Archive for January, 2008
Every newspaper should pay attention to EveryBlock
EveryBlock is ChicagoCrime.org on steroids, and it is officially here to change the face of journalism forever. EveryBlock strives to put data into the hands of citizens down to the block level. It strives to give users a much better portrait of the world around them. From the introductory blog post at EveryBlock: For a [...]
Pre-roll ads are a great way to lose money
Apparently, users don’t like them. Well, users don’t like a lot of ads, but it seems that the majority of users won’t even sit through a pre-roll ad to get to the content they originally wanted to view. Now, how is that going to make you any money or disseminate your content? Cory Begman doesn’t [...]
If Time and Slate can use Twitter, so can you
Time, Slate and others have begun using Twitter to post rapid-fire updates from the campaign trail and at primaries and caucuses. And if they can do it, why can’t you? You can. Twitter is easy. Signing up takes seconds. All you have to know how to do is type 140 characters or less and hit [...]
You still can’t teach culture
A lot of people disagree with me, but I’ll say it again: you can’t teach culture. Sure, you can learn culture, but it cannot be taught. Learning culture is an affirmative step, it’s something an interested person does because he or she wants to. Being taught something is a passive step. Someone is teaching you [...]
Another old-school journalist who just doesn’t get it
The Los Angeles Times again has a columnist who just doesn’t get it. This time it’s Bill Dwyre’s turn to say something stupid. We blog before we report, when it should be the other way around. We write more about ourselves than we do about our subjects. We have Facebook and YouTube, and we see [...]
A lot of the best young journalists are leaving
Journalism is hemorrhaging some of its top young talent. Many of the best j-school students forgo a career in the depressing landscape of journalism for law, PR, political science, Web starts up, etc. And more power to them. I’m not going to blow some smoke up your ass about how journalism matters or how this [...]
Final project at online storytelling seminar
I did my Poynter project on a no kill animal shelter in St. Petersburg. Now, the projects that most of us did probably would have been handled differently in a real-world situation. I spent a few hours at the shelter, but in real life, I would have spent more time. I would have called ahead [...]
Thumbs up for Online Storytelling seminar at Poynter
I can now officially recommend the Online Storytelling With Audio & Images seminar at Poynter. Creating an audio slideshow is easy. Creating a great audio slideshow is hard. This seminar can help show you how to make the latter. The seminar had many audio slideshow neophytes but also people who had some experience with audio [...]
Heads and tails at Poynter
Making great audio can be as simple as heads and tails. Howard Berkes of NPR gave us a great tip to always grab 1-2 minutes of ambient audio (often white noise) from every interview you do, even if it’s indoor in a “seemingly” quiet room. Every situation has ambient noise, but by grabbing extra ambient [...]
More thoughts on Poynter
Multimedia journalism is one of those funny things in life. Most of the people producing it weren’t originally multimedia — they were monomedia. If you’re a photographer you just add some audio skills and all the sudden you have multimedia. Right? The unique problem of creating audio slideshows is often people work on them by [...]