November 2004 Archives

We made a great step toward convergence between KUJH-TV News and the University Daily Kansan Friday when the Kansan staff came to visit the 694 online production class. The discussion churned out a lot of similarities between the Kansan and KUJH-TV News. Both are reformating their Web sites with the intent on being more than just shovelware. Both are producing news about the campus and Lawrence community, targeting students and embracing technology. Most importantly, both want to work together, at least in theory.

Andrew Vaupel, who will be next semester's editor-in-chief, asked a good question: How do we work together on stories?

One student mentioned the importance of communication, but there are some roadblocks. Email seems to get lost in the cyber-zone. Phone messages don't always get returned. The Kansan is up the hill and KUJH-TV is down in Dole.

Reporters for both media have different deadlines and schedules. Is it even possible to converge? The biggest issue both media have to overcome is mindset, Vaupel said. Student journalists need to think like future journalists. Next semester, the Kansan will have a liason in the Multimedia Newsroom. This will help students begin the journey from single-media mindedness to cross platform learning and reporting. KUJH-TV News will be able to share stories easier, with the chance of more 415 and 409 stories being published or aired. The liason may even help coordinate KUJH-TV News and Kansan coverage of big events. J.T. Mitchum, online producer, said they'll need some "fire drills" for this type of coverage to work. Matt Rodriguez, online producer, said that Kansan staff has come down to the Multimedia Newsroom, but KUJH-TV staff has not had a presence in the Kansan.

It's true. For campus media convergence to work, the effort needs to come from both KUJH-TV and the Kansan. But before that happens, there are some important questions to be answered.

How do we utilize all student reporters? How do we teach them how to write and think multimedia? How will the information be shared? How will news be covered?

In the coming semester, convergence will happen. How fast these questions get answered will depend on quickly the mindset changes.

The Friday morning 694 class starts at 9:30 a.m. A bit early for some students (you know who you are). So, Professor Musser started a Friday morning bagel and schmear ritural. It motivates them, I think.

I learned this week that the "everything" bagel is just too much for this early morning crowd. Interesting, since this generation, if any, would seem to enjoy - no expect - everything all at once. Aren't these the same young adults who watch TV, talk on the cell phone and surf the Web all while listening to their iTunes?

Natalie caught with a big grin on her face as Ellyn quickly makes a run for the door after class.

Working with Natalie Myers on her in-depth 693 project was a sometimes frustrating but ultimately rewarding experience. It often felt like the blind leading the blind -- I'm sure Natalie expected me to be more technically proficient. But she gave me some great material to work with, and I think the result was satisfactory.

We hit any number of snags along the way. There were long stretches of time when Blogger apparently went into hibernation. Another issue was that we had a few different sets of instructions floating around, some old, some updated, but none 100% reliable as far as I could tell. This was nobody's fault; it's just that we kept making new discoveries every day about how best to deal with Blogger's eccentricities, and no one had time to thoroughly update our manuals with every new discovery.

I'm beginning to feel more comfortable with the ins and outs of HTML code. Even though much of it is still gibberish to me, I like the idea that I can just punch in a formula and voila! I'm a web designer. More often, though, I would miss a back-slash here, a quotation mark there, and a grotesquely deformed window would pop up instead of my video clip. I hope to write in more detail on my personal blog about some of these horrible mutants, such as the zombie bar graph, the leprous video clip, and the incredible shrinking window.

Overall, the fact that it was such a slapdash, trial-and-error process only heightened my enjoyment of the experience and my satisfaction once it was done. It felt more like a process of experimentation and discovery than a dry, pre-determined exercise.

You know, I had a lot of fun putting together multimedia web packages this summer. What we've done with the advanced TV students isn't very different, except that it wasn't fun this time. It was frustrating, disorganized, and unimpressive.

Don't get me wrong — I think the stories the TV students put together were great. But over-compressed QuickTime files, hastily print-ified scripts, and a few links just don't seem remarkable to me after working with them for a semester. A lot of this, I think, is because we're still using Blogger — and we all know how I feel about that. Blogger is cool the way 8-tracks are cool: both are obsolete but worthy of nostalgic fondness.

What would do these stories justice?

