Evan Milberg: Comm 361

This chapter focuses on the future of journalism, which is many people collaborating online to cover a story. Today’s news has to be transparent and collaborative. There are three types of collaborative journalism covered in this chapter: crowsourcing, open-source reporting,  and pro-am journalism.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing involves asking for direct assistance from your audience with a specific project or question. News organizations use crowdsourcing as a way of online freelancing. However, some organizations, such as InnoCentive have offered money to people in the past to help them solve problems. Google does not pay people to help them find images, but the game offered, Image Labeler, can be fun and helps Google provide better photos.

Crowdsourcing is still experimental, but thousands are contributing and helping news organizations publish stories.

Open-Source Reporting

Unlike crowdsourcing, open-source reporting opens the process of reporting to the public. When people see how the process works, they are more likely to believe the reporter and less likely to accuse them of biases.

One way open-source reporting is being used is for beat blogging. The reporter builds a social network around a particular topic or beat, and brings the people who follow that beat together for discussion. The ability for userss to leave comments and suggestions make for more interactive stories. USA Today incorporates this method.

Another form of open-source reporting is link journalism. News organizations gather collections of links related to a particular story, which provides the full context of that story.

Pro-Am Journalism

Sometimes, your audience doesn’t just want to read the story, but also help make the story. No news organization can be everywhere at one time, so it helps to have people who are willing to contribute elements such as photos or links to a story. Some good examples of current uses of pro-am journalism are CNN’s iReport and NowPublic, a participatory news site that has a parternship with the Associated Press.

This chapter focuses on visual storytelling with photographs. Journalism without photographs is like writing without verbs. Your audience doesn’t just want to read the story, they want to see it too. This chapter covers the basics of digital photography, editing and publishing photos, and how to tell a story with those photos.

Digital Photography

Most disciplines have units of measurement. For photography, the unit is pixels. A pixel is essentially a small square on a matrix that makes a computer image. A picture is comprised of hundreds or thousands of pixels.

The second major concept to understand is resolution. Resolution is the number of pixels in an image. The higher the resolution, the better the picture will look. However, the larger the resoultion, the longer the picture takes to download. This is why some newspaper who post online use low-resolution pictures. Those same newspapers, however, run into trouble when a certain image looks blurry when altered because it is low-resolution.

Like all material published to the Web, newspapers and other organizations maintain ownership of the pictures they publish and put copyrights on them. The irony of this is that the new age of Web culture is all about sharing. In order to protect those who share their pictures, the Creative Commons Project was created. With this project, artists can mark their work with whatever rights they wish to reserve.

People take pictures with two types of digital cameras.

1. Point and shoot cameras: more compact, easier to use, and cheaper. Includes built-in lens and flash, and usually comes with video capabilities.
2. DSLR cameras: Usually capture better photos because its image sensor is 10 times larger. However, it’s not as user-friendly and it is expensive.

The camera has 4 basic functions:

1. Camera modes: Including action, portrait, or landscape.
2. Zoom: Either digital or optical
3. Flash: Auto flash or force flash
4. View/delete

Once you have captured your photos, the next step is editing. Some great outlets for editing photos include Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However, ethics comes into play. It is morally and legally wrong to remove objects from a photo to alter it. Improvements in technology have made it easier to not only to improve the quality of photos, but to transform a lie into reality.

Organizing your photos is important as well. You can organize photos from your computer using programs such as iPhoto for Mac or Windows Photo Gallery for PC.

Before you can publish a picture, there are a few steps one should take:

1. Edit a copy of the photo
2. Crop the photo
3. Resize the picture
4. Modify the resolution
5. Edit the color of the picture
6. Save a Web copy
7. Keep it simply

When you’re ready to publish to a blog, there’s a few things to remember: wrap your text around the photo using the align function, use intuitive alternative text, and add links and screenshots to your photos.

This chapter focuses on mobile journalism. Specifically the kinds of stories you can effectively publish with mobile reporting, the equipment needed for medium, and how news organizations use mobile to augment the platforms they already use.

