Introduction to Online Journalism

An Introduction to Dreamweaver

Today's session will be, for the most part, an introduction to Dreamweaver. I think the best way to get started is to try the program out and get an idea of how it works. I'll do a quick intro to the basic Dreamweaver interface, then we'll go through a tutorial from one 'Dreamweaver 8 - The Missing Manual' by David Sawyer Macfarland, published by O'Reilly. There are lots of basic Dreamweaver manuals - this is one of the better ones. I've got a copy for the Mac room. There are also copies in the library.

We're going to use the intro tutorial from this because you can download some basic assets which you can then use to create a simple page.

To get started, you need to download the files from David Sawyer Macfarland's site. Click here to download them. You'll then need to double click on the file to decompress it - though if you're using Safari, apparently it will do that automatically. Download it to the desktop.

Once you've decompressed the files, you should be left with a file called DW Tutorial1. There may already be a copy of that file on the desktop from the time Group B did this tutorial. If so, the file you download may be given a different number. It contains all the things you need to build the page. For the moment, leave the file on the Desktop.

We'll go through the tutorial step by step in class. It's fairly basic stuff, but it lets you see how to put text and images on the page. You can see how to add styles to text and also how to add links. The aim of the tutorial is to create something like his finished version.

Some things to focus on in this tutorial:

• Site Definition is absolutely crucial. It may seem trivial. But you need to make clear for Dreamweaver where the key assets for the site you're building are - you need to define the site's root folder. You also need to be organised and keep everything relating to the site in that folder. If you don't, Dreamweaver will not be able to find everything it needs to display your page properly and it will appear on screen with gaps and broken image symbols.
• Previewing in the browser. You can only do this once you've saved your pages. You need to get into the habit of previewing your pages in different browsers. One of the biggest problems when designing web pages is making sure they look the same in different browsers. Layers - a tool you use to create layouts - can cause problems here. We'll look at that in later lessons. But get used to previewing in various browsers.

The page you create in this tutorial is very simple - there's no page grid, no navigation aids, no real structure. To add those things we need to start working with more complex tools, like tables and layers and rollover effects. If there's time today, we'll have a quick go at creating a very quick site with layers and Dreamweaver's navigation bar tool.

Analysing online writing

Writing online, especially on blogs, often involves responding to and critiquing pieces written elsewhere, often in the mainstream media. Recently, Jay Rosen, an American journalism professor, wrote a column for the LA Times, taking apart a comment piece the paper had run before, also written by a journalism professor, arguing that blogs weren't serious journalistic tools.

Rosen is a committed advocate of both blogs and online journalism in general - his piece is a well informed, well argued rebuttal of the first piece. Have a look at it and think about the way he uses links and the way he puts the piece together.

One of the most popular blogs in the world is Boing Boing - have a look at one or two posts there and think about the way the writers work with links and the blog form. You could also look at the blog put together by Clive Thompson - an American tech journalist who writes for The New York Times and Wired. Again, think about the way he writes and the way he uses links. You could also do the same with Dooce, another very popular blog.

Incidentally, if you're looking for some good basic advice about how to write well online, once again the Online Journalism Review has a good list of tips on its wiki.

Today's session

Today, we're going to look at online research and reporting and then go back and look at some of the things we didn't manage to fit in last week - in particular writing online. I hope that this week we'll get a chance to talk about what the Web 2.0 is. Last week, I asked you all to try to do a bit of research on this.

First up, though, we'll talk about research and reporting online. The Online Journalism Review has a good basic introduction to this. It covers some of the more interesting new approaches to research/reporting online - approaches influenced by the Open Source movement and sites like the Wikipedia.

We might look at these later on but first we're going to think a bit about how the net can be used as part of a more tradtional approach to reporting.

Web Design

Today we're going to look at web design. I'm also going to get you to tweak and tidy up the blogs you created. We'll look at adding information to the profile and adding lists of links and feeds to the site. We'll also look at bit at writing online - how to work with links and create prose that is easy to read on screen.

First, we'll start by looking at some examples of very bad web design. Web Pages That Suck is a site that highlights some of the worst examples of online design. You'd think that, with the web becoming more and more a part of everyday life, they'd have less to work with. But it seems not - there are still plenty of dodgy sites out there for them to poke fun at.

Today, I want you to find the worst designed site they've highlighted over the last two years. Check the following links and try to decide which is the worst site - the site that deserves to win the overall award for awfulness.

• The Worst Web Pages of 2007 - Part 1
• The Worst Web Pages of 2007 - Part 2
• The Worst Web Pages of 2007 - Part 3
• The Worst Web Pages of 2006
• The Worst Web Pages of 2005

As you look through, think about what's wrong with these sites - why don't they work? What's wrong with them? Is it the graphics? Is it the site organisation? Is it the way you move through the site? Try to come up with a list and pick your candidate for worst site.

