Guest speaker: Brad Kalbfeld

5 04 2011

Brad Kalbeld has seen it all.

From carrying a heavy typewriter around and a Telex machine, he now is able to hold a small tape recorder and — even better — can whip out his iPhone 4 to do the job for him.

Kalbfeld began by showing the filtering that occurs from an event all the way to the reader:

Event, reporter, copy editor, section editor, managing editor, reader.

But with the way that technology has constantly been improving, the role of the editors has been nearly erased. Rather than waiting for and hoping that the editors will publish what you’ve written, reporters can take a video of anything interesting that they see and post it to their computers and the internet for the readers to view.

Professional journalists are scared of citizen journalists.

We are now living in a one-click world and citizen journalists are now able to snap pictures, take videos, take audio of anything going on even quicker than a typical journalist could at times. This ability could steal viewers from the professional journalist and attract them to that citizen journalist’s publication.

You must have news that interacts with the audience nowadays.

Traditional journalists would find a story, report the news and that was it. Now, they must worry about getting the viewers involved and interacting with them to keep them engaged. This transition can be difficult for some.

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Guest speaker: BJ Koubaroulis

31 03 2011

BJ Koubaroulis, George Mason University graduate in ’04, began writing high school level sports, getting the most access and “real people” who enjoy doing what they’re doing.

He had an early recommendation for us young journalism students:

Work at a small place early to get learning experience and make mistakes.

By doing so, you’ll gain experience and be able to get published without having extreme pressure and demand of needing to be perfect.

He eventually focused his energy into adding another element into his repertoire in order to be able to compete better. He added a video element to his game which helped him stand out amongst his other journalists at the Washington Post. It gave him more power as a writer having another aspect to add to it.

As important as it is to have unique abilities in one particular area, BJ made an important point to talk about the necessity of being able to do everything — writing, radio, television, video, internet.

By being able to do everything, you’ll be able to do your one “specialty’ even better than you thought. If you’re unwilling to change, you will get left behind.

He showed us a virtual tour that he created about Mason’s campus. It was incredibly cool to see.

The four necessities to become a real backpack journalist:

  • Camera
  • Computer
  • Microphone
  • Work hard

The major takeaways from BJ’s speech:

  • Do as much as you can
  • Don’t be satisfied with the ability to do one thing
  • You need to be able to do everything
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Guest speaker: Mark Potts

29 03 2011

Mark Potts, creator of Washingtonpost.com, showed us how journalism works without using the typical inverted pyramid, who/what/when/where/why style.

He showed us how good Wikipedia can be, despite its reputation.

He also showed us how Facebook was used as a storytelling device as well as Storify.

How to get the audience involved:

  • Crowdsourcing (at both local and hyperlocal levels)
  • Comments
  • Facebook

When creating a blog, know what you do and do it best.

People who blog do it to be an authority in their community and to be respected for their passionate dedication rather than for money. These same people want their audience to become passionate and care.

The blogs tell people what is going on in that specific community that is not being covered by anyone else.

  • Computational journalism: Using the computer to tell stories
  • API: Giving people ability to create data tables

As a Twitter user, Potts surprisingly felt that it was not a useful tool except for publicity. When he posts a new blog on his site, he will post that URL on his Twitter and gets many hits from that.

The most important technological tool for journalists in the last five years?

The cell phone.

With social media, the super fast speed can be both an advantage and a disadvantage because some people are struggling to keep up with the need to publish as soon as possible and multiple times throughout the day instead of having one deadline.

It also exposes laziness because journalists may not have the pride in their work to get it right the firs time instead of doing it lazily and waiting for their editor to fix the mistakes.

Newspapers are struggling to realize that there are websites with better writing to give the same information that they give the day after.

Living in a “river of news,” it is important for each person to individually be able to filter their own news.

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Guest speaker: Steve Buttry

22 03 2011

Steve Buttry, Director of Community Engagement at TBD, spoke to our Comm 371 class about the abilities and effects of video storytelling and how important of a tool it is to help show and explain events.

As a writer, you have control of the story. The user can browse to the page they want to read, skim over certain information, etc.

But with video storytelling, there is shared control of the story with the user. There are pictures, videos, graphics, interviews, etc.to keep the reader engaged and able to find out as much of the story as possible — things that wouldn’t be able to be seen or found in a print article.

Nothing is as impactful as being able to scroll your mouse over an image or play a video that gives more meaning and more detail about what is being reported. It doesn’t matter how many pictures you have in a print newspaper to compensate.

Think of how the story will affect somebody and what needs to be gathered to tell the story beyond the facts. The images, the context, the maps are all extremely important tools to interest the viewer.

Developing storytelling skills will:

  • Create a comfort level with working with all the tools necessary to create a story through video
  • Allow you to do videos in less time and it will become less of an issue as time goes on
  • Help learn a lot and be able to apply certain aspects to the next story you do

The ever-changing world social media is a new concept but it can even help you become a better writer.

Always be curious. If you don’t know the answer to something, ask somebody. Push through any fear or resistance to get what you want.

A very interesting idea that Steve mentioned was to copy and paste your lead into Twitter — if it doesn’t fit, it’s probably too long!