What is Mobile Journalism?

With technology growing, people are becoming increasingly tech savvy. Mobile technology and computer technology overlap, with many people accessing the internet from their mobile phones. Phones are sophisticated enough now to let you surf the Web, and update your own personal Web 2.0 applications from there as well.

This growing technology allows for news organizations to start catering their stories for mobile devices. Since audiences are “going mobile,” news organizations must follow suit. This does not mean that mobile journalism replaces in-depth reporting or detract from the accuracy or compelling nature of journalism, it just means that there is a new outlet for news organizations to use as an add-on to what they already do.

Creating a Story for the Medium

Not only are audiences easier to reach with mobile journalism, but the stories themselves are becoming easier to cover on location with the growth of reporting technology.

When it comes to choosing equipment, there are a wide array of options. Between laptops, smartphones, video cameras, and live stream broadcasting, as long as you can connect to the Internet, you’re in business. However, when on location, bring only as much equipment as you need.

When deciding what your story should be for a particular location, consider whether the audience benefits from you’re taking them and if the reporting can be brief and easily summarized. This is particularly important for breaking news.

There are two ends of the eqiupment spectrum: the gearheads and the light packers. Gearheads comes fully equipped with a laptop, internet connect, a USB to hook up microphones, camera phones and digital phones, a tripod for a regular camera, and devices to record audio. Light packers can combine many of these things by packing smartphones. Smartphones come equipped with a full keyboard, a camera, and full internet capabilities.

The growth of mobile devices allow for more diversified options for publishing as well. Some may combine mobile technology with microblogging platforms like Twitter. Journalists can now kill two birds with one stone through mobile microblogging, making stories accessible through a computer or a phone. This can overlap with live blogging, with constant updates covering a particular story. Some notable live blogging services are CoveritLive and TechChrunch.

If you want an even more interactive approach, you can report live video stream to mobile devices as well. The benefit of services like Qik, Kyte, and Flixwagon is that you can use your mobile network to connect to live video without an Internet connection. However, these services only work for phones that can shoot video.

This interactivity is becoming the future of journalism. With this new technology you can share audience feedback from Twitter on your Web site and even create an RSS feed from it. Mobile journalism allows you to include your audience in your coverage of a story, and it them interested, which is the ultimate goal, right?

This chapter focuses on microblogging in the field of journalism with an emphasis on Twitter.

Intro to Microblogging

Microblogging sites let you post brief text messages (usually up to 140 characters) on the Web. The interesting part of microblogging is that you can post these messages through a mobile device, a computer, instant messaging, e-mail, and other ways.

Twitter is the most popular microblogging service. Some of the reasons it has become so popular are its ease of publishing and consuming, along with brevity of messages. There is also a sense of connectivity of updates that makes people feel connected to each other.

Why is Microblogging Important?

The major thing that sets apart microblogs from regular blogs is that microblogging happens in real  time. As it relates to journalism, readers want to know what is happening right now! While this may take some readers away from Google, Google has countered with its own real-time technology, Google Wave.

In this age of journalism, every venue for print media is augmented by microblogging or other forms of Web 2.0. With Twitter, journalism becomes interactive.

Limited posts to 140 characters is a great tool for teaching journalists as well. With limits on how much you can write, it challenges journalists to get to the point as quickly as possible.

Microblogging has become an effective medium for breaking news, building a target audience, and marketing a publication’s brand.

Using Twitter

Just like with regular blogging, before you create a microblog, you need to know what your purpose for the microblog is. In the field of journalism you could either try to build a community of readers, create a network of people who follow a specific topic, create a network with other journalists, or seek marketing opportunities.

It’s important to undertsand the language of Twitter. The most common type of communication between two people with Twitter is the @ symbol. Everyone on Twitter has a Twitter ID, and when you insert the @ symbol before a person’s ID, that signifies that you are sending a public message to that person. If you want the message to the private, you can send a DM, or direct message, similar to e-mail.

