It's been quiet for quite a while, so I just wanted to give a brief glimpse at a few of the resources I've discovered during the last several months:

- NextNewsroom (http://www.nextnewsroom.com/ -- not to be confused with the NewsroomNext project) - A college media group gets serious about modeling industry-wide change for others to emulate/adapt.

- News Videographer (http://newsvideographer.com/) - A good source of information for a new-to-video person like me.

- Shawn Smith's blog (http://www.newmediabytes.com/) - This fella is a producer at the news source for a good chunk of my old home state. Some of his ideas are intriguing.

- Wired Journalists (http://mediageeks.ning.com/) - If you have the google toolbar installed with Web Clips, this site's Yahoo-Pipes-based feed stream will get automatically installed, and it will keep you busy finding all sorts of new approaches to media. In fact, it's likely that if you watch this site's feed(s) for a bit, all three of the other sites will pop up.

Labels: journalism, media, multimedia, news, newspapers, newsrooms, organization, skills

Andrew Donohue is executive editor of voiceofsandiego.org, a nonprofit, independent online newspaper focused on issues impacting the San Diego region. According to the organization's funding description, the publication is the only professionally staffed, nonprofit online news site in the state focused on local news and issues. Donohue oversees news coverage and reports on local politics. He also won the 2006 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Online Investigative Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. Donohue's examination of an affordable housing program in San Diego abused by participants and contractors showed "the value of cultivating sources and displaying integrity," according to contest judges quoted by SPJ. "Goes beyond just good reporting in dimension, documentation and results."



Bobbi Bowman is diversity director for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, one of the most active professional journalism organizations in North America. Recent printed works include articles on immigration and diversity issues for the San Francisco Chronicle and The Poynter Institute.

Labels: diversity, editors, education, gljjif2007, media, multimedia, newspapers, online, video, young journalists

This, by far, is the most addicting thing ever.

It brings up an interesting topic, though. Do you guys at BGSU consider this type of work journalism? At Ohio University, they put the students who aspire to do this type of work in the in the school of telecommunications or in visual communications, which in no way has any affiliation with our J-school. I think it's bull.

If you watch a good one, let us know by posting it in comments.

Labels: college_media, flash, journalism, media, multimedia, online, video

Former journalist Carl Sessions Step, who teaches at the University of Maryland and is senior editor of the American Journalism Review, wrote an interesting piece for this month's edition. The story focuses on the increasing frustration among young staffers at the Charlotte Observer about their paper's slow evolution. The Observer's under-30 workers seem scared about their futures in journalism. They wonder, will they still have jobs in 20 years? The layoffs and lack of job security in the industry, coupled with their paper's "discouraging progress" (read: few A1 stories that attract younger readers, more talk than action and editors' apparent refusal to adapt at the reader's pace ), seem to be making these young journos question their industry despite their passion for it. Toward the end of the article, Step gets a little more positive by focusing on some of the staff's efforts to have more impact in newsroom decisions and become part of the solution, rather than dwelling on the problems but I was a bit sad after I read this.

What do you think about the article? Do you think young journos should be as scared as those at the Observer? I'd like to think if we focus on the future possibilities available on the Web in the form of video, flash presentations, etc., we won't need to stress as much as elder journos would tell us.

Labels: career_advise, editors, journalism, media, newspapers, organization, teens

Read this New York Times story, titled All the World's a Story, and start the debate in our "Comments" field below.

Is journalism, reporting and news organizations better off as a free agency model? No real newsroom, no full-time reporters, instead you outsource the story. A free agent reporter is picked up for an assignment pitched by readers, who contribute the initial facts and lead maybe. They're calling it "Wiki-journalism."

I dunno man. What do you think of the pro's and con's?

Labels: journalism, media, multimedia, news, newspapers, online, organization, story_planning

We're finally getting soundslides down here at my mid-sized paper. If you don't have it, you most likely will within six months: It's cheap and handy.

Since we're getting it, I figured this was a good time to put a bit of a public service message out there to anyone going into newspapers: You'll likely be using this product, so spend a few minutes to use it correctly.

I've been looking at soundslides presentations since The State News at MSU started doing their own groundbreaking, home-grown versions, and one thing has disturbed me a ton: Most papers leave captions turned off. For example: This or this. They're nice, but they lack default access to a layer of information that would be easy to provide.

I had always thought that this was a flaw of the soundslides software until I saw this. In the first two (and most other examples available), captions are hidden behind a button, if they're available at all. In the third, captions are automatically turned on.

Now I know that we have a choice (which, incidentally, is what convinced us to finally purchase the product).

We can try to be TV stations (we'll fail), or we can be the next step in what was formerly known as print media, with a blend of images, sounds, text to provide information and links to even more information. Newspapers' strength has always been their ability to provide exactly as much context as a reader wants, whether he or she is browsing the headlines or reading a 48-inch story all the way through, complete with breakout boxes. Now it's up to us in the next generation to keep that context available instead of letting it wither.

Do you think we're up to the task?

Labels: career_advise, college_media, education, flash, journalism, maestro, media, multimedia, news, newspapers, online, story_planning, student_press, video

For better or for worse, most of our readers live in relative proximity to Cleveland. I urge you to check this event out:

In Their Words: Teens as Media Consumers and Predictors

It's also on the calendar at right.

You'll want the information this event provides. You might not want it now, but you'll want it when you're trying to argue with veteran newspaper reporters about why they need to adapt. You'll want it when you're interviewing for a job. You'll want it when you're trying to convince your editor to send you on that cool assignment. This stuff comes in handy.

Labels: cleveland, conference, journalism, media, spj, teens

So you're on your first multimedia reporting gig. You've got your story, several videos of your impassioned interview subjects, three PDFs of competing neighborhood planning reports, a map of the affected area ... and absolutely no clue how to make sense of them all.

If you play your digital cards right, you can keep your readers from feeling equally confused. Check out these tips: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070210ruel/

As the OJR article demonstrates, it's not enough to have multimedia anymore: Writers, photographers, designers, editors and yes, even programmers need to work together in planning and organizing how a story will be told. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's essentially the gist of the Maestro process that became popular a few years back. Examples in your portfolio of this type of collaboration are likely to be the difference between getting your desired job and a facing a long search for employment.

Side note: The article makes note of Eyetrack III near the bottom. Some information on that rather cool study can be found here: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm

Labels: flash, maestro, media, news, online, organization, story_planning

For photographers and page designers, there are quite a few Web sites on the Internet where you can build your own online portfolio.

Doing this will help your internship hunt tremendously. It's a low-cost way to organize and present your work. When you get an editor's attention, they can quickly see your work online instead of waiting for the mail, and losing focus of you in the meantime.

It's also an easy way to show off your work to family and friends who don't get to regularly see the print versions.

The most popular page design site is News Page Designer, this is where all the professional designers have their portfolios.
One very nice up-and-comer is College Front Page. There both photographers and designers can build their own CFP Personals Page, which shows off your work in a very nice revolving slideshow, complete with detailed captions you can type explaining your thoughts for each piece.
CFP Personals also is a bit more fun, it's sort of like the Facebook of journalism portfolio sites.
Photobucket is one of the more popular free sites for amateur photographers.

Regardless of where you build an online portfolio, you'll need to make your pages into much smaller jpg or pdf images. News Page Designer has a tip sheet on how to do this.

Labels: applications, applying, career_advise, clips, college_media, editors, flash, internships, job hunt, media, multimedia, newspapers, online, portfolio, resumes, skills, snd