Journalism at Westminster

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 presentation - some useful multimedia links

In the powerpoint on Multimedia Journalism which I used in today's session, I mentioned a couple of writers whose work is really worth looking at in more detail, if you want to think more about this whole area.

Henry Jenkins has his own blog, where he talks over his current research. His book - Convergence Culture - has been out for a while. When it was first published, he put some introductory notes about it on his blog.

Paul Bradshaw runs a brilliant blog about online journalism - his guide to the BASIC principles of online journalism is on his blog. The series covers brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity and community/conversation.

In the powerpoint I focused on adaptability and linked the ideas there to some of Paul's other writing about how news organisations should change to respond to the net - in particular his ideas about the news diamond. That post is part of a larger series of posts about the 21st Century newsroom, which are also worth looking at.

Another writer you should definitely follow when it comes to online multimedia is Adam Westbrook - his blog regularly highlights really interesting multimedia and online trends in general.

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - News stories and multimedia

Here are a few links we might use in class today: 

The BBC on the Coalition proposals for welfare reform

The Guardian on the same story - specifically Ian Duncan-Smith defending his proposed benefit cap

The Telegraph on Ian Duncan-Smith's welfare reforms

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - Useful multimedia links

In today's powerpoint, I talk about building on Paul Bradshaw's ideas about adaptability and the news diamond and thinking about how to combine different media types to tell news stories more effectively...

There's lots of experimentation going on in this area at the moment. People are trying out new combinations of media and new ideas to see what works.I mentioned some sites that are good places to go to keep up with what's new:

• Multimedia Shooter
• Interactive Narratives
• KobreGuide
• 10,000 Words
• Media Storm

As for some specific projects you could look at, I mentioned a few in class:

• Jonas Bendiksen's The Places We Live - there are a few technical glitches with this site at the moment, but when it's working - which it seems to be at the time of posting, it's really interesting
• The New York Times' One in 8 Million
• Going to the End of the Line - more from the New York Times
• No Such Label - an interactive feature package from Flyp Media
• The people behind Flyp Media are now in Zemi - also doing lots of interesting multimedia work
• The Guardian's Riot rumours on Twitter
• The Guardian on the Costa Concordia's route

What I'd like you to do is write a review on your blog of an interesting/innovative multimedia journalism project. You could review one of the projects mentioned above.

But it might be more interesting for you (and me) if you find a new project. One way to do that is to look around on Multimedia Shooter and the other links I mentioned above. They showcase interesting lots of interesting new work. 

One you write something you like, write a short review - no more than 200 words - saying why you like it, why you think it works well online, why it's innovative. Remember to link to the work you're reviewing.

Do this in addition to the other short posts I suggested you write as a way of getting started on your blogs.

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2 - Images Online

Today we're going to look at how to put images on your blog. Not something that seems that hard, really. Just fire up Google Images and you're away. However, there are problems with using the pictures you find that way. We'll talk a bit about that today and about how to find images online that aren't copyrighted.

We'll look at Flickr, which is a great photo-sharing site and a brilliant source of non-copyright images - via the Flickr Creative Commons page. We'll look at Creative Commons a bit and what it means and go through some ways to find images there. In the meantime, there's an old but still useful guide to finding images on Flickr on Skelliewag.

There are various sites online that have stock photos you can use for free. The best known of the stock photo sites is probably stock.xchng. EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for free photos online - it's not a bad way to find copyright free images online. However, the best way is to use Google's Advanced Image Search and then, after entering your search terms, scroll down and tick the radio button next to 'Only images labelled for reuse'. This is a great way to find rights-free images on Flickr - much better than the site's own search engine. Lots of photographers on the site make their images available under the Creative Commons license.

However, you should make sure you look at the terms of the license they're using and when you put images on your blogs which you've found on Flickr or elsewhere online, you should always put some kind of credit link - a caption which acknowledges the source for the image and links back to it. The best way to do this is to put a caption at the end of your blog post, referring to the source of the image and linkng back to it. 

It also pays to put some kind of general disclaimer on your blog, pointing out that it's a student project and not a commercial effort and that any kind of copyright infringement is accidental... 

 

Multimedia Journalism - Session 1 - some blogging advice

You'll find lots of advice online on how to blog. A lot of the stuff was written to get traffic and rehashes some basic standard advice, plus a little bit of basic search engine optimisation... This post from Problogger is pretty representative of a lot of what's out there. It's OK, I suppose, but doesn't take you that far. So it's worth reading round a bit - beyond the first page of results on Google for searches on blogging. There are lots of useful blogging tips online. Here's a few to start with:

• Web Designer Depot on how to blog effectively
• Camilla Chafer - freelance journalist/blogger on how to make your blog successful
• Ex-BBC head of blogging Robin Hamman on how to get started blogging
• Todd Sieling's Slow Blogging manifesto
• Roy Peter Clark's 25 non-random things about writing short
• Boing Boing having some fun with the ten worst types of blog posts - I talked about some of these in the presentation today
• Finally - some more general stuff - Journalism.co.uk on how to write for the web

Multimedia Journalism - Session 2

Today we're going to be looking at different types of blog and thinking about different ways to write on blogs. We looked at writing online before, as part of the Essential Journalism session on blogging before Christmas. 

Today, we'll recap some of what we talked about then and think more about different types of blog post you could write. I'll get you to work on sorting out your blogs and adding some more content.