Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category
Why Do We Need a CMS?
A bit of career advice for anyone in an online news organization: Never get roped in to leading the creation of your site’s new content management system. Yes, you may realize that the business rules that underly the CMS will determine who has the power to make decisions in your newsroom, but CMS projects are like storming the beach at Normandy — even if it’s successful, many involved in the operation will not survive.
With that optimistic image fresh in your mind, let’s look at what CMSs do and why your news organization needs one.
How To Edit for Online & SEO
One Pager Tip Sheet: Search Engine Optimization (PDF)
Lecture Slides
IT Fluency for Journalists
Dan Gillmor’s recent blog post about the future of journalism education — particularly collegiate schools of journalism — is highlighting once again what is perhaps the most popular debate in our field. The question revolves basically around this: How much technology do journalists need to know? Read the rest of this entry »
How to Report for New Media
Links Referenced in This Lecture:
- Slide 3
- Slide 5
- Sworn Statements by Abu Ghraib Detainees (washingtonpost.com)
- The Fact Checker: Romney and Abortion (washingtonpost.com)
- Slide 7
- Bluffton Today
- Live Online With Bob Kaiser (washingtonpost.com)
- Wiki Scanner (wired.com)
- GasBuddy.com
- #ch-snow (Twitter.com)
- Ushahidi.com
- Veep-O-Matic (washingtonpost.com)
- Consumer Consequences (American Public Media)
- Slide 10
- MarketWatch.com
- War in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)
- Times Topics (NYTimes.com)
- Slide 14
- Breaking News Blog (L.A. Times)
- iReport of Va. Tech Shooting (CNN)
Additional Resources
How to Report a News Story Online (Online Journalism Review)
A Guide to ‘Crowdsourcing’ (Knight Citizen News Network)
Multimedia Storytelling (Knight Digital Media Center)
MP3 Audio of the Lecture
Online Exercise: Write an FAQ
FAQs are a good way to introduce students to online news writing and editing for three reasons.
- It gets them thinking about conversational journalism.
- It gets them writing shorter.
- It gets them using links.
The key to good FAQs — of course — is to formulate a good set of questions. A good question is at the start of all good reporting. And to formulate a good set of questions, the FAQ writer needs to have a very good sense of his or her audience. There are a few questions to consider when thinking about writing an FAQ.
- Who is the audience?
- What would they already need to know to get value out of this FAQ?
- What search terms would they use to find this FAQ?
- How would they use the information they find on the FAQ
Consider those questions and see if you can answer them for each of these examples of online FAQs that employ different styles. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Plan an Online News Project
If I had to pick only one difference between the mindset of print and online journalists, it’s the way they plan. Online journalists are more likely to have to collaborate with a large group, they are often working on longer time horizons on products that has longer shelf-lives. They are dealing with lots of smaller moving pieces and have to try to get management approval using static words and images to represent a project that will have a lot of animation and user-driven customization.
So, if you want to work online doing something other than breaking news you have to learn how to plan. In my experience, any online project — from an election returns database to a deadline explainer on the capture of Saddam Hussein — needs six things:
- A product concept
- A storyboard
- Asset management
- A clear workflow
- A financial budget
- A testing and quality assurance procedure
Bootcamp: Data Driven Journalism
So much of the training and retraining of journalists seems to be focused on getting them to be multimedia reporters, backpack journalists or one of the other buzzwords we use for collecting audio and visual content and presenting it online.
Multimedia is one of three things that make online journalism different from offline journalism, but the other two things — interactivity and user-control — depend largely on journalists understanding data driven journalism. This isn’t about numbers, but about structured data. Here’s a bootcamp that’s intended to introduce journalists to the tools and concepts of structured data and data driven journalism.
If Wikipedia Says It Loves You, Check It Out
The idea of using social media to report a story is appalling to some journalists. They have a certain germophobia when it comes to the Internet. Because it is littered with rumor and lies, they never use it as a source for a story, they say. They’re right, of course. Social media like Twitter and Wikipedia are littered with rumor and lies, but so are most city halls and almost every other place journalists ply their trade.
Social media, I tell my students who have been scared away from it by other professors and editors, are like all sources — a great place to start and a lousy place to finish.
Armed with the same skepticism and curiosity with which I treat any other source, I try to teach students to stop worrying and love the hyperlink.
How to Blog
While talking earlier this week to a journalist about the future of news, I again heard the story of newsroom leadership that has issued an edict that all reporters must blog. While I believe there are many contributions that the blog format can bring to news reporting, I can think of no more certain way to kill their potential than by making them mandatory.
If you think “blogs suck,” then there ain’t anything I’m going to say here that will convince you otherwise. I never knock another person’s religious beliefs.
If you are looking for more evidence to arm yourself in the battle of whether bloggers are/are not journalists, then please stop reading now. I have about as much interest in the answer to that question as I have in debating whether figure skaters are athletes.
BUT… if you are a journalist who wants to start blogging or be a better blogger then welcome. And if you’re a blogger who wants to be more newsy, then read on, my friend.
And if you don’t have time, just check out the PDF one-pager.
Lecture: The Online News Audience
Before I let the students in my online reporting and editing classes touch any piece of technology or blurb their first blog post, I think it’s important to spend some time talking with them about the behaviors of the online news audience. The way people consume news and information online is fundamentally different than the way they consume it in other media, and it’s pointless to practice online journalism without understanding those habits.
This is not a lecture about how I wish the online news audience behaved. It is a lecture based on years of watching actual site usage at national news sites, watching focus groups, and reading industry surveys — primarily those done by Pew and collected in the annual State of the News Media reports.
This isn’t a lecture about how to change audience habits. It’s a lecture about riding a wave that is SO much bigger than journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