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Guest speaker: Jim Iovino

10 03 2011

With the world turning to the internet, NBC Washington takes their television content and puts it on their website.

The sooner you get stories out on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. the more people will acknowledge you as a consistently good reporter. Thus, you will receive more traffic and gain attention. You want to be the first to say that you broke the story and knew about it before anyone else.

Important thought:

The good, basic journalistic reporting is the start to anything. You need to ask the best questions to get the best answers for a unique story.

Connecting with the audience is good to build a relationship with viewers and interact to gain attention. Pat Collins does a great job of this, taking 20 minutes out of every day to answer questions from his audience via the internet.

NBC Washington takes plenty of videos from people in the area to collaborate with them and share information. With videos, people love raw footage rather than someone anchoring the video segment.

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Guest speaker: Jon DeNunzio

3 03 2011

For those of you who do not know who Jon DeNunzio is, check out my other blog, upper90.onmason.com to find out more about him and his background from my other class he spoke to.

Now that you’ve (hopefully) checked that out, we can move on to the good information he gave to our class today.

He introduced us to UMapper, Blackbird Pie, Intersect

Why do we use social media?

  • It’s where users are
  • It helps our reporting
  • It allows us to build a relationship with users — people want to talk back to you!

Third-party platforms: Not the only way!

  • Social part is more important than the medium — be social!

Examples of being social:

  1. Running a poll
  2. Pay attention to the comments
  3. Ask for ideas
  4. Add a user photo gallery
  5. Host a debate
  6. Answer user questions
  7. Use the knowledge of the crowd

Why is all this important?

  • Social media is a growing industry and the ability to connect with users can help you get ahead in this type of business
  • People are starting up sites every day

Allourideas.org, twiigs, startupli.st — sites that are great with social media

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Guest Speaker: Mandy Jenkins

10 02 2011

A Kent State University graduate, Mandy Jenkins is now the Social Media Editor for TBD.com, She expained that 90% of her work is listening, doing research, and getting information from people for relationship cultivating.

Twitter, networking and knowing the right people helped her and her fellow employees at TBD.com get their jobs within the organization.

It was interesting how she told us that when she first got to TBD.com for a job, they had her and the other hopeful employers sit down and write abouta nything that they wanted to write about for 30 minutes. She wrote about “big media” and how much she disliked it, the same things she blogs about on ZombieJournalism.com.

And they loved it! So from then on, she was an official employee of TBD.com. Very cool.

Crazy fact: She has about 9-10,000 followers on Twitter for TBD.com and barely had half of that when she worked at the Cincinnati Enquirer — the only newspaper in that area!

She introduced to me (and probably nearly all my classmates) to Twitter Search. This search engine seemed really cool in getting info about anything and everything that people tweet regarding whatever you want to find out about. For example, she explained how there was a fire in Dupont Circle. She searched “fire near DC” in the Twitter search and voila! She saw all the people who were tweeting and taking pictures about the fire and was able to interact with them on the spot!

And as far as local news is concerned, Mandy Jenkins and TBD did some amazing thigns for the people stuck in the winter storm during rush hour the other week. She was live tweeting to everyone who wanted to know what was going on in the exact area they were in to help them out and let them know the details.

Another thing she told us about was the Twitter Trends Map. This is a map on your computer screen that shows the world and what Tweet words are being said the most. This is really an amazing tool to be able to find out what’s big and happening in certain parts of the world.

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Claudia Holland: Guest Speaker

3 02 2011

Claudia Holland, Chief Copyright Officer, had a very thought-provoking presentation today. She began with the three copyright traits:

  1. Expression
  2. Originality (because very little of our ideas are unique. It is all from things we’ve experienced)
  3. Fixation

She also explained a bit about what protected and non-protected works were:

Protected Works

Plays, graphic works, sound recordings, etc. Thie list can go on and on and on.

Basically, almost anything is a protected work, besides:

Works Not Protected

Ideas (cannot be certain that you were the original producer of the thought), methods of operation, basic facts, titles, names, slogans (very interesting that slogans aren’t protected. I didn’t know this!)

So, generally, anything which was published prior to 1923 isn’t protected)

Rights of Copyright Owners (section 106)

What’s the point of having copyrighted material (in this case, a hit song)? This is why:

reproduction (CD’s), derivative (music video), public distribution (sell CD’s), public performance (concert tour), public display (concert T-shirts), digital audio transmission (podcasts) is at your YOUR choosing! (So, that’s why Michael Jackson wanted the rights to all the Beatles songs…)

Four Fair Use Factors (section 107)

  1. Purpose & character of the use (why are you copying it?)
  2. Nature of the work (for what ethical reasons are you copying?)
  3. Amout & substantiality of the portion used
  4. Effect of the use on the potential market (in the end, it’s all about the Benjamins!)

^^^ “In a court of law, fair use is used as a defense against claims of infringement.” ^^^

These were some of the main points that caught my attention from her presentation. So, the next time you decide to copy things onto your own website, make sure to remember everything here! It is much more important than you think!

In the end, it was really good to have Claudia speak to the class today and I have definitely learned a lot from what she taught us!

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