Some links to look at

Here are a few sites I'd like you to look at today. I'm not going to say anything about them here. During the session, I'll put you into groups and get each group to focus on a couple of sites.

Try to figure out what each site is about, who it's aimed at and what kind of use it's making of the web. Is the site you're looking at delivering the news in a new kind of way? In what way is it journalism?

• Slashdot
• Google News
• Digg
• Arts and Letters Daily
• The Policeman's Blog
• Newsvine
• Oh My News
• Indymedia
• Andrew Sullivan
• BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson's weblog   
• Guido Fawkes
• Comment is Free
• The Register
• outside.in

Some blogs to look at in class

Here's a few sites I'd like you to look at. I'm not going to say anything about them. The idea is that you look at each one and tell me what it's about, what kind of use it's making of the web, what kind of blog it is and whether you think it qualifies as 'journalism'.

I am Fashion

Go Fug Yourself

Hecklerspray

Punk Football

Who Ate All The Pies

Hippy Shopper

World Changing

Back To Iraq

Where is Raed?

Baghdad Burning

H5N1

Greenslade

VickyWatch

Andrew Sullivan

Collision Detection

Outside

OK - that's more than enough to be going on with. I'm not expecting you to look at all of these - just look around at a few - then start writing a review of one you find interesting. We may not get chance to finish this in class. If not, finish it off for next week.

One thing you could look at after class. BBC Radio 4 recently did a short series called Meet The Bloggers, which looked at blogs and the bloggers behind them. Follow the link and you can listen to the shows (they're only fifteen minutes long) or the unedited original interviews.

Today's session

I'm going to change things around a bit today, compared to the way the unit ran for Group B. We're going to start with something practical, before we get on to thinking about what online journalism is, exactly. So today you're going to set up a blog using the Blogger service and then look at the different ways people use blogs.

Blogger was one of the first free blogging services available online. It was bought a few years ago by Google and was recently upgraded and re-designed to make it easier to use. There are lots of other blogging services out there - some you pay for, some you don't. Some are targeted more at people who want to keep online diaries and network with friends. Others are aimed at people who see themselves as publishing professionals. We use Blogger for this unit because it's free and it's pretty easy to use.

In the lesson, I'll go through the basics of setting up a blog. To get started, go to the Blogger home page.

Welcome to the unit, Group A

Hi. Welcome to the blog I'll be running in tandem with the Introduction to Online Journalism unit. I'll use this blog to circulate useful information and lecture notes. I'll also post timetable changes and basic admin info here. I'll put links to sites I want to discuss in class here as well.

You can leave comments here too - if you need to get in touch or you want to ask a question about something we've discussed in class or something I've put on the blog.

This time round, I'll also be making lecture notes from the class available on Blackboard. Remember - you can access that via the college student portal.

So, with Blackboard and this blog, there will be two ways to access info relating to the unit. Let me know which you find easiest to use/access. 

Ways to use your blogs

Would-be journalists can use blogs in various ways.

As a showcase for your work

Blogs offer 'push-button personal publishing'. You can write what you think and publish it immediately, for the rest of the world to see. So the first use for blogs is as a way to get your writing/ideas/stories out there.

Beyond this, if you're already writing for established sites/publications, a blog can work as a kind of online ‘cuttings file’. You can put the things you write on your blog. If you write something for another site, you can link to it.

The American journalist Clive Thompson does something like this on his blog, Collision Detection. If he writes something for the New York Times or for the online companion to Wired magazine, he'll put links and sometimes the full story on his blog

Even if you're not being published 'officially', a blog can still be a useful showcase. If you want to write a particular kind of journalism (music reviews, football news), start doing it on your blog. If you keep at it, you'll build up a selection of work you can then show to editors of both online and real world publications.

As a place to develop your technique and ideas

Writing regularly on your blog will help develop your basic technique and your personal style. With things like reviewing, editors are looking for an interesting take and a distinctive style. You can use your blog to help develop those.

Think of it as a kind of ‘mind gym’, a place where you can test out styles and ideas, where you can tone and hone your prose style. Blogs allows for a kind of thinking aloud in public – just writing a post can sometimes help you figure out what you think.

Lots of high profile writers use their blogs in this way - for example the American science writer Steven Johnson has written about how writing his blog (and responding to comments) has helped him develop ideas.

As a vehicle for ‘personal reporting’

Lots of blogs are very personal affairs. People write about their relationships, their jobs, their families and more. This may sound mundane, but many blogs that specialise in ‘personal reporting’ are well written, entertaining, illuminating and newsworthy. Good enough to appear in the mainstream press, which has an obvious appetite for ‘confessional writing’ and specialist columns that lift the lid on specific professions/workplaces.

