Writing for New Media

For those times when great ideas or photo ops come to you while you're on the move, Sony Ericsson has unveiled a new phone that lets users post words and images to their blogs.

It is the first time a mobile phone manufacturer has included tools to allow people to blog directly from their handset and shows that blogging is about to get a whole lot bigger.

It's interesting to think about how tools like this will affect traditional and citizen journalists alike.

Want to impress your friends, family and potential employers? Just memorize all the terms in the Guardian Unlimited's Weblog glossary (knowing the definitions would be helpful, too).

You'll be using the profile template to assemble the pieces of your first project.

For the audio clip, you have two choices. Choose ONE of these:

• Use RealAudio (what we did in class last week):
  
  
  
  1. Capture your audio in Audition and save it as a .wav file.
     
  2. Run your audio file through RealProducer to produce a .rm file.
     
  3. Create a one-line .ram text file with the full URL of the .rm file (e.g., http://tiger.towson.edu/~astudent1/profileaudio.rm).
     
  4. Create a link in your .html file (either in the text or in the sidebar) to the .ram file (e.g., Listen to Frank Smith speak about making doughnuts.).
     
  5. Upload all three files (.html, .ram and .rm) and you're set.
     
  
  
• Use Flash audio (looks nicer and isn't as hard as this might seem at first glance):
  
  
  
  1. Save your audio file as an .mp3 with the filename of audioclip.mp3. If you want to do this, I advise you do NOT use Audition 1.0. You can use version 2.0 (which should now be installed in VB 207) or instead use Audacity (which you can download free and use at home). To use Audacity, you will need to download and install Audacity, then download and unzip the LAME encoder (instructions are here -- it's very easy). You must choose File>Export to save the file as an .mp3; the first time you do so, you'll have to tell the program where you saved the LAME files.
     
  2. Go to Mindy McAdams' instruction page and download the audio_button.swf (right-click on the link).
     
  3. Connect to your Tiger account. Open your WWW folder. Click MKDIR to make a new folder. Name it "flash"
     
  4. Open the flash folder. Click MKDIR to make a new folder. Name it "audio_button"
     
  5. Open the audio_button folder. Click MKDIR to make a new folder. Name it "audio1"
     
  6. Open the audio1 folder and upload both the audioclip.mp3 and audio_button.swf files.
  7. If you've followed these steps exactly, you will not have to do anything in the html code to make your clip play.
     
  
  

If you're not already familiar with the work of Kevin Sites for Yahoo's Hot Zone, take a look at a recent article from the Guardian (U.K.). Halfway through his first year of working with Yahoo, Sites has covered wars in Somalia, Iran, Lebanon, Uganda, Congo, Sudan and elsewhere. Working on his own, Sites produces packages including audio, video, photos and text to help his audience understand the human toll of armed conflict. Three team members back in Los Angeles help edit and choose material for his reports, but Sites does all the newsgathering and writing by himself.

Update (from Yahoo): Kevin Sites has been chosen to receive the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. The Los Angeles Press Club presents the award each year in honor of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and slain by militants in Pakistan in 2002.

Online news columnist Steve Outing writes in the current edition of Editor and Publisher online that "It's imperative to reach news consumers through digital channels." Outing's column looks at several newspaper podcast and vodcast initiatives and argues that they are important for the future of news.

A Washington Post article titled "Blogged Out of a Job" looks at the increasing numbers of people who are being fired for what they post on their personal blogs. It also notes that many "human resource professionals read job candidates' blogs to gather information on them before the company decide(s) whether to hire them."

In its latest issue, New York Magazine focuses on the world of blogs and bloggers. Features include a major feature on the haves and have-nots of the blogging world, a good historical timeline, as well as a piece on the most commonly linked blogs.

If you're interested in the new technology of podcasting and don't know where to begin, check out this
guide to Podcast directories. It will help you evaluate the many directories of podcasts and find some of the best.

Here's a good resource touching on many of the basics of our class: Jane Stevens' "Five Steps To Multimedia Reporting." It covers the basics of Choosing a Story, Storyboarding, Fieldwork, Editing and Assembling a project.