First, I'd like to see the reporters think a little harder about gathering extra information before they start the reporting process. I'm not sure how everyone else did their projects, but by the time I met with my TV partner, she was nearly finished and so our approach to getting "web exclusive" material was just to salvage interesting quotes from her interviews. If we were paired up before the TV students even picked their topics and were part of that creative process, I think we'd end up with better material for the web.

Second, Blogger's got to go. Next semester, we'll hopefully have the new KUJH-TV website to play with. But I'm a hardcore handcoder, and with a templated site like we're using, I think we could have saved a lot of time if everyone was given a generic html file and inserted their story into it. The only tags we weren't coding ourselves were the paragraph tags, and those are the most painless of all. No waiting for Blogger to rebuild, no waiting for Blogger's server to come back to life, no adding people to the blog's "team," just getting. it. done. Not every project needs a CMS, and with a small project like this, handcoding ain't that bad.

Third, it would have been really great to have a better idea of what exactly the TV and web students were each responsible for contributing to the story. We figured this out eventually, but confusion caused some delays.

I'm not sure if/how these projects have been done before, but this round didn't particularly impress me. That said, I'd bet next semester's will be vastly improved since The Powers That Be have been listening to our feedback.

Some of you might have noticed clumps of my hair laying around the newsroom. I was tearing it out last week trying to get Susie Cable's in-depth up on the Web and helping 415 students out with their Web packages. But good news, things are back to normal, Sigh, and my head thanks me.

Producing an in-depth for the Web was a sheer act of determination. I spent several hours building two small layers, that were later integrated into a div tag, webifing newscasts, editing, linking, building a slideshow and coding the stuff into a workable, integrative Web site. And let me tell you, Blogger doesn't allow for much creativity, but I did my best and it turned out pretty cool.

Two things I've learned: div tags are not easy for me, and we need to find a better way to webify Final Cut files. To stress the Final Cut issue, TV 1 and TV 2 students currently edit and save their stories on Final Cut, a super program capable of much more than iMovie. Yet, iMovie is needed. It's a complicated issue, but I'll simplify by saying that the Final Cut QuickTime movies are just too big and iMovie QuickTime files are just right. Thus, the long and tedious process of exporting and importing and exporting again. With two four-minute newscasts, two other interview clips and one slideshow (that had to be imported into Final Cut), I spent an hour on just exporting and importing and converting. Ouch!

I survived the process and did well, but I must say my final product is no better than a lot of my classmates.

Some of their tricks of the trade include:

• Webify a package by putting a still shot of an interesting B-roll in front of the anchor intro.
• B-roll can be jazzed up with good voice over, like what Matt Rodriguez did on Jake Yadrich's story.
• Pull quotes can be made in Photoshop. (Save as gif, for better quality.)
• Ellyn Angelotti is webifing the print story by breaking parts of it up, posting those on separate blogs and linking from the main story page. It eliminates scrolling, and I'll be interested to see how it comes out.

Call it fate; call it being immersed in the field on different levels, but ironically my journalistic conundrum of the week just so happens to fall along the same lines as our class's weekly topic question concerning legal issues surrounding web journalism.

Graduating from Piper High School, I take the subject of plagiarism to heart. But until this week, I hadn't considered all of the ways it is overwhelmingly present in web journalism.

I went into helping 693 and 415 students put their stories on the web with the understanding that pulling pictures off the web was okay. After our discussion in class on Wednesday, I realized I needed to be more cautious.

For an extra perspective, I thought I'd bounce the idea off some of the people at Lawrence.com.

Phil Caulthon, the editor of Lawrence.com, as well as most of the denim-clad web staff, represent the laid-back environment of web journalism. I think Rob Curley describes Phil (and the mood/new standard) when he said that it is a whole lot easier to break the rules if you know and appreciate them first.

The team at Lawrence.com is notorious for creating their own graphics and photo illustrations; Photoshop has become a staple in new media.

But even though the staff Lawrence.com, may use pictures from the web as a base for some of their photo illustrations or features (like the new feature where they post the most popular picture when a particular word is googled), they still are respectful of being respectful of journalistic standards (and keeping it legal) just a bit more relazed. Phil said that he gets calls from the Pitch and the Star wanting to share material, and he knows he can call them if he needs info.

