What to do between Oct. 7 and Oct. 14

Here’s what you need to COMPLETE between today (after class) and next Tuesday when you arrive in class:

• Read Kern, Chapter 6. It will help you edit a good story.
• Edit your OWN audio file. I expect each student’s audio to be different from that of his or her teammates.
• Edit your OWN selection of photos. I expect each student’s set of photos to be somewhat different from that of his or her teammates.
• Write a caption for EACH photo using “File Info” in Photoshop. Carefully copy-edit all of your captions! Captions will certainly be unique for each student.

There are three links to tutorials on the Week 8 page that will help you with these tasks.

MAKE SURE that you have a ratio of at least one photo per 5 seconds of audio (90 sec. = 18 photos; 120 sec. = 24 photos).

Notice that all of these points are INDIVIDUAL work. Each person on your team needs to come to class with his or her OWN audio file and his or her OWN set of edited photos.

In addition, your TEAM needs to bring in the list of all sources and resources. Don’t forget that!

Please read the Project 2 assignment carefully.

You do not need to do anything with Soundslides, the program, before class on Oct. 14. If your photos and audio are ready to go, you will be able to complete the Soundslides DURING the lab period.

Have you tried Delicious?

Delicious is a site where you can save and share bookmarks. This enables you to access your Web bookmarks from any computer, anywhere. It also allows you to TAG each bookmark with MULTIPLE tags, making it easier to find your stuff later. (If you bookmark a lot in your Web browser, have you noticed it is hard to find the sites you bookmarked later? They get lost!)

You can sign up (free) and start bookmarking today. You can also look at other people’s bookmarks — except the ones they have selected not to share. For example, you can see all my bookmarks. Or you can see bookmarks I have tagged specifically –

• My bookmarks tagged jou4341
• My bookmarks tagged Soundslides

One of the most useful and powerful features of Delicious is that you can build a personal network of people who bookmark stuff you like. My Delicious network is made up of people who are involved with online journalism. Their links point me to great stuff I might otherwise miss.

You can also look at others’ networks — for example, the Delicious network of Joe Weiss, the guy who invented Soundslides. Or, say, Joe’s bookmarks tagged Soundslides. (Are you getting the idea now?) A network is a useful thing.

One more useful way to harness the power of shared bookmarks: See EVERYONE’S bookmarks tagged Soundslides AND tutorial.

Blog maintenance check list

Make sure you are tending to your blog:

1. Your blogroll: I already told you about this in class. Make sure you have linked at least two relevant blogs (relevant to the topic of YOUR blog) in your blogroll. Make sure you have deleted the link there to WordPress.org. You may keep the link to WordPress.com.
2. Your sidebar(s): Use the widgets in WordPress to configure your sidebar.
3. Your “About” page: I told you this in class last week. Every WordPress blog comes with an About page already written. Naturally, you look like an idiot if you still have the default About page. So FIND the About page and EDIT IT so that it is about YOU and YOUR BLOG. Also, make sure there is a LINK to your About page on your blog.
4. Tags and categories: You have been writing your blog for four weeks now. You should be able to come up with suitable tags and/or categories for your posts now. Do so. Also, GO BACK to each one of your old posts and EDIT them so that you can add appropriate tags and/or categories to EACH POST. Do this by Friday, Oct. 10. REMOVE all category links to “Uncategorized.”

Learn about tags and categories:

• Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?
• Tags! And Categories

Make good decisions based on YOUR OWN blog.

Learn how to use the Zoom H2

The Zoom H2 recorder is a powerful device with a lot of features.

I expect you to monitor your audio carefully, wearing headphones, whenever you use it. NO MORE TOO-QUIET AUDIO!! For Project 1, a lot of you had audio that should have been recorded at a higher level (thus louder).

There are short HOW-TO VIDEOS for the H2 linked at the bottom of this page.

Also, a newspaper reporter made this video to train his reporter colleagues. It’s good!

You can download the complete user manual for the H2. It’s a PDF file, 2.2 MB. You could print it, or just refer to it on your computer.

TEACHING YOURSELF to get GOOD AUDIO with the device you are given is part of the job. So don’t act helpless. I know I did not teach you about the features of the recorder — I didn’t because no one on the job is going to teach you either.

TEST your equipment (and the resulting FILES, in Audacity) BEFORE you go out into the field to get the real thing. Ensure that you know how to get a good result by doing advance work.

Always carry SPARE BATTERIES!!

Your SD card holds 4GB. That should be enough for any normal interviewing and gathering of natural sound.

The structure of a story

Stories (not reports, but stories) have a dramatic structure that is very simple:

At the beginning, you need to give the viewers an immediate clue what the story is about and why it matters, or should matter, to them.

The middle needs to lead upward to a distinct point or conclusion, the climax. This does not have to be HUGE, but it does have to be DEFINITE.

After the climax, there’s always a bit more needed to wrap it up — put a clean ending on it.

Tip: Using photos in your blog

You’ve heard of copyright, yes? Well, it applies to the Web. You cannot just grab any photo you feel like from any Web site and put it on your blog. It does not matter if you acknowledge the source — unless you have the EXPLICIT PERMISSION of the copyright holder, you are breaking the law. Yup. The law.

So if you would like to illustrate your blog post, and you have no nice photos of your own, what can you do?

One great option is Flickr. You can’t use ALL photos on Flickr, but some are okay. Go to the advanced search page and scroll down to the bottom. Then check the box for Creative Commons licensed photos.

Use the SEARCH FOR box at the top of the page to enter keywords.

You should always include an attribution AND A LINK for someone else’s photo.

To learn more about Creative Commons, look here.

How a blogger keeps coming up with new stuff

Are you having trouble thinking of two original blog posts each week?

For me, the trick has never been to find the one best way to get new story ideas, but to but open up a wide variety of communication lines. Though my system is not perfect and I continue to miss stories from time to time, I also have a backlog of about three weeks worth of topics in my notebook.

Read this for tips on how to get a backlog of good ideas.

Tip: Avoid MS Word garbage in your blog post text

It is VERY bad to copy and paste from MS Word into the blog Post field — if you are in “Visual” view in that field.

Switch to “HTML” view — and then paste. This way you will avoid carrying over a bunch of bloated, foul MS Word formatting code, which will really mess up the way your blog text looks.

The Visual and HTML views are controlled by two tabs at the upper right corner of the Post field in WordPress.

$10,000 prize for reporting

YouTube launched Project: Report this week. It’s a three-round competition for video reporting. Round 1 requires a profile of someone in your own community. The video must be 3 min. or less.

If you’re in this class and interested in working on a video story, let me know.

Also see the rather lame announcement at YouTube Citizen News.

Students’ blogs appear in the sidebar

Blog post No. 1 was due today at 10 a.m.

So at 9:30 a.m., I went into the Dashboard of THIS blog and built the RSS feeds (using the WordPress RSS widget) that you see in the sidebar. Each RSS widget shows the title of the blog and the title and date of the most recent post. This is easy to do because every WordPress.com blog automatically has an RSS feed.

At 10 a.m., I opened each of the posts and saved it as a complete Web page to my hard drive. This enables Curt (my T.A.) and me to grade the actual post that was online at 10 a.m. Deadlines are important in journalism, so I see the 12-week blog exercise as one way to train students to respect their deadlines.