The handheld video camera is the cornerstone of any multimedia journalist's arsenal and the Sanyo VPC-HD700 is bringing high-definition recording to the party. The small and sleek camera records HD video and doubles as a high-powered still camera. It comes with a remote control, has in-camera editing abilities and saves files to SDHC Memory cards. My one qualm is that it doesn't have a dedicated audio recording feature, but with a little ingenuity and conversion, that can be resolved. The HD700 is available for $350 at Amazon.

For high-definition video without the HD cost check out the Aiptek A-HD 720P High-Definition camcorder, which retails at Amazon for $134.99. The viewfinder is small and the zoom is not much help compared to other handhelds, but its great for newsrooms on a budget (which is to say, almost everyone).


The Tony Hawk HelmetCam is a tiny camera that can be strapped on to any helmet and is great for capturing elusive action shots (I wish I had one for a project on downhill skateboarding). The compact camera is great for recording from the viewpoint of a staffer and records 640 x 480 video in a range of formats. The HelmetCam is available from Amazon for $30.


With all the useful and cool gadgets available, it may be easy to run out of room in your proverbial backpack. There is, however, always room for the ZRAD Super Mini SPY Cam. The tiny camcorder is about the size of a pack of gum and record up to two hours worth of video on a single charge and can store up to 33 hours of video. The video output is not broadcast quality and is barely web quality, but is useful for capturing spot news on the fly when a larger camera is impractical. The SPY Cam is available from Spy Gadgets for $129 (please refrain from actual spying).





If you size is not an issue and pitch perfect, broadcast quality is what you're looking for, look no further than the M-Audio MicroTrack II. The battery operated audio recorder has two-channel WAV and MP3 recording and playback and stores to Compact Flash cards. It records up to four to five hours on a single charge and connects with a USB cable for quick uploading to the web. The recorder also has input jacks for professional and consumer microphones and headphones. The MicroTrack II is available for $300-$500, depending on where it is purchased.





Recording phone calls with sources can be a pain (but not as much as the transcription), but the Teleport 2.0 makes it a little easier. The gadget connects your telephone to your PC's USB port, and records incoming and outgoing calls. It also keeps a log of calls made and is compatible with any telephone set. The Teleport 2.0 is available for around $70. A friendly reminder from 10,000 words: remember to check state laws before recording phone calls.

Labels: audio, video

It's easy to be inspired by the work of mainstream media powerhouses like The New York Times and CNN, but there is great multimedia to be found outside of the traditional journalism sphere.

The role of individual musicians in an orchestra is illustrated in the following clip from the short film "Das Sein und das Nichts". As the music plays, the contribution from each musical instrument is visually represented.



Many people are aware of the spread of HIV, but unclear about how the disease attacks the body. The slick-looking video "Targeting HIV replication" is more Star Wars than PSA and interprets the debilitating process in a very easy facile manner.



People in Order, a series of short films that translates statistics in a very visual and emotional way, is one of the greatest video series I've seen this year. The four shorts by filmmakers Lenka Clayton and James Price were filmed over four weeks in February and arranged 471 Brits by age, yearly income, relationship length and pregnancy.

The embedded videos are "New Age, BANG, Old Age," in which a person of every age, between 1 and 100, bangs a single drum. The second is "New Love Order" in which 48 couples are arranged by length of their relationship. The other two films are "We Make This Much Money" and a video showing women at various stages of pregnancy.






Along the lines of People in Order and my previous post about finding multimedia in the mundane is a series of photos dubbed "Taking pictures of strangers," courtesy of mental_floss blog. The photos of random people are innately compelling without the need for a news hook or a nut graf.


A series of video and flat graphics illustrate how New York reaches out to the rest of the world. The project tracked international phone calls and ISP connections between NYC and locations around the globe and it is presented in a visually arresting way. The multimedia project is available online and is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.






Finally, this simple, yet effective animated gif of how a sewing machine works takes what could have been a flat graphic and turned it into a hypnotic, "so that's how it works" moment.

Labels: video

Today's post comes courtesy of Flickr's Designer Wallpaper group. Contributors answer the question what is design? through clever and excellently designed graphic images. Here are my faves (click the titles to view the original images):


Design is the part you don't notice.




Design is about scoring chicks and getting wasted. Oh wait, that's rock and roll.




Design is beautiful.




Design is boring text and solid colors.