Blogs are a good place to practise that kind of journalism, develop your style and potentially even build an audience. The most popular workplace blogs – Call Centre Confidential, for example, now sadly defunct – are read by lots of people and have received mainstream attention as a result. We’ve talked before about how there’s space for a blog that details the realities of modern student life – from dealing with debt to working to supplement the student loan.

As a media filter

In the mainstream media/press, there’s an awful lot of coverage about other coverage – press digests about what other papers are saying, TV shows about other TV shows. Blogs are built for this kind of journalism – ‘media filtering’. As you read things online, you can link to them and give your take on them. For many people this is what blogs are all about. They’re a way for ordinary individuals to participate in the media and feedback their views, even take over and develop certain stories.

Journalists need to be highly media literate, aware of stories and trends, able to offer their own take or angle. Blogs let you develop and showcase this skill. If you direct people to interesting stories online (and/or offer an interesting interpretation) people will enjoy and return to your blog.

As a research tool

Blogs offer a great way to keep track of things you find online – and the ideas you have about them as you’re browsing. As you find and read things, you can make notes and link to the story on your blog. That way you have a record of what you were thinking about. The American SF writer Cory Doctorow refers to blogs used in this way as 'outboard brains'.

Crawford Kilian (a specialist in writing online) has an interesting research blog tracking news coverage of Avian Flu – he’s done it to keep himself informed. But his blog is turning into a useful general resource.

These kinds of blogs can help people pool their research. For example, say you were trying to track media coverage of student attitudes to the General Election – you could create a blog, then work together to post links to different stories you found in different news/media sites, with your comments. By working together, you’d soon build up a really useful journalistic resource.

As a way to build contacts and develop your social network

Bloggers love to comment on, and link to, other blogs/sites. As you do that, you build up potentially useful contacts, people who may refer other people to your journalism and help raise your profile in general. Some bloggers leave comments on big news/media sites, often with a link back to their own blogs. A few have succeeded in creating a lot of traffic as a result – some have even got work as mainstream media pundits as a result.

So there’s a careerist benefit that can come from using your blog as a social networking tool. Beyond that, this kind of social networking can enable a new kind of collective journalism, in which a group of people work together to develop a story, find out more abut something already covered in the media, or perhaps even expose/correct mistakes.

An old example of this, from a few years back, is the way bloggers/contributors to MetaFilter worked together to expose what’s become known as the Kaycee Nicole Cancer Hoax – you can still read some of the original Metafilter threads in which people discuss the story. 

An introduction to Dreamweaver

Today's session will be, for the most part, an introduction to Dreamweaver. I think the best way to get started is to try the program out and get a quick idea of how it works. I'll do a quick intro to the basic Dreamweaver interface, then we'll use a tutorial from one 'Dreamweaver 8 - The Missing Manual' by David Sawyer Macfarland, published by O'Reilly. There are lots of basic Dreamweaver manuals - this is one of the better ones. I've got a copy for the Mac room. There are also copies in the library.

We're going to use the intro tutorial from this because you can download some basic assets which you can then use to create a simple page.

To get started, you need to download the files from David Sawyer Macfarland's site. Click here to download them. You'll then need to double click on the file to decompress it - though if you're using Safari, apparently it will do that automatically.

Once you've decompressed the files, you should be left with a file called DW Tutorial1. That contains all the things you need to build the page. For the moment, leave the file on the Desktop.

We'll go through the tutorial step by step in class. It's fairly basic stuff, but it lets you see how to put text and images on the page. You can see how to add styles to text and also how to add links. The aim of the tutorial is to create something like his finished version.

Some things to focus on in this tutorial:

• Site Definition is absolutely crucial. It may seem trivial. But you need to make clear for Dreamweaver where the key assets for the site you're building are - you need to define the site's root folder. You also need to be organised and keep everything relating to the site in that folder. If you don't, Dreamweaver will not be able to find everything it needs to display your page properly and it will appear on screen with gaps and broken image symbols.
• Previewing in the browser. You can only do this once you've saved your pages. You need to get into the habit of previewing your pages in different browsers. One of the biggest problems when designing web pages is making sure they look the same in different browsers. Layers - a tool you use to create layouts - can cause problems here. We'll look at that in later lessons. But get used to previewing in various browsers.

The page you create in this tutorial is very simple - there's no page grid, no navigation aids, no real structure. To add those things we need to start working with more complex tools, like tables and layers and rollover effects. If there's time today, we'll have a quick go at creating a very quick site with layers and Dreamweaver's navigation bar tool.