This applies to sharing photos and information on the web. It is sloppy journalism to google your subject and copy and paste any given picture to your blog/web site, if you are basing it on the old rules, but this is an entirely new ball game.

My first personal brush with this experience happened a few weeks ago after I took pictures of post-game celebrations at the KU vs. K-State game. My initial reaction was "How cool! My someone likes my work." I didn't really care that they had used my work for their website, a compilation of Jayhawk sports. In fact, I thought it was appropriate, and was especially happy when I saw they gave me credit.

New media is more relaxed environment, but that doesn't mean the ethics and rules don't apply. Webbies may be able to go to work in jeans (or their pajamas if working from home), but from the professionals I've been around, I've learned it's important to the status of the medium to maintain legitmate practices.So next time I'm involved with a web project that needs a photo, instead of googling it, I use my handy Photoshop skills and make my own.

Since I've been publishing on the web for a long time (and been burned for it more than once), I've spent a fair amount of time investigating First Amendment-type issues. What's become clear to me is that most internet users don't understand intellectual property very well and often misapply what they do know.

Here at the journalism school, we are all required to take a course on the First Amendment, but I worry that the class doesn't focus enough on applying what we know. I've seen journalism students lift images from other sites without even thinking about whether or not their actions would be considered fair use. They think since they're journalists and they're being informative, it shouldn't be a problem. And besides, it's the internet, right? It's not the same here, right?

Hardly.

So here's my proposal. Before our students start publishing anything on their blogs, they'll have to carefully consider what kind of copyright they want to put on their own work. Take a look at Creative Commons, a site that helps writers/creators of all kinds come up with a simple copyright license. If they're happy to see their work be copied elsewhere with or without attribution (i.e., "some rights reserved" vs. "all rights reserved") without putting it completely in the public domain, Creative Commons can help them label their work as shareable. Also, their info page has some great information on copyright. Check out the "Get Creative" video on that page.

The whole idea behind Creative Commons is collaboration — that if copyright barriers are removed, we can do really cool stuff with each other's work. And I think that's an approach that can suit an educational setting quite well. Do we want to require attribution? Do we want to require those who reuse our work to share all their work in the same way? Do we want to let them change our work or republish it verbatim? Creative Commons lets you mark your work with all of these preferences.

If we get students thinking about copyrights on their own work, I think they're a lot more likely to consider the copyrights of others. I certainly was.

What if a 694 student called the chancellor a "whoremonger" in her blog? Or, what if a KUJH-TV reporter writes a story about his landlord saying the landlord is a cokehead?

These are two real lawsuits filed against Yale's student tabloid magazine "Rumpus."

Where were the editors of the Yale's tabloid, Rumpus, who let both these scenarios happen? Doesn't Yale teach its students how to make editorial decisions? Whoever says the Ivy League sets higher standards is in for a rude awakening.

Libel is one of the most popular lawsuits brought against the news industry. I think a big fraction of all libel lawsuits could be avoided by building a staff of experienced editors. Rick has already said that, as a whole, we lack good, online copy editing skills.

Our online class works in conjunction with several classes. A lot of material is transferred between them. For example, I worked with KUJH-TV reporter Jake Yadrich, on an in-depth package. Due to our busy schedules, most of my editing questions had to be answered over the phone or through e-mail. When I was campus editor for the University Daily Kansan, I found a one-on-one session with the reporter was more effective than a phone session.

The way I see it, copy flow is like a game of secret. If you continue to pass the same information through a network, you increase the chance it will be altered and the final product will be nothing like the original. That's one way newspaper's get sued for libel.

The multimedia newsroom has a tight budget, nowhere near the size of the Kansan's. Any type of settlement would ruin our success. The cases against Rumpus cost Yale $10, 000 -€” an expensive editorial mistake. Try going to the donors and asking them for more money after something like that hits the stands -- or the web.

In the last week I have been working on a style guide for the eHub Web site and our Blogs. It is important that we have a style guide to maintain professionalism. Although a lot of our work is on personal Blogs, we are still linked to the School of Journalism. Our posts need to be consistent in name, address, title, and etc. style. We are journalists and the Blogs should be representative of our learning in the school.

