Optional Question of the Week: 11/28

Examine one left leaning political blog and one right leaning political blog for one full day's worth of postings. Comment on their similarities and differences in terms of which media they cite and which bloggers they link to.

Update
Some top left-leaning blogs include
Daily Kos
Atrios
Josh Micah Marshall
Huffington Post
AmericaBlog
Wonkette

Some right-leaning blogs include
Instapundit
Michelle Malkin
Hugh Hewitt
Power Line
Little Green Footballs

Creating a Screen Capture

Most vlogs maintain a posting etiquette of creating a small screen capture of the video and posting this .jpeg file to their posting to indicate that it is a video. In order to create this screen capture, you will need to open the video in the preferred media player program (quicktime does a nice job!). Get to the frame that you would like to have a picture of and then use the following command (depending on whether you are on a Mac or a PC) to take a screen capture

1. On the Mac: press Apple+Shift+4 (all together), and your mouse pointer will turn into a crosshair. You can use this to draw the border of your screen capture. Define the frame of the file around the borders of the movie file, and then save. The file will save on your machine as a .png (most probably), but sometimes as a .pdf (can't tell you why on this one). Open this file in the preview application, or in photoshop, and then make sure to resave it as a .jpg. Do not use a .gif extension because .jpg handles photography better, as opposed to .gif which is better for flat areas of color. Also .jpg will give you better compression rates with photo-like images

2. On a PC: hit the button "print screen" (on your keyboard above the insert/delete buttons. It is also after the f12 button). The picture is now stored in the computer's memory (or the clipboard, to be more exact). Open a picture editiing program such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks and crop the frame of the file player window, extracting extraneous background image/color from the picture. Save the file as a .jpg (do not use .gif, see point no. 1 above for the reasons why).

You now need to insert this image into the area of your story where video appears. To create a link to the video, you can put a text link immediately below the image that says: View video (making this a hyperlink). You can also make your image clickable, allowing a user to click on the image to get to the video segment. However, making the video image clickable does not substitute for a text link. In other words, you must have a text link.

Makeup Question for the Week: 11/21

Analyze the case study of Apple vs the Bloggers as presented by blogger Michele Malkin (see here, here, and here). Give your opinion on the application of this ruling for BOTH citizen journalism and mainstream media. Be sure to follow the links she provides in the story.

Comments are due by Monday, November 28, before class begins at 8:30 am.

Question of the Week: 11/21

Refer to the following readings for this week (We the Media: Here Comes the Judges [191-208], We the Media: The Empire Strikes Back {209-235]) and comment on the implications of copyright for citizen journalism. Be sure to make reference to an actual situation (there are several in the readings) where copyright can have dangerous consequences. Is there a mentioned situation where copyright restrictions can have beneficial outcomes? Make references to citizen journalism and/or mainstream media in your response, where appropriate.

Comments are due by Monday, November 28, before class begins at 8:30 am.

Amy is Live Blogging

Amy Lavergne was live-blogging Ari Fleischer's visit to UT last Wednesday, November 9, 2005. Check out her posting, complete with pictures.

Adam Weinroth Guest Speaker on 11/16

Adam Weinroth, developer of the blogging tool, EasyJournal, which is now owned by Pluck, will be our guest speaker this coming Wednesday, November 16. This blogging and syndication toolkit now powers the Austin American Statesman's citizen journalism endeavor. Aside of his interests in citizen journalism as it relates to mainstream media, Weinroth has interests in social media and collective action, and has posted an interesting interview with Jon Lebkowsky and Clay Shirky called Tag Team. This interview is about the bubble up nature of folksonomies and tagging, something we have discussed in reference to user-generated categorical organization of content.

Angela Grant has posted a previous blog entry on Weinroth's visit to the UT Multimedia Journalism class here taught by Rosental Alves. Be sure to check out her thorough posting.

Question for the Week: 11/14

[UPDATE: Please be sure to reference citizen journalism sites in your response]
Referring to either layer number 6 or 7 from Steve Outing's article, the 11 layers of citizen journalism, comment on the role that citizen journalism can play in impacting the production and dissemination of news. Make reference to other commenters on this article, including Gillmor's note for the inclusion of more layers, Grubisich's commentary on the poor content level of citizen journalism publications, and Heaton's rebuttal on the insulting comparison between mainstream journalism and citizen journalism.

New Tools for Submitting Group Assignments

As we discussed in class, there are two solutions for posting your group assignments. Both of these solutions make use of your ourmedia.org accounts, where you can store your video and audio files for your projects (if they involve multimedia).
Now, to the two solutions:

1. You can create a group account on Blogger.com and through the admin interface invite the other members of the group to join. Whoever creates the group account must authorize the other team members, once they accept the invite, to have admin status such that you can all collaboratively post and edit the entries to the blog. Since it is best to not edit entries after posting them, please remember that you can store your post in draft format, and you can make use of clever titles to the post, like version 2.0, to indicate the changed status of the story. From blogger, you can link to your audio/video files stored on ourmedia.org.

