Here are a few links we’ll be looking at in class today:
Northeastern students and Boston Globe technologists at the Globe Lab. (Photo by Michael Morisy)
Many thanks to Chris Marstall, creative technologist at the Boston Globe, who hosted our visit to the Globe Lab on Thursday evening. We got a chance to see some pretty interesting projects, and learned about how BostonGlobe.com uses responsive design to reformat itself for a wide variety of digital devices.
Today, the Society for News Design honored BostonGlobe.com as the “World’s Best Designed website.” You can read about that here.
We also heard from Miranda Mulligan, design director for BostonGlobe.com and Boston.com; Damon Kiesow, senior product manager for the two sites; Joel Abrams, social-media product manager; and Andy Boyle, newsroom Web developer.
All that and food, too.
Many thanks to our hosts for an interesting and informative evening.
On Tuesday we will take a look at Visual.ly, a social-networking site for infographics that are available for journalists to use. The service is working on tools for do-it-yourself graphics, and we’ll take a look at some of those as well.
The example above fits well with the talk we recently attended by Chinese journalist Wu Nan.
We’ll also look at PostPost, which allows for sophisticated searches of the people you follow on Twitter and what they’re talking about.
Please reread this post for detailed information about your final project. I thought it would be useful to list your upcoming deadlines here.
I enjoyed reading what you’ve been writing today, and have sent you all brief emails. I do want to emphasize that if you’re not posting regularly on your beat (or even off your beat), then it affects the quality of your blog and will have an effect on your grade as well. It’s not enough just to write the assigned posts.
The final deadline for posting to your blog is next Tuesday, April 17.
Also: I don’t know of any respectable stylebook, including AP’s, that allows postal abbreviations for states. Yet I saw a lot of references to Washington, PA. According to AP style, it should be Washington, Pa. Remember, your AP Stylebook is your friend.
Today we’re going to take a look at three Boston-based news organizations that cover international news to see what they’re saying about the elections in Myanmar, better known as Burma.
Wu Nan
Wu Nan, a Chinese journalist who’s spending the academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, compares investigative reporting in China to “playing a video game” — negotiating the system is like finding your way through a maze, and it takes “wisdom and courage” to avoid the obstacles that keep popping up.
“On the other hand,” she told Northeastern students on Thursday, “it’s very addictive.”
Wu showed a video report she produced on black-lung disease suffered by Chinese coal miners, and discussed stories ranging from the outbreak of SARS to a train crash in Shanghai last summer in which a microblogger pushed government authorities to step up their lifesaving efforts.
“They had to admit they’d made a mistake,” she said.
Wu also said the sheer size of the Chinese Internet — 420 million Internet users, 270 million mobile phone users and 250 million users of Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter — gives her hope that the government will limit its efforts at censorship. The half-dozen or so largest Internet companies are one-fourth the market value of Apple, she said, and the government is dependent on the tax revenue they generate.
Those remarks were accompanied by a PowerPoint slide that was optimistically titled “Online Media: Too Large to Control.”
Asked about the difference between reporting for the Chinese media and for the Chinese edition of the Wall Street Journal, where she has also worked, she responded that in China, reporters always lead with policy, whereas at the Journal, the rule is to lead with an anecdote. But, she said, “the essence of journalism is the same.”
Wu Nan
A reminder that our class today will consist of attending a talk by Wu Nan, a Chinese journalist and Nieman Fellow, in 305 Shillman. The subject of her lecture will be “Will One Thousand Bytes Bloom?”
The event will be from 3 to 4 p.m., followed by a Q&A and refreshments. So I don’t think we’ll have time to reconvene in 171 Holmes afterwards.
I’ll be looking for a blog post on her talk. Don’t be shy with your cameras, either.
Here is a bio passed along by Professor Bill Kirtz, who helped organize her talk:
Wu Nan, a 2012 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, has worked from Beijing for leading Chinese and American press, including the Economic Observer, NetEase Portal and the Wall Street Journal Chinese edition. Starting journalism in 2003, she firstly covered Chinese social and economic issues, then intensively reported on international news. Most recently she has worked as a multimedia editor and is dedicated in using multimedia skills to tell compelling stories. She holds a master degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley.
I’ll see you all at 3.
On the syllabus you will see this: “You must write a blog post outlining what your final project will be by Tuesday, March 20.” Unfortunately, when I started looking for those posts this morning, I didn’t find any. I think you all got too busy with the Google Maps project. You did a good job with it, and so we move on.
Please have a post up explaining what your final project will be by the beginning of class on Thursday, March 22. Most of you seem to have chosen a good topic already. I want to see evidence that you’ve thought this through and that the main person you need will be available to you for interviews. (Which means you must make contact with her. Or him.)
Remember: Your project must be about a digital media initiative of some sort. I’m willing to be pretty flexible with regard to what that means. It is not a requirement that it be related to your beat, though it would be preferable. And I’d like it to be local if at all possible.
As I have told you, your project will comprise various components, the deadlines for which I am spacing out out so that you don’t feel overwhelmed.
1. Your text story. You will write an 800- to 1,000-word feature story, in the form of an extended blog post, about a person, persons or organization involved in digital media of some sort. I am looking for interviews with at least three people as well as at least five links. Deadline: Sent to me by email as a Word file on Friday, April 13, at 5 p.m.
2. Your slideshow. You will put together a slideshow comprising six to 10 photos that is either directly related to your story or that functions as a sidebar. You will post your photos to Flickr and create a slideshow as you did on our Flickr assignment earlier this semester. You will write a title and a caption for the set as a whole and for each photo individually. Unlike your earlier assignment, you do not have to interview people for this. But aim for variety and visual interest. Please do not create a slideshow consisting of the outsides of buildings, for instance. Deadline: Friday, April 13, at 5 p.m. Send me an email with the link.
3. Your video. I have built into the schedule a full week for you to work on nothing but the video. So take a deep breath and relax. Your video can be directly related to your story, or it can function as a sidebar. The video should be two to five minutes long, with interviews with at least three named people. (No interviews with any unnamed people, please.) There should be B-roll in the form of video clips and still photos. There should be an introductory slide, and though I am not making it an absolute requirement, I think it will be better if you do a stand-up at the beginning. Other than having a friend shoot your stand-up, all shooting and editing must be done by you. The deadline is Friday, April 20, at midnight. If there is demand — and by “demand,” I mean even one person — I will keep 171 Holmes open until midnight. Post it to YouTube and send me an email with the link.
4. Putting it all together. Our last class meeting is on Tuesday, April 17. That will be my deadline for sending you memos about recommended revisions to your blog posts and slideshows. Your final deadline is Tuesday, April 24, at 10 a.m. Post your revised story to your blog. Embed the lead image from your slideshow and link it to Flickr, just as you did with your earlier assigment. Embed your YouTube video.
Also: Send me a brief (a paragraph or two) memo explaining how you used social media as part of your reporting — whether it was finding sources or some other aspect. And after your post is live, use a Google map to link to it, just as we did with the historic-sites project.
Reinventing the News • Spring 2012 