More after the jump

Design is a nice way to say hello.




Design is the difference.




Design is not ripped paper and chunky fonts.




Design is trendy.




Design is something a programmer should not do.





El diseño es algo más que colores bonitos. (Design is more than pretty colors.)




Design is LEGO for grownups.




Design is subtle.




Design is putting focus where it matters.




Design is using serif when sans is trendy.




Design makes me happy.

If you haven't already read yesterday's post on how journalists are using Twitter, check it out here

So you're twittering. Now what? It's time to take a look at sites that are making the most out of Twitter's ability to instantly transmit the news.

Instead of waiting for traffic updates online or via radio, some internet users are turning to Commuter Feed. The site lets Twitter users send updates about local traffic around the country directly to the site, where the feeds are searchable by city or metropolitan area.



Politweets tracks the political discussion happening in the Twitterverse by aggregating tweets about political candidates. The most recent tweets about Democratic candidates are on the left and Republicans are on the right. In the middle is a list of candidates positioned by how much they are being discussed (Barack Obama is currently at the top of the pile).

Because the web is all about citizen journalism, truemors is made up of news submitted by the average Joes and Janes of Twitter. It's kind of like a micro social news networking site that aggregates the content that people care about from a variety of news sources. Twemes is also a great way of indexing what people are talking about online. The site is useful for searching tagged tweets on any subject, like, for example, John McCain.

Twitterers are already discussing major news events, including Super Tuesday and Sunday's Academy Awards; it's just a matter of major news organizations grabbing the opportunity and creating their own news hubs.

Did you know Twitter isn't just for sending text? TwitPic and Twixtr both allow users to send photos either online or via mobile phone through Twitter. So instead of simply including links to new stories, anyone can add photos to accompany their tweets (and we know photos are a great visual attraction).

Twittervision combines Twitter and Google Maps to create a real-time visual idea of where tweets are coming from. The only requirement to appear on the site is a location and an image defined in your Twitter post. The 3D version is also worth a look, if only for the coolness factor.

Twittermap creates a visual display of geotagged tweets and can also be used to find Twitterers by location. Those familiar with data mashup editor Yahoo! Pipes can use geo twitter to get a geotagged feed of your Twitter posts, which can be displayed on a Yahoo or Google map.


Twitter draws a lot of comparison to Facebook's status updates (example on the right), so it make sense that Twitter also has its own Facebook application to keep friends and followers updated via the social network.

There are a lot of interesting and useful sites based on Twitter and with the Twitter API up for grabs, there is no reason that journalists can't be a part of the next evolution in news.

Labels: maps, photos, social networking, widgets

Twitter is changing the way news is delivered and read. For those who have yet to hear about the service, Twitter is an online application that lets users send short messages of 140 characters or less called "tweets" through instant message, cell phone or its website. Many journalists are already using it as a microblogging platform or, alternatively, as a way to keep friends and colleagues updated on their daily lives.

ReadWriteWeb has encapsulated the reasons why Twitter and journalism go hand in hand:

Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation. Like its new media brethren, blogs, Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.

Twitter is built for the new news cycle. "Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds," [Patrick Ruffini of TechPresident] writes. "It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."

NPR (username: nprnewsblog) may be the best example of how a traditional news site is using Twitter to deliver news. Like may other Twitter feeds, makes use of both Twitter and URL shortening service TinyURL to provide links to its news content. KPBS News (username: kpbsnews) provides updates on local and national news and uses Twitter to broadcast election updates and recently, updates on California wildfires.


NPR's Twitter feed

Other traditional news media making use of Twitter are BBC News, CBC News (Canada), Le Monde - World, the New York Times, CNN Breaking News, The Oregonian, Orlando Sentinel, ESPN, and a host of others which are meticulously indexed by Curt (username: imwiththepress). It's about time your news organization was added to the list, right?

Creating links to news stories on Twitter and redirecting them to your site is a great way to generate additional traffic or to notify Twitter users of breaking news. The site is also useful for liveblogging or tracking reaction to local stories.

What makes Twitter great is the ability to not only follow the news on the site, but through RSS feeds. Almost every news site has its own news feed by now, but because Twitter limits the characters that can be included, its kind of like news for those with low attention spans (which is to say, a lot of people).

