via Neville to the CMA listserv)

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Image via WikipediaJust in time for tonight’s debates, a couple of links for your enjoyment:

Kathy Gill’s Guide to the First 2008 Presidential Debate @ about.com

and the Daily Tar Heel’s new political twitter feed.

Obviously, the Daily Mississippian has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for coverage.

Anyone else doing something special for the debates?

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Image via WikipediaChuck Burke, an Eastern alumnus who is a designer at the Chicago Tribune, spoke to the Illinois Community College Journalism Association conference tonight. Burke is a community college alum as well, so he shared some of his experience and also gave the students a preview of the Trib redesign that’s coming out Monday.

There are some interesting design changes in the offing, but Burke also said that the redesign was part of an effort to transition the Tribune’s storytelling style as well. Instead of having five top stories on the front page, there are now going to be a couple of stories on the front and pointers to inside pages. I’ll post a photo later.

Burke showed some of the early prototypes, including the one that was leaked onto the Internet last month. But he also said the prototypes were just to push the envelope of creativity as much as anything like changing the name of the paper.

There’s going to be a new features section starting next week as well. Burke said the Trib is also working on a web site redesign, but focused on the print redesign first.

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Image via WikipediaI really like a lot of things about sports web site espn.com. They have a fine stable of writers and reporters, some cool flash-based live in-game data interfaces, and the ability to stoke the SEC-Big 10-Pac 10 football controversy like no other.

But for the love of all that is right and true about the web, STOP THE AUTO-PLAY VIDEO ON THE FRONT PAGE!

There are few things more annoying than surfing to a web site and being bombarded with sights and sounds from a video that I didn’t expect. Quite possibly the only thing I can think of that approaches that level of annoyitivity (I made that word up) is those flash ads that obscure part of the copy until you close them.

We all know how to use the “play” button, ESPN. If we want to listen to your anchors talking about the latest sports news for 2 minutes, WE CAN PUSH THE BUTTON. As it is, I am to the point where I don’t even want to check the scores from Sunday’s NFL games to avoid the annoyance. There’s always Yahoo! Sports instead.

I seem to recall for a long time the auto-play was turned off. Maybe it was my browser. Whatever. It needs to stop.

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via College Rag, a note that college journalists and writers can sign up with Writer’s Residence for a free online portfolio … for a year. After the year is up, it’s $8.95/month.

This is not something I’d recommend. Instead, a student could set up a WordPress.com or Blogger site and post their writing samples there. Have photos to display? Flickr, Imageshack.us, smugmug or photobucket will work. Video? YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo or several other sites will fit the bill.

WR might make sense for a non-tech savvy writer who doesn’t want to be bothered, but a student today needs to be bothered with these things. Your tech-savvy is your friend in the job market.

What’s more, those sites are socially networked and search-friendly. I can’t suggest spending $110/year for template-based hosting.

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Image via WikipediaAn interesting discussion popped up on the CMA listserv this week about pay for multimedia work. Some college newspapers, for instance, pay reporters a certain amount per story. They pay photographers per assignment or per photo.

So how does that structure translate to multimedia. Jim Killam, adviser for the Northern Star at NIU shared their pay structure on the list and agreed to let me post it here.

• Video story (max. 2 minutes)
  Shoot, edit: $15
  Shoot only: $10
  Stories must be posted online for payment to be made
• Video Catch of the Day (max. 1 minute) [this is a quick personality profile on a random student]
  Shoot, edit: $8
  Shoot only: $5
• Audio slide show
  Extra $5 above what was paid for shooting the print assignment and slide show
• Slide Show (no audio)
  No extra: Normal payment made for shooting the print assignment
• Blog
  $7 flat fee per week (minimum of three posts)

Jim says the structure is still in flux and may change. I noted that the shooting part of the video pay structure was higher than the editing part, even though editing can take much longer than shooting.

I do like the fact that they are paying for blogging, with a minimum required amount of posts. And they put a cap on the time for a video report (2 minutes).

Anyone else got information about pay structures for multimedia work? Is this a good structure? Any suggestions for improvements?

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Here’s an archived video of Robert Scoble’s keynote at the Online News Association. Scoble was livestreaming the keynote at kyte.tv.

Image via WikipediaI just created a Facebook page for the CICM. If you’d like to be a “fan,” click here. We’ll spare you the spam, but it would be nice to know who’s following our adventures in multimedia for college news media.

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