Sad but true. Rick drinks apple juice from a can because he can't get coffee. Staci is functioning only because she brought a large styrofoam cup of coffee from the restaurant.
For example, Mr. Brady talked about "content orbiting" the washingtonpost.com's policy about linking to related content from multimedia. It's about creating links between content for the reader. This is good for two reasons, that I can think of. One, it provides a context and historical reference for news and information. Two, it keeps the reader on your site.
Another bit of insight from Mr. Brady...Here's what you need to know, future online journalists. You do need technical skills. You need to know how to edit audio/video, how to create maps and other interactive pieces in Flash... and understand the meaning of deadlines. Brady said that he makes an effort to hire developers who are journalists, and journalists first, because trained journalists understand the business and the meaning of time. Forget the software development life cycle, this is news, and news churns out by the minute. That means, if there is a database to be queried, and an interactive map to be created it needed to be done yesterday. Welcome to the biz.
Our presentation went off without a hitch, or so I think. Listen to Blogs - not just for blogging, technically speaking (mp3) and see for yourself. We also put our paper online.
Conference tidbits:
George Daniels, University of Alabama, talked to us about the ongoing struggles between broadcast and print. He said there are jobs now for content producers, people who don't report but instead think laterally and across a variety of media. I couldn't agree with George more.
Tony DeMars, Sam Houston State University, talked about computer-assisted reporting. Reaching citizen journalists, using databases to make connections, organizing and analyzing information from blogs and podcasts. Shouldn't this be part of the reporting process for today's multimedia journalists? DeMars thinks CAR classes can be part of a convergence curriculum. I agree. Let's do it. Think of all the interesting and relevant story ideas could come from these "alternative" sources. For example, the Future of mp3 Players III:Pez?.
Janet Kolodzy, Emerson College, told us not to forget the audience. She said, it's not pandering, it's reaching people with stories so they can improve their lives. Convergence is a strategy to do that. Not the only strategy, but one strategy. Her definition of convergence is using all media to their fullest potential to reach diverse and diffused audiences.
Some excellent examples of "random acts of journalism" (a phrase coined by one of Kolodzy's collegues)
- H20town documents Town Hall Meetings
- Backfence provides an outlet for citizen journalism
- News-Record.com Town Square
- Kids news from the BBC
Unfortunately, this conference has now made me obsessed with metadata and video files. Like I need something else to research. Metadata, I love that word. I am such a geek. But seriously, journalists are supposed to be master communicators. They should be able to categorize data and accurately and meaninfully label it. It's important not only when producing content, but also when you are searching and researching a story. This will only become more important in the information saturated world we are building.
I could go on and on about the things I learned at this conference. Instead, I urge you to listen to the conference podcasts and visit the conference blog.
no coffee? i mean, NO COFFEE? do i feel for you. that's some serious event mismanagement.
Hi - this is Lisa Williams of H2otown. I'm interested in video (and podcasting) too. Have you seen Mefeedia? It's a group video site, where users upload video clips and use "tags" to describe them. This approach to metadata is typically called "folksonomy," and it's a kind of bottom-up approach to metadata -- there isn't a fixed taxonomy of terms everybody uses -- everyone tags things so that they themselves can find things. This wasn't first used for video, but rather for collections of online references -- if you look at the del.icio.us tag browser, it shows you the most popular tags from all the users of the service; more popular tags are bigger, hot tags are red. The first really popular use of a folksonomy strategy for media files was probably Flickr, and insanely popular online photo sharing community.
Most tag-based services generate an RSS feed for each tag; for instance, I subscribe to the "watertown" tag in Flickr so that I'm automatically notified when new photos labeled "watertown" show up on Flickr.
You might also be interested in "Everything is Miscellaneous," a forthcoming book by David Weinberger on the challenges of organizing knowledge in a digital age. David wrote the great and popular book "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined," about why the web is the way it is. This article by Jon Udell talks about how the programmers who are making the tools that will ultimately define how you and I are able to categorize digital stuff are thinking about the issue.
PS. It rocks that the conference has podcast audio available. I'm going to download and listen to them.