Flash Packages

I was browsing the internet and came across this post by Mindy McAdams. She has put together a list of 7 examples of exceptional Flash projects done by news organizations such as The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

“I chose these examples to show to journalism students who are near the end of their 10 weeks of instruction in designing and producing multimedia news packages,” McAdams said.

The first is a project that shows the day by day recovery of the earthquake in Haiti. This project is from the USA Today website. It’s an interactive project that shows a 10-day update of Haiti.

Another interesting project is from the Australian Broadcasting Company about the worst bonfires in the country. It has a very interesting layout with a lot of interactive components.

NPR did an interesting project about the 30 years of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. This one is probably my favorite of the examples. It has such a good feel to it and it’s very well put together.

To view the other examples, visit Mindy McAdam’s site.

Flash Journalism

Mindy McAdams, author of “Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages”, wrote an article on the Online Journalism Review about the pros and cons of the journalistic use of Flash.

“Flash addresses two key needs in online journalism: integrating multiple media (content), and reaching the widest possible audience (compatibility),” she says.

Flash gives the users the opportunity to take control of what they want to see and hear. Being able to be the one in control gives the reader a sense of intimacy. Flash also gives us, as journalists, the ability to experiment with different sorts of multimedia content.

Mark Adams, a freelance multimedia producer and photographer based in Atlanta, said his desire to combine sound and motion with still photography goes back to Kodachrome. “I remember sitting around with friends and putting together a slideshow, popping chromes into the tray, turning on the stereo and hanging up a sheet in the living room,” he said. “I loved that immersion with all your senses.”

Reproducing that experience in Flash can be a challenge. “It’s really hard to integrate it really well,” Adams said. “It’s easy to put too much in there and overwhelm folks.”

The content of these multimedia projects is determined by how much time there is to work on the piece. Journalism is still built around deadlines and if there’s not enough time to get a visual/audio story together, then it must run solo.

There are some people who don’t think Flash is a good program for journalistic stories.

Not everyone agrees that Flash makes a good partner for databases. Adrian Holovaty, an editor at washingtonpost.com and former lead developer for World Online, the Web companion of the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, argued against using Flash in cases when users might want to link to specific segments of the package, or send a link in e-mail.

“Flash is good for things such as video that can’t be broken down into nuggets of information. But otherwise, information should be broken down,” Holovaty wrote in an instant-message conversation.

According to the article, McAdams says Flash probably won’t be around forever. As it is right now being used for bringing multimedia journalism to the web, in a few years there could be a new program to knock it out of the park. The ever changing web will constantly bring new things to the world of online journalism.

100 Things Journalists Should Never Do

I found this article quite interesting. It’s from Poynter Online. The base of the article is explaining the things journalists should or should not do. They’ve implimented Twitter into this list, and have been posting Tweets with new additions to the list. They’re also asking people to post their own ideas. They will then comprise the list based off the most retweeted suggestions.

Here’s a selection of the most retweeted so far (not counting Poynter’s tweets):

• A journalist should never do: Wonder how to rewrite a press release before wondering how to fact-check it. (@JoshHalliday)
• A journalist should never do: confuse impartiality with decontexualised he said-she said reporting. (@paulbradshaw)
• A journalist should never be a friendly dog when reporting and then go snake at the keyboard. ABC. Always Be Congruent. (@carr2n)

The Mac

This is a soundslide done by a college student, Crystal Street. She won first place in the photo/audio category of College Photographer of the Year in 2007 with this soundslide. It’s about the Durham Housing Projects in North Carolina. The interviews she got, along with the natural sound and photographs were put together perfectly. It’s impactful and keeps the viewers attention. Her consciousness of playing the audio perfectly with the photographs adds an interesting effect to the project. My favorite part would be the introduction.

Click here to view soundslide.

Soundslides class example

Here is an example of a soundslide project done in class.

Click here.

Interesting Soundslide Projects

I found a high school news site while searching through google which really caught my eye. There are a bunch of really great soundslides that they’ve done. The audio mixed with the photographs flow together really well.

This soundslide is about a junior in high school who is a host to a Polish exchange student.

This one in particular is put together really well. I like how they start out with the natural audio, and then move into the interview. I think they could have cut out some parts of the interview piece, and shortened it up, maybe chopped it apart in some spots. The photos match up with the audio nicely.

Click here to go to The Harbinger Online multimedia site, where it lists a bunch of soundslides the student journalists have put together.

I found another soundslide done by a girl while she was working as an intern at The Gainseville Sun. It’s about Dance Alive’s “The Nutcracker”. The use of music with the audio and visuals are perfectly aligned.

The Nutcracker

Along with the soundslide was a full page spread, which you can see on her blog.

Audio Exercise

This is an audio clip of some student interviews. Click to play.

More text.

Mobile News

It seems that with the advances of technology, the ways we send/recieve the news are becoming more advanced as well. I found an article on the Poynter Institute website about iPhone applications that allow you to get the news in a quick and easy way. The article says,

“News is going mobile in the U.S. In fact, the number of people getting news via cellphone doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009, according to comScore. Improvements in the iPhone OS have the potential to make or break news delivery.”

That’s a lot of newsflow from the mobile network.

iPhone applications for the news don’t just bring an ongoing flow to a news organizations website, but it can also maybe even bring in revenue to your organization. The article stresses that news organizations create an application for the iPhone in order to reap the benefits of the ever changing online world.

Converged at the Washington Post

I found this article from Poynter Online called Converging in Cape Canaveral.  It’s an article from a few years back when the Columbia space shuttle disaster happened.  The article describes the process that Mark Stencel went through when he was in Florida for a Poynter seminar. Stencel is the co-managing editor for online news at the Washington Post.

He worked quickly to get the news up as fast as it was happening. Being that he was the only one from the Post in reach of Cape Canaveral, it was up to him to get as much detail as possible to relay to the public.

The article explains how he “was being recorded as he described the news from a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center”. That recording was placed on the web within minutes.

“On Sunday, Stencel tackled the story another way: He was live online from Cape Canaveral, leading a WashingtonPost.com chat even as the press conference was winding down. He had questions from D.C. and questions from Bogota, Colombia. If he wasn’t sure about a user’s question, he’d walk across the room, ask a NASA official, and return with the answer.”

After reading this article, it’s interesting to see how professional journalists are putting the advancement of technology to work. The quickness of the whole thing is something that we all must get used to.  Like Stencel said, “and if you’re not practicing converged journalism, you’re not practicing journalism”.

Twitter Reflection

My experience with trying to report at an event using twitter was interesting. I found it quite difficult to post status updates through my phone and pay attention and take notes of what was going on around me all at the same time. It was a great experience as far as learning how to multitask during an event. I learned how to type faster on my phone in order to get the message out and still be able to maintain concentration on the things going on around me. I would probably get a better phone if I continued to use this technique as a means of reporting.

The advantages of using Twitter to cover events is more so for the audience. It’s a great way to get the news out quick and keep people updated for what’s going on. It’s also a great way to link back to my blog and promote myself as a reporter. The disadvantages of using Twitter is the fact that it makes it a little difficult for a reporter to tweet and take notes and pay attention what’s going on at the event.