Twitter is used more often for personal discourse, but journalists should approach twittering of their personal lives with caution. Tech blogger extraordinaire Tiffany B. Brown explains why she tweets and why having the public following your public life may not be such a good idea. For me and many others, I stopped using Twitter outside of the professional realm not because of personal conflict but because I spend so much of my life staring at computer screens, both big and small, that I have to save some time for real world interaction.

Tomorrow: Taking Twitter to the next level

Labels: rss

Journalists are angry about a number of things and the transition to new media is one of them. In the tradition of Overheard in New York and True Office Confessions, journalists are having their say at AngryJournalist.com. Here are what some of them are saying (Warning: NSFW language.)


Angry Journalist #271: We are doing great things in multimedia online at our small newspaper. And it's being done by those of us with no real journalism training whatsoever because our actual journalists turn up their noses at the web, and can't seem to grasp the concept of adaptation and change.

Angry Journalist #276: The fact that papers look to hire journalists with online and multimedia skills, but only take paper packet applications. The fact we have to write the same amount of stories we always have AND do more multimedia on top of it.


Angry Journalist #257: We make multimedia projects, sure. But let's make them only because we want to enter contests. Forget about storytelling, our journalistic responsibility to the public, our tools/resources and throw it all away for a CHANCE to win a contest.

Angry Journalist #126: I'm angry that my journalism department at a mid-level public university is staffed with tenured, unmovable dinosaur professors who haven't sniffed a newsroom or written an article on deadline in more than 15 years. They don't surf the Web for news, don't know what an RSS feed is, have never handled a video camera and aren't prepared to teach youngsters what they need to enter the very tight job market competitively.

Angry Journalist #277: I'm angry because on Saturday I was shooting video with my left hand and stills with my right. That, and our three-person staff is expected to produce over 700 pointless, wretched videos this year. I love multimedia, but why do we think the public will just love the crap we churn out in a couple of hours?

Angry Journalist #457: I hate hearing about new media. I don't care.

Angry Journalist #663: The web is constantly misused by journalists. The managers think it's a dumping ground ("oh, let's just put it on the web"). The reporters don't care about it. The photographers don't know what to do with it. Promotions doesn't know how to promote it. And when a few people try to do the right thing the right way (ie: my news manager, two of my reporters), it gets buried under the ignorance of everyone else....The web is NOT television. Just because huge fonts and bright colors work on TV doesn't mean you should screw up my design by turning my thin lines fat and my understated fonts ginormous.

Angry Journalist #612: Why do older "managers" insist on including CLICK HERE on fucking everything on the web? If people are that fucking stupid, they shouldn't be online. Most of the web users logging on to media sites are pretty tech savvy… is it really necessary to insult their intelligence by having a big CLICK HERE on an otherwise AWESOME graphic?

Angry Journalist #143: I am angry that the field of journalism is virtually becoming a joke because nowadays everyone with access to a blog fancies themselves a viable one.

Angry Journalist #444: People who think web sites are dumping grounds for stuff that can't get in the paper. Also, people who have no idea how to read or interpret traffic reports but make it seem like 10 extra visits represent a huge spike.

Angry Journalist #273: I'm angry at our no talent staff of help desk workers who are recent college graduates. They're idea of journalism is asking the online department for a blog about something very random and then they don't treat it like a blog, because no one took the time to teach them how to blog. Then, when they do post, It's not about their "blog topic" instead it's about how much beer they went and consumed on the previous night.

Angry Journalist #468: I'm angry that in a paltry concession to "the new media" we have opened our online edition to anonymous reader comments, which has led inevitably to the lowest form of human communication-flamewars-and has had a chilling effect on our ability as reporters to gather sources, who say in response to our inquiries "I don't want to end up on your website."

Angry Journalist #53: Seeing that within the circle of my 100 or so J-school friends on facebook, there is only one - count it: ONE - newspaper-related application in widespread use. Furthermore, that single application is the WashingtonPost.com political compass. Where is the local-newspaper-sponsored "my street's news" app? Where is the local-newspaper-sponsored "my high school team" app? Where's the local-newspaper-sponsored "local movies" app? Where's the local-newspaper-sponsored "my local blog" app?

Oh yeah - they're in the empty seats at what should be the Web development desk, thanks to a hiring freeze that's also crippled the reporting staff. They're in the pocket of the publisher who's still blindly grasping for the fantastic, elusive, 30-percent profit margins of the late nineties. They're in the brain of some guy at a dot com who's actually willing to take a risk for the next big thing.