I am working on combining The Associated Press' Stylebook, The University Daily Kansan's style supplement and the Wired Style Guide. As a class, we will have to decide what we want to adopt from each. In specific cases, like those relating to The University of Kansas, we will have to come up with our own guidelines. The Kansan's style supplement does this as well.

Getting even more specific, we'll have to invent our own guidelines for things within the Multimedia Newsroom, starting with the Multimedia Newsroom. How will we refer to it on the site and on our Blogs? I made a post on our development boards about this.

Adapting and adopting a style guide for this class is necessary because it will give us more credibility when other professionals visit our site and Blogs. Misspellings and fact errors are unacceptable. We are journalists. Browsing through the 694 Blogs I have found a bevy of misspellings, including the misspelling of a journalism professor's name.

The following are a variety of style sites:

• Dick Nelson's KUJH-TV style guide
• The University Daily Kansan style supplement (updated Sept. 22, 2003)
• Malcolm Gibson's 'Top 15' from The Associated Press Stylebook

Natalie and I are in a constant state of writing and rewriting our content outline in light of new information and new issues. For instance, first we were doing "My Newscast," then we didn't have the capability, then as soon as I had turned in the original content outline with no "My Newscast," then we discovered that we DID have the capability (again, thanks to Bryan). Now we have a revised outline, but as we were discussing the site map in class today, I found at least three problems with the revised version. For instance, I guess now we have no plog. And now that we've discussed it, I can really see no advantage to having one-€”I guess I just always assumed it was compulsory. I also keep changing my mind about the "In-depth" section-€”it's sort of the same thing as the "producer's choice" which Natalie has conceptualized, but it may have some value in and of itself. For the moment, anyway, I've crossed it out.

I'm not complaining about any of this, by the way, just enumerating some of the challenges. I'm actually increasingly excited about the possibilities of this project; I know that staffing will be an issue, but if we do a good enough job designing it I think students will be enthusiastic about contributing to it. Above all, I see it as a good showcase for potential employers. Sports and weather, for instance, will obviously not be areas where we can compete with the pros, but we need a web presence in these areas so our sports and weather students can show their stuff online-€”no matter how technically primitive or un-comprehensive our coverage may be. These pages might consist mainly of shovel-ware, but enterprising reporters could enhance them as much as they'd like.

Talking about coding standards ranks in there with teaching grandma how to use her iPod.

I think my fellow developer and I already had drawn some pretty stark lines in the proverbial sand. The problem is, when relaying technical information, we weren't sure who we were speaking to just yet.

• Is this just between us coding nerds?
• Does Rick have to understand this or can we skip him?
• What kind of students can we expect to try and read this next semester?

In class, we agreed upon some of the information we needed to complete some of our work. We are speaking to the lowest common denominator. Explaining the "why" in lay terms has certain challenges, but it forces us to make this really easy for 300 percent staff turnover. Not a shabby goal, if you think about it.

Accessibility!

Let's talk about what can start headaches for developers. When the Web made graphic interfacing the standard, it unintentionally discriminated against the blind! For every graphic component of the new site, we have to have text equivalents. Easy for some things, such as graphics, but different for others like video, links, navigation menus and every little graphic component you see on the screen.

Luckily, Kansas already has a nicely done page covering these issues and how to fix them. Links to appropriate 'fixes' for non-accessible material make our job easier.

Most of our work is a growing document that's filled in as problems begin and, hopefully, end. Our FAQ section will also be a living document, fed by trial and error. The idea is to make a document that is the first line of defense when things don't go as planned for the end-user.

End Results

Most of our real work has yet to hit us. Basically, Katie and I are just agreeing what international Web languages we'd like to use so that we speak clearly from here on out. What's important for us to consider is how our decisions now affect future ability to adapt and develop. I think, in all the muck of our technical brief, we've actually set the bar at a progressive level without leaving our 'slow adopters' out.

The page will be accessible beyond any original notion I had. Not only are we working for cross-browser accessibility, we are also working for every English speaking person. That includes the deaf and blind, so far.

Are we remiss?