Another common occurance on Twitter is the retweet tool, which allows you to show people who follow your tweets something that someone else said.

Building a Twitter Network

You could say that the follower is the unit of measurement for Twitter success. However, you cannot simply post things on Twitter and expect millions of people to read it instantaneously. You have to start by building a network.

Before anyone can follow you or know you exist, you have to follow other people first. Twitter is like an RSS feed, except instead of following one source, you are following a bunch of people in real time as they post.

This chapter is dedicated to blogging. A good blog, which requires dedication and determination, is like a continuing conversation with readers. Every college journalist should have one.

Blog Basics

Blogs are defined by three key characteristics:

1. They are frequently updated Web sites that display content in reverse chronological order
2. Each entry in the blogs has a headline and a body
3. They have links the direct the reader to a comment section

Another characteristic of blogs is that they’re important. They have changed they way journalism is done. Dan Gillmor created the first blog for a mainstream news organization in 1999, for the San Jose Mercury News.

One of the most important news values of journalism is immediacy, and blogging’s combination of interactivity and easy accessibility allows for certain blogs to publish stories right as they happen. However, as a caveat, one should never sacrifice accuracy for immediacy. Blogging brings journalists closer to their target audiences and removes the limitations caused by time and space.

On top of these advantages, because blogging is a Web tool, it can be edited and experimented with, unlike print media. It is a far more flexible medium with limitless potential.

In order to become an effective blogger, you need to read other blogs and see what their strenghts and weaknesses are. You also need to learn the language of blogging. A key word that some may not know are trackbacking, which is a way of communication between blogs when one blog links material to another one.

Creating a Blog

The first steps in creating a blog should be deciding what the blog is about and what the purpose of it is. After that, think of a 1-3 word name, and write a short description of the blog. What is its mission?

After you cover the basics of establishing what your blog is about, you can work on how it looks. You can change everything from your page template, to the CSS code for the text, and the fonts and colors. You can even add gadgets or widgets, such as a calendar or a blogroll.

As far as creating content, Briggs offers a formula for driving traffic to your blog: post regularly, write effective headlines, and participate in the community. Some other tips include:

• Put the readers first: not try to impress them, but have their interests in mind when you write
• Organize your ideas
• Be direct
• Make your posts scannable: readers have short attention spans
• Use links, summarize, and analyze
• Participate in the community by reading other blogs and offering feedback

Keep in mind that when you create a blog, you are competing against other blogs for traffic. You can use beat the competition by adding an RSS feed to your blog. It’s the most efficient way to scan large quantities of information and it efficiently tracks the topics you have interest in.

During President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address in January, the people of the United States finally got to see the man they voted for.

In his speech, Obama told Democrats to not “run for the hills,” one of many statements that reminded political consultant Bob Shrum of the oratory prowess that Obama used to captivate the nation before he became president. 

“Obama was Obama again” said Shrum.

According to Shrum, the president rediscovered the voice that made his 2008 campaign so successful. 

Shrum, who has advised numerous Democratic presidential campaigns, joined students participating from the George Mason University Video Studio along with Steve Scully, the political editor for the C-SPAN networks, and students from the University of Denver and the University of the District of Columbia.   

The students had the opportunity to ask Shrum a variety of questions, one of which covered the strenghts of Obama’s speech.   

“I think the speech had a colloquial sense, but wasn’t pedestrian. It moves with a rhythm you find compelling. What mattered was not the length of his words, but the strength of his words” said Shrum. 

Shrum seemed to imply that if one of the president’s goals was to restore Americans’ confidence in his administration, he successfully did that.

“He was confident and honest with people. The sense you got out of this was someone with a sense of direction and someone who cares about people” said Shrum.  

In his first year, two of the more defining issues the Obama Administration has had to tackle have been the economy and health care reform.   