2. The second solution is a full-blown wiki alternative called seedwiki, via URL http://www.seedwiki.com/?ld=2005,11,9,11,9,9. You must create a free account, then create a new wiki, and from then on, it is straight HTML. As you can see, wikis do require some rudimentary knowledge of HTML, mostly heading tags, paragraph tags, and breaktags. The method of creating new pages is simply to edit an existing page, and within the edit box include a new page name with format [newpagenamehere]. On saving the page, the new page created will appear with a question mark: clicking on the question mark and entering content in the edit box makes the page a viable, alive page. Then, that is all there is too it. For the more adventurous, you can tweak the template, but this is not a requirement since the format appearance looks very much like a wiki, which is good.

Use whichever method you prefer, just be sure to let me know the URL of your post, ensuring that 80% of the content is near a complete state when you submit.

Please add any questions you have to this post as it relates to the actual format of the group assignments or configuration issues on either of the solutions.

Who said this citizen journalism thing was easy work! Good luck!

URLs for Class Session 11/09

Following through on the taxonomies that we have developed for the way that blogging (text) is being incorporated into MSM Web sites, you can use the following URLs. We have already covered how beat blogs/opinion blogs are being used in the newsroom. See the remainder of the URLs for other examples of blogging under the umbrella of MSM.

Group Blogs
Dallas Editorial Blog
Business Week Blogspotting
Guardian UK Group Blog for Breaking News
CBS News, The Public Eye
Seattle Times (interesting one--youths being encouraged to blog for the newspaper. Cross into the citizen journalism taxonomy)


Spot/Event Blogs
CNN's Hurricane Blog
Knight Ridder Convention Blogs
NOLA's Weblog

Citizen Journalism
Ohmynews International

CASE STUDY: News-Record.com, Greensboro, North Carolina
Newspaper as Town Square
If all of us build
Bloglines Feed
Full Report
Publishes Letters to the Editor
Citizen Journalism Section
Blogs On Newspaper Page

Other Notable Citizen Journalism Endeavors
Knight Ridder Newspaper C-J Initiative
Northwest Voice (Bakersfield Californian)

Guest Speaker Jim Debth and Tim Lott, Austin American Statesman

Jim Debth and Tim Lott will be our guest speakers for class this coming Monday, November 7, @ 8:30 am. They will be discussing the implementation of the new citizen journalism blog initiative, both from a strategic big picture and from real-world implemetation.

See here for a look at the community blog initiative. Reviews on the Statesman initiative are below:

Austin-American Statesman Gets it Right With Blogging

Pluck Press Release on Initiative

Editor and Publisher Article on Initiative

Guest Speaker Hal Straus

Hal Straus of the Washington Post will be a guest speaker at our class on Wednesday.

Straus is currently the Opinions and Blogs Editor for the Washington Post, a position he has held since March 2005. Prior to that, he was the Director of Site Tools and Newsroom Technology, a position in which he organized and managed the site's first team of technical producers and led the functional requirements for the development of the Washington Post's new Content Management System (CMS). He joined the Washington Post in 1997 as a Database Editor. Prior to working at the Washington Post, Straus worked at the Atlanta Journal & Constitution as a Web Editor/Database Editor/Editor Reporter, (1982-1997) and at Newport News as a reporter (1979-1982).

URLs for Class Session 10/31

Use the URLs below to examine the way blogging is being incorporated in MSM as it relates to our first taxonomy: individual journalists being allowed to have their own blogs in the newsroom. Some of these also straddle group blogs (taxonomy two). Please note, the amount of newsrooms incorporating blogs is enormous. In this session, we will examine some existing examples.

Washington Post Blogs (Case Study)
Rebuilding Weligama
Joel Achenblog
Howard Kurtz, Media Notes
Dan Froomkin
Interview with Hal Straus, Washington Post
Washington Post partners with Technorati
Example of Technorati sidebar in a Washington Post story

Other Examples
Dan Gillmor's e-journal for Mercury News
MSNBC.MSNBC is at the forefront of including citizen journalism in their programs
News-Record.com (Greensboro, North Carolina)
Omar Gallaga for the Austin American Statesman. See all of their blogs here
Ward Harkavy of the Village Voice
Daniel Weintraub of the Sacremento Bee
Scott Norvell of Fox News
Christian Science Monitor blogs. Ethan Zuckerman writes a great post on the possibility that CSM is the world's bloggiest newspaper
Dave Barry of the Miami Herald
Mickey Kaus of Slate
Spokesman-Review. The Spokesman-Review, in addition to the New York Times, won awards from the Online News Association. See article in New York Times (registation required)

Question for Week: 10/31

Using a couple of examples from CyberJounalist.net listing of J-Blogs affiliated with newspapers (as opposed to independent blogs by journalists unaffiliated with the MSM directly), or listings from the class blog for this week's lecture, please apply your week's readings to an examination of the usage of blogs in the newsroom. Since many newspapers are making the move to incorporate blogs, what practical significance can you see in the way they are implementing it? Any criticisms of the way they are using it?

This question requires you to use our class discussion and class readings for an informed opinion on how blogs are being incorporated in newsroom ecosystems.