Angry Journalist #290: I'm angry at all the old-time journalists willing to let journalism die. We need change, and the time for change is now.

Congratulations to Albany and Schenectady, New York; Boise, Idaho; Juneau, Alaska; Kansas City, Missouri; Manchester, New Hampshire; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah. You are the latest additions to Google Street View! These locales join the more than 20 other cities to be invaded by the Google street team.



Google Street View provides 360° panoramic, street-level views with just a click, but it isn't the only service on the block. Gigapan users can upload panoramic images using pricey equipment or just an ordinary digital camera and a whole lot of patience. There is some exceptional photography on the site, including this photo of Burning Man and this one of the Sonoma County, Calif. coast.



Liebenthal, Kansas photographed by Gigapan user Ron Schott.

Immersive Media is proving panorama doesn't always mean long, flat images. The combination of video and 360° lets users experience a ski race from every possible angle, join a whale watching expedition, or experience the big game as the players see it.

For tips on creating panoramic images, check out this previous post.

Labels: maps, photos

Today is my big day. To commemorate the birthday festivities here are 25 things I've learned about journalism.


1. There is no such thing as a small story, only small thinking.

2. Sources always call back well after the story has run.

3. A cop is harder to interview than a criminal.

4. Somebody somewhere will always be upset about any given story I've written.

5. Behind every good reporter is a good editor (or three).

6. Good headphones are a great investment. Unless you let someone borrow them.

7. Breaking news will always happen 20 minutes before shift is over.

8. White balancing is my friend.

9. Business and sports reporting are the hardest beats to cover unless you have a passion for them.

10. Journalists plagiarize each other more than they do outside sources.

11. Never stand downwind from a fire.

12. The small market television news reporter is the original backpack journalist.

13. Beat reporting is cyclical.

14. Nothing beats an old fashioned pen and notepad.

15. There is 75 percent chance that I will have recorded bad audio.

16. Most journalists aren't the heartless bloodsuckers the public thinks we are.

17. You can't always fix it in post.

18. THE INTERNET WILL BE THE DEATH OF MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT!!! (okay not really).

19. Scientists and journalists speak two different languages.

20. Make it to the scene before the TV reporter.

21. There is no such thing as "unbiased."

22. It's better to get off the phone and out of the office.

23. A deadline web project will always take two hours longer than I think it will.

24. If journalism becomes a chore, find a new profession.

25. Always keep a spare battery.

In honor of my birthday tomorrow, I am taking a look back at the most interesting multimedia projects I have created or contributed to this year. Click the name of the project to view it.

7. Los Angeles Times' Homicide Map

After a traumatizing event several years ago involving a day care van flipped over on a freeway, I vowed to steer clear of cop reporting. So I was dismayed when I was asked to organize the data from Jill Leovy's homicide blog so it could be made into a searchable database of facts and figures. I was horrified at one of the hundreds of murders I had to read through and cursed ever accepting the assignment.

The outcome was well worth the psychological damage. The team who built the database did an excellent job and I commend Jill for taking on such as arduous task.

6. Best in Song

By now most people have seen a tag cloud like the one in the rail of this blog, but I believed that the concept could be taken further. While brainstorming for ideas for coverage of the Academy Awards for Entertainment Weekly, I realized that many of the Best Song lyrics contained similar themes. To find if this was true, I tracked down the lyrics to 40 years worth of best song lyrics, put them all in one document and uploaded the results to TagCrowd, an online tag cloud creator. Love, of course, was number one with 75 occurrences.

I then took the results and manually weighted and arranged them into the shape of an Oscar statuette. The process required the painstaking creation of more than 200 buttons in Flash, but the results were both stunning and satisfying.

5. Exploring the Kanye-verse

The idea for a graphic of rapper Kanye West's influences and production credits came from this print graphic by Andrew Saeger of the Times-Union. I had saved the graphic in my inspiration files and pulled it up when the opportunity to do a story on West arose. The print graphic itself is amazing and well-researched and lent itself to creating a very visual online piece.