“[This speech was] reaffirmation that he wasn’t going to run away from these issues” said Shrum. 

As for weaknesses of the speech, Shrum had a hard time thinking of any. 

“Weaknesses? I don’t know. There was some policy stuff that was not riveting, but he moved through it quickly” said Shrum. 

The distance learning course, which is produced by C-SPAN, is a unique opportunity for students to interview guests via video conference. The course airs on C-SPAN3 on Fridays at 5 p.m. and also streams online at (http//www.c-span.org/Distance_Learning).

Intro to Digital Information 

The Web is a way to send and receive digital information. This information can come in the form of text, photos, audio, and even videos. These files can be measured in bits and bytes.

It’s important to know the weight of the files you download. Files are measured in bytes. As a general rule of thumb, you should never send an e-mail with an attachment larger than one megabyte. That way, you don’t clog the recipient’s server.

How Web Browsers Work

The chapter is divided into four sections, the first explaining how the Internet works. It’s important to note that the terms Internet and World Wide Web do not mean the same thing. The Web is not the computer’s network itself. It is the the way you access information through the network.

The Web’s server is what stores and distributes information over the internet. The Web’s browser is the software used to obtain and present information over the Web.  Some browsers include Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox.  Browsers do three things:

1. Search and find information on Web servers
2. Retrieves information and brings it back to you
3. Renders the information for display on your computer

When a browser retrieves information for you, it makes a digital copy of that Web page, known as the cache, which is stored temporarily on your computer.

Using RSS

The second part of the chapter discusses RSS, an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows you to subscribe to a feed of information (usually relating to one specific topic) that you can access direclty via the Web or an RSS reader.

According to Briggs, RSS is the most efficient way to view large quantities of information in an organized way.

Setting up an RSS Reader and subscribing to feeds can be done in three steps:

1) Select a reader: either web-based like Yahoo and Google or stand-alone readers such as NewsGator, FeedDemon, and SharpReader. Web-based readers are accessed from specific Web pages, while stand-alone readers are downloadable programs that you save to your computer and use afterwards.

For those who want the best of both types of readers, NetVibes and Google Reader are alternative options.

2) Find a Feed: Go to your reader and click which feed you want to subscribe to. If you have difficulty, you should upgrade your browser. If you can’t do that, obtain the RSS’s URL, which will probably end in “xml.”

3) Subscribe

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

The third part of the chapter discusses File Transfer Protocol, which is a way of moving extremely large files that cannot be sent through e-mail.

As aforementioned, Briggs mentions that it’s generally unadvisable to send e-mail attachments larger than 1 megabyte because most network servers cannot handle them.  FTP can be used to transfer these large files from one computer to another. 

Some good FTP programs for Windows include FireZilla, Coffee Cup, and Ace. For Mac users, there are Fetch, Cute FTP, and Cyberduck. 

In order to actually transfer these large files, after you download the software,  you need to obtain the account information of the server your sending your file to. 

HTML, CSS, and XML 

The last part of the chapter covers the different codes for arranging text, audio, video, and other media on the Web. Basic Web pages are created with HTML code which is stored on the server. The code tells the browser how to display the media.

The commands used in HTML are called tags. Most of the tags used in HTML come in pairs, with one opening and another one closing the command.  The same rules of HTML apply to images as well, but the tags are different. The <img src> tag is used when uploading pictures.

The next code used is CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. CSS puts an emphasis on the creative aspect of Web design. With CSS, you can change the text’s font, color, size, and other qualities. You can CSS to augment what you already have selected with HTML.  In between the <body> tags for HTML, you simply insert your H1 (heading 1) and ul (unordered list) tags to change how the text looks.   For tutorials on how to do more: go to www.csszengarden.com  

The last code used is XML, or extensible markup language. Like CSS, XML is not a replacement to HTML, it just augments it. Remember how the URLs for RSS feeds end in “xml?”  That’s because most XML is used for RSS feeds. Http://xmlfiles.com is a great resources for using XML.