Writing for New Media

If you are adding podcasts to your blog, all you need to do is upload the mp3 files to your Tiger WWW account, then link to them from your Blogger entries that explain what the files are about. That's it!

Business Week has an article this week called "What Podcasting Revolution?" and the BBC has one called "Podcast numbers show 'few hooked.'" Both are based on a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The good news is that the survey found 12 percent of U.S. residents online had downloaded a podcast, up from just 7 percent earlier this year. The bad news is that only 1 percent of the respondents say they download a podcast on a typical day.

Despite its title, the Business Week article offers optimism that podcasts will catch on:

Researchers at the Diffusion Group forecast that 11.4 million Americans will tune into podcasts by the end of this year and 21.7 million Americans—or about 10% of those using the Internet—will download an episode in 2007. "We are going to see it reaching into the mainstream consumer market," explains Andy Tarczon, founding partner of the Diffusion Group. Tarczon is confident of growth because he believes that both the availability of podcasts and the increase in people buying digital media players capable of serving podcasts will increase interest in them.

The Gannett Corp., which owns countless newspapers, announced this week that it is converting the newsrooms of those papers to "Information Centers."

The restructuring includes initiatives to involve citizens in the process of journalism, mine online community discussions for story ideas, and focus more on database-driven services, and is the first wide-scale undertaking in the industry. As the Washington Post reports, "It's pretty big," said Michael Maness, Gannett's vice president of strategic planning. "It's a fairly fundamental restructuring of how we go about news and information on a daily basis."

I encourage you to use SoundSlides software for your final slideshows. This program allows you to combine audio and photos into a professional slideshow, with NO technical wizardry.

You can download a demo of the program here and learn how to use the program at home.

Instructions on getting started are here.

Once you have exported your project, you need to publish it. To do so, follow the instructions here under the heading "Some internet publishing experience." You should create a new folder on your Tiger account (suggestion: Name it "slideshow" and put it in your "flash" folder) and upload the files and folders there.

You need to link directly to the FOLDER to get your slideshow to play. For example:
View my multimedia slideshow.

(See the code for this link.)

John Lindner of the Baltimore Sun is producing an interesting series of podcasts in which he interviews bloggers. John's "Blography" pieces are a nice model for what you will be doing for this class.

A handful of sites I've recently come across may help you with your final audio and podcasting projects.

The first, O'Reilly's QuickStart: Digital Audio Editing site, offers hints on cleaning up audio, doing fades and other nifty tricks.

The Wiki Audio Recording Guide offers a great deal of information on all aspects of audio editing.

It offers more than you'll ever need to know, but this Guide to Podcasting is a great resource for beginner podcasters.

Finally, the Radio and Television News Directors Web site offers a nice guide to gathering sound for radio, also available in a full-color PDF file.

The EditTeach Web site posts results of a survey of more than 400 online managers and producers. Rich Gordon, who supervised the research, writes in a column for Poynter Online that the most important lesson was that "the traditional journalism job that most resembles online newsroom roles is that of copy editor. What online newsrooms need are people who have news judgment and can copy edit, write headlines, package and present content on a page."