4. Landmark Moments in Gay Hollywood

Entertainment Weekly's gay Hollywood cover story got an online punch with a couple of YouTube videos and a whole lot of research. The examination of pivotal films that explored gay content required endless movie watching, several trips to the bookstore and a couple of days combing YouTube for supporting videos. The subject matter took me out of my box and required several readings of the NLGJA Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology, but like many reporters I became an expert (in my mind) on the subject after writing the story. The piece is currently nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for digital journalism.

3. Fighting Wildfires: An Uphill Battle

Creating this graphic about California wildfires for the L.A. Times was itself an uphill battle. The Flash project is a fully animated version of a static, full-page graphic that had ran in the paper some time before. The project took weeks to create and required the conversion of an Illustrator file into Flash vector graphics. It was further complicated by the addition of animated elements like spinning helicopter blades, moving fire, spraying water, moving embers and rolling fire trucks. In short it was a nightmare, but became one of the go to graphics during wildfire season.

2. Black & Gold

I previously mentioned my thoughts on Black History Month, yet I created this piece on black Oscar winners and nominees not as a tie-in to the observance, but because it was an untold story. It also happens that Black History Month and awards season happen at the same time. There are (mostly incomplete) lists of said honorees circulating the Internet, but I believed adding the stories behind the trophies, in addition to pictures and video, would make for a stronger multimedia piece. My favorite part of this project was watching the video of actors like Halle Berry, Hattie McDaniel and Cuba Gooding, Jr. accepting the Academy Award and the deep meaning it had for them.

1. Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I have a pair of dirty, ripped, worn out shoes that were brand new when I bought them, but after two weeks walking on dirt roads under the heat of the African sun became the disheveled pair I own today. I refuse to discard them because of what they represent: my time in spent in Ghana researching the lives of gay men and women for whom simply living is a struggle. Homosexuality is illegal in Ghana and those accused of the "crime" face public ostracism and jail time. So it wasn't easy for an American to waltz into the country and start interviewing people. Like many of the aforementioned stories, the project required untold amounts of research to track down the hidden enclaves where gay men congregated, the beaches where men sold their bodies to male tourists and the gay leaders fighting for rights in a country that refused to recognize them.

The project, which was funded through a grant from UC Berkeley School of Journalism, ultimately consisted of three detailed print stories and three multimedia pieces.
The multimedia components were belabored by last minute design flaws, but ultimately went on to win the NLGJA award for Student Journalism. The people I met and the lessons I learned while reporting the project will stay with me forever, kind of like those shoes.

In the spirit of love, here are some of my favorite recent blog posts from around the web.

• Dan Gillmor thinks the New York Times needs to wake up.


• Online News Squared talks reorganization.
• Robert Niles writes in defense of Facebook.


• E-Media Tidbits runs down the rules of commenting.


• News Videographer believes the internet is affecting TV as bad as it is newspapers.


• Journalistopia has updated its online crime maps directory.


• Beat Blogging examines liveblogging with CoverItLive.


• Melissa Worden has tips on breaking through the online news clique.


• Citizen Press wonders whether bloggers will save journalism.

Big Media's first forays into the digital realm were earnest but in retrospect were downright laughable. Check out how major news sites looked like when they first hit the web courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Click the images to view them in actual size.




CBS then (1998), and now





CNN then (2000), and now





ESPN then (1997), and now





Los Angeles Times then (1997), and now





MSNBC then (1997), and now





NPR then (2000), and now





New York Times then (1996), and now





People Magazine then (1998), and now





Wall Street Journal then (1997), and now

Almost 90 years after Carter G. Woodson laid the foundation for Black History Month, the yearly observation of the contributions of African-Americans to the country has devolved into a regurgitation of trivia and a tired observation of the same notable African Americans. There is more to Black History Month than Martin Luther King, Jr.

Black History Month can easily be translated into something newer, fresher and more relevant. Instead of simply focusing on the history makers of the past, there are ways of focus on the history makers of today.


There are a number of research labs and community outreach projects based at the more than 100 historically black colleges and universities across the country. Talk to students and professors at local HBCUs to discover the history being made within the collegiate walls.

Add some soul to your food coverage, by covering not just traditional soul food, but tasty alternatives like kosher or vegetarian soul food. Attend a spoken word event (YouTube link, NSFW language) and watch members of the community express their minds poetically.

The Schools for the Colored photo gallery is reminiscent of a photo project I saw some time ago that used archival photos of black neighborhoods and compared them to more recent photos to document the evolution of the area.