Not that we have to solve it now, but are we missing out by only using one language? I know there are a few diehards that feel the United States has a lingua franca, but the fact remains we do not. I won't debate this much here, but here is an article that seems to express the views I hear from my Latin friends.

We fell into this by accident. I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organization for us before we had an organization. Howard Dean, talking about the success of an Internet-driven campaign

Meetup.com was launched in 2002. Its purpose wasn't political. The creator's wanted to increase social capital and resolve the social isolation problems addressed in Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone." In its infant stages, the only people who used the site were the creators of Meetup, their friends and their families. Then, the 2004 presidential election political season began.

Howard Dean first attended a gathering arranged through Meetup in early 2003. He was surprised to find an audience of approximately 300 people waiting -€” just to hear him speak. Meetup's target audience and Dean's political prospects increased within days following Dean's appearance.

The KUJH-TV Web site is in its infant stage. We, too, have a target audience that consists of the friends and family of everyone involved.

In addition to these two groups, professors and students within the School of Journalism are also part of the current target audience. Eventually, the ideal target audience could expand to include students outside the J-school and then it would include the general public.

Since we are in our infant stage, we shouldn't begin with a large target audience, but rather a focused one similar to our current target audience and build from there. I doubt we'll ever have quite the endorsement Dean gave Meetup, but it shows what could happen.

The Marketing of a President

To get you into the mindset of what we are dealing with here; factory workers rolling cigars to meet quota

Broadcast news, like its relatives, is a creature of proven instinct. It's ability to locate and track stories comes from generations of evolution. Its senses honed by a hungery desire to gather and filet news into tender pieces the audience can enjoy. Now we have a new jungle to drop this beast into -- the Internet.

What does instinct tell the beast to do?

TV Web sites seem stuck on merely repeating the content that is readily available. That is, digitizing a news segment and allowing the Web viewer to "re-see" the news cast. It isn't fundamentally different than the newpapers' initial response to Web space, but broadcast news seems to be on the slower side of evolution.

Broadcast should respond to this new format in its own way. First, a preview of exactly what not-to-do.

One of the worst examples I could find was WDAF-TV or Fox 4 News. Nevermind the fact this Web page isn't really browser friendly, let's just notice how useless this site is for the moment.

I'm not sure if this changes from day to day or not, but this site seems to indicate an importance on weather and other programming. The pictures to other programs aren't clickable and lack function for the viewer. The 'News' link takes you to a very sad table of times to watch news and a link to the national Fox News Web site. Woo.

For better examples, I think we have a lovely local example with Channel 6 Lawrence. It's not, and pardon the pun, "flashy," but it gets information across and it isn't stuck on repeating broadcasts. At the time I looked, there were transcripts of interviews available and extra information that probably didn't fit in a broadcast succintly. But are left-overs, or "side-dishes," all we have to throw on a page?

The problem remains in the instincts of the news station. The gatherer still gathers just as they did before, so the routine doesn't change until we get back to the station and a Web editor of some sort decides to spice-up the story. The change has to occur in the field, not just at the station.

NPR probably has some of the most forward progress with this dimension of journalism. This is radio realizing it can use pictures. The irony that radio could figure out how to use pictures and sound better than broadcast is just fine with me. Let's look at a nice specific example such as the Mt. Saint Helens story.

The Helens story has most of my favorite ways to use the Web in news. There is a seperate news story that obviously isn't script and links to pictures and video seem to lay down on the screen in a nice clean list fashion. Not "flashy," just clean. As a newsperson, I really appreciate NPR's links to previous and related stories. It means that if I'm just now tracking the story, I don't have to go through the stress of "learning" NPR's search bar. It's just all right there. Please note the "Volcano Cam" under Web resources in the upper right-hand corner. That's just shivy.

The lesson in all of this is one of several things.

1. Don't repeat! If you don't do it, you don't have these issues.
2. It doesn't take magical coding to make a news site purposeful.
3. The real change is out in the field, not at the station. It doesn't take a lot, it's just saving what you might otherwise throw away. Well, maybe take a few digital pictures instead of depending on the video, but that's a cameraperson's job.
4. A person designated as a Web editor is probably essential