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

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

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