Lately, I have been enjoying VH1's "Say It Loud" documentary series that brings together musicians young and old to speak about themes running through black music, like sexuality and politics. Its fun (and secretly educational) seeing Snoop Dogg and Teddy Pendergrass talk about the passionate music of Marvin Gaye.

The Black Vote in Oakland by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism (of which I am an alum) is a great multimedia piece focused on the voting habits of African Americans, which promises to be a more scrutinized issue in the coming months. For her masters project several years ago, a UC Berkeley alum traveled the country photographing streets named after Martin Luther King. The project showed the blighted nature of the streets, but was also vaguely uplifting.

BET has a photo slideshow of entertainers making history right now and Los Angeles blog LAist has a list of ten books hat provide a balanced overview of black history recommended by a local bookstore.

PBS has a must see multimedia site about the black experience and though the verdict is still out on The Root, a web magazine by the Washington Post focused on African American issues, it is a step in the right direction.

There are, of course, many great blogs documenting the black experience, including Black Fives and Nappy Diatribe, from which coverage ideas may be sparked.

No matter your Black History Month coverage, it shouldn't end when March 1st rolls around. I hate to quote McDonald's, but Black History happens 24-7-365.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret. 95 percent of the multimedia work I do is hand-coded and designed from scratch. But once in a while I am pressed for time or the project I'm working on requires technical knowhow I just don't have...yet. That's when I turn to sites that offer stock Flash and ActionScript elements that can be tweaked to fit the project I'm working on.

For example, a couple of months ago I scoured the web and several books for hours, trying to find ActionScript that would allow me to build a multiple choice quiz. When I was close to giving up, I remembered Flash Kit, an excellent resource for Flash templates and other multimedia elements. I quickly found a multiple choice quiz that I dissected and whose code became the basis for two quizzes: "Which 'Hero' are you?" and the Movie Prop Quiz.

  

(click thumbnails to enlarge)

For a long time, I had a kirupa.com Flash tutorial on interactive image panning buried in by bookmarks before I realized the ActionScript could be used for an interactive, virtual tour of the W.E.B. DuBois Center in Accra, Ghana (the full project can be viewed here). You can still how the original script came into play, but how it was also added to and expounded upon. There are many sites that offer online tutorials on Flash and other multimedia programs, but I am a fan of kirupa.com for its straightforward and easy to understand tutorials.

  

(click thumbnails to enlarge)

Sites like iStockphoto, a stock agency that carries photos, illustrations, video and Flash files, are an excellent resources for finding Flash components that would otherwise take hours, if not days, more to build. I used this file and others like it for a recent Flash feature on dancing celebrities that had to be finished in less than 5 hours. The results were outstanding and amusing, and incorporated the stock files into a unique Flash project.

  

(click thumbnails to enlarge)

The site isn't free, and depending on the complexity of the file, isn't cheap, but it can really come in handy. I also use some of iStockPhoto's stock illustrations on the 10,000 words posts when time is a factor.

  

iStockPhoto illustration before and after

There is also Soundslides, of course, for aid in creating quick slideshows and a number of other Flash-based image galleries. I must reiterate that I believe wholeheartedly in originality and I have become accustomed to staring at a computer screen for hours on end. But when you're in a time crunch or need a push in the right direction, the aforementioned sites can be of great service. Just be sure to make them your own, because originality trumps speed any day.

Labels: flash

1. Documenting everything

Running into the newsroom and editing audio, video and photos together to form an effortless multimedia project is so much easier when it becomes an integral part of your life. A good multimedia journalist should have a digital camera at all times (preferably one that captures audio, video and photos) to document everything from birthdays to bar mitzvahs, weddings to little league games. Then, when back in the newsroom, putting together an outstanding multimedia project becomes second nature.

For home multimedia projects, try any number of free applications including iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Audacity, GarageBand, iPhoto, Picasa or one of many web applications that facilitate editing without the need for software.

2. Trying something new

Many journalists who are now at the forefront of the industry took their first step toward new media when they experimented in a medium different from their own. That means podcasting if you're a magazine person or doing stand ups if you're a newspaper hound. Once you have mastered another medium, its easy to pick up another one. Learning video editing after learning audio editing is very similar to learning French after having studied Italian. A journalist with a wide range of skills better serves their audience (and probably has a higher-paying job).

3. Blogging

Writing a blog is as easy as keeping a journal, but with instant gratification and feedback. A new media journalist should feel compelled to blog, whether its about personal or professional matters. Writing on your favorite topic, even if it differs from your beat, is a great way to stay invigorated and excited about journalism. If a blog is written in conjunction with an established news site, it's a great way to speak more freely and to have an ongoing dialogue with readers about the issues that are important to them.

4. Social networking

Whether its LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, hi5, Orkut or any of the hundreds of sites on the internet, social networking is key in meeting not only other journalists, but possible experts in your beat. Consider CarDomain for car enthusiasts, Flixster for movie buffs, or FanNation for sports fans.

5. Networking (IRL)

There is never a bigger chance to learn about the future of journalism and technology and the people behind it than at one of the many conferences held across the country. It's an opportunity to see what's happening in journalism right now and what new applications and equipment will likely have to be reckoned with in the time to come. It's also a great way to meet the faces behind the names and kibitz who journalists who face the same issues and work load. After all, you can't stay behind a computer screen forever.

Summer is a big time for journalism conventons, so its best to start planning now. USC Annenberg has a list of journalism organizations and I'll see you at ONA, UNITY and NLGJA.

6. Social bookmarking

Your audience knows more than you do. Often a local story or even a potential Pulitzer Prize winner has been circulating the internet for days before it is covered by mainstream news media. Be the first to know what's going on (and impress the boss in the process) by keeping a finger on what's news on the web. Sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg and many others are made up of millions of people aggregating what's news to them and should be news to you.

7. RSS-ing

Many old school journalists who are just starting out in new media have no idea of the wealth of support and reference material available online and seasoned journalists may have missed a blog that is a perfect resource. Old or new, who has the time to scour the web checking to see if their favorite blogs have been updated? That's where RSS readers like Google Reader, NetVibes, PageFlakes, Bloglines and many others come in. If you have a favorite that you'd like to suggest, leave it in the comments.

Check the blogroll for a list of RSS-enabled websites to get you started (I've added three more that I've come upon in the last two weeks) and be sure to subscribe to the 10,000 words RSS feed.

Online ads run the gamut from innocuous to annoying. Every time I begin to curse an online ad on a news site, I have to remind myself that they are the bread and butter of a news industry that's still searching for a substantive way to generate revenue from their content (paywalls anyone?).

Most news sites have forgone the flashy, blinky ads of yesteryear and opted for static image and text ads. But there are a few that are crowding advertising in every area of the site, in the middle of news stories, tacked to the beginning and end of online video and sometimes completely blanketing the entire content. Several news sites are making use of rollover ads and annoying site visitors in the process. Instead of clicking on a link to another part of the site, users are unintentionally clicking on rollover ads that are sometimes deceptively hard to close.

Other offenders include ads with self starting audio, heavy flash animation and a few holdouts who still use pop up advertising, though a large number of sophisticated users have integrated pop up blockers into their browsers. The last thing any site should want is for the user's experience to be frustrating.

Unlike a newspaper or magazine, online ads have only a few pixels to sell the message. On the plus side, there is less likelihood of a website visitor to tune out the message, as is often the case in television and radio, because the advertisement is staring them directly in the face. Online advertising is a very lucrative business and there are people right now working on the next generation of online ads.



Ad overload

As annoying as advertising can be for the casual visitor, on the opposite end of the spectrum is ad blindness, which for those on the business side, is a terrifying reality. Web surfers are beginning to tune out ads that are integrated or stand alongside news content. Google Adsense text ads are found on millions of webpages and as such are easily fading into the background.



A recent study found most people do not click on ads, and 99 percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis.

So who is clicking the ads? Mostly middle-aged women from the Midwest, according to AOL Executive Vice President Dave Morgan. And because online ads are still prevalent there have to be a great number of people clicking them, right?

There are some things your site can do to create more dynamic advertising. Every internet user by now is used to seeing banner ads. Try experimenting with the size and shape to create something more unusual that viewers will be drawn to. Ads should be intriguing and/or fun and make the user want to click the ad and not the "close" button." Stason.org has more great design tips on how to combat ad blindness.

As a personal aside, I absolutely loved travel website Orbitz' online ad campaign (which is now defunct, I think) because the ads were well-designed and incorporated games that were actually fun to play. Unlike those "Is George Bush a good president?" or "Push this button to win an iPod ads," they actually required some skill.



And if I find myself annoyed at bad ads, I just remind myself that those ads are the reason I have a paycheck.

Labels: site management

Craving Super Tuesday results? Keep up with the latest totals below, courtesy of MSNBC.



More election goodness:

• Super Tuesday Coverage Around the Web (Cybernet)
• Google Trends Predict Super Tuesday Outcome (Advertising Lab)
• Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday (ReadWriteWeb)
• Google teams up with Twitter to make Super Tuesday geomap (Webware)

Labels: maps, widgets

Poor weather. The size of the weather page is shrinking on newspapers across the country and the meteorological report is almost always at the end of the television newscast. Many radio stations still read the weather at the top of the hour, but that's been happening since Marconi pushed the on button. But there are a group of online sites that are bringing a new twist to an old phenomenon.

I didn't believe it when someone said at last year's Online News Association conference that old standby The Weather Channel/weather.com was also a social network, but indeed it is. Users can post photos and video of good and bad weather happening around them and discuss local climates on the site's message boards. In addition to its hour by hour, weekend, 10-day and monthly forecasts, Weather.com boasts interactive maps, a bookmark-worthy blog written by weather experts and meteorologists and other weather-related tidbits that are too numerous to mention.

By now you're familiar with the broadcast TV weather map that has the temperature of an area overlaid on a map of that area (i.e. 75° in Miami, 32° in Seattle). Weather Bonk has scaled that map down and made it available with just a click. Regional temperatures across the globe are plotted on an interactive Google Map, along with storm warnings and embedded webcams.



WunderCam and EarthCam also take advantage of webcams stationed around the country to display local weather condition. While the sites' individual coverage doesn't exactly blanket the United States, there are many webcams to choose from.

Do you love a good sunset? Wish the natural splendor of the sun setting on the horizon would last forever? Well, Eternal Sunset took this idea and ran with it. The site is collection of 266 webcams around the world, all facing west to capture the sun set in 48 different countries. Eternal Sunset also has two maps that assist in determining where the sun is setting at any given moment.



Sunset at 9 am PST, 6 pm Central European Time. From left, Carro, France, Santa Ponsa, Spain, Riederalp, Switzerland




Eternal Sunset Realtime Global Map

Several sites, including WeatherBug, RSS Weather and the aforementioned Weather Channel, are taking advantage of RSS technology to make up-to-the-minute weather alerts available through RSS feeds. Distributing something as useful as weather predictions through RSS is a great way to encourage users to subscribe to your content and is also a great branding tool.

Labels: maps, rss, video

An ode to my longtime companion, the AP Stylebook... Some of us have had great journalism or English teachers, but none as steadfast as the Stylebook. The first AP Stylebook was produced in 1953 and had 62 pages, according to the Associated Press. The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, as it is formally know, is edited by longtime AP editor Norm Goldstein and is updated annually. The 2007 edition includes new words like BlackBerry, hip-hop (in 2007?) and Katmandu and in the spirit of new media is available online. I'm a little embarrassed to say I still use mine when referring to state abbreviations. What do you use yours for?

When working on a multimedia project on one computer, it is easy to forget that are millions of different computers with a variety of browsers, screen sizes and connection speeds that will all access the same project. If the project's screen size is too large, the computer color is not calibrated correctly, or even if it has one too many photos, it will cause many viewers to not access it correctly. Even if the project is designed perfectly and has been meticulously edited, remember the following Douglas Adams quote (via Neatorama):

"A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

Luckily there are some great web tools that will help turn out impeccably designed, up to code, (and unfoolish) projects that are accessible and viewable to as many internet visitors as possible. But first here are some answers to some frequently asked questions:


A lot of journalists/designers like to use Firefox for internet-related activities for a multitude of reasons, most notably because websites tend to look better on the browser. However only about 25 percent of total internet users use Firefox and an approximate 70 percent are using Internet Explorer, according to W3Counter. Anyone who has been designing online for any period of time, knows that the chances of IE highlighting every flaw in a project's design are much higher than in Firefox. And even though the majority of internet goers are using one of the two browsers, there is still that small percentage who may make up a larger percentage of your viewership.

That's where BrowserCam comes in. The site will display what your website looks like in different browsers, which is helpful in making sure nothing is awry. The site requires registration and charges a fee after 24 hours of free usage. Also interesting is this timeline