Smarter: Keeping up with journalism

I read a lot of posts and articles and news about journalism — about the evolution of this field. Job prospects. Technology. New content formats. Ethical problems, scandals, lawsuits. New publications, new websites, new mobile apps. Thank goodness for Twitter — that’s how most of the information comes to me.

Last week I started a new project. The idea is to help journalism students keep up (at least a little) the way I do, but without expecting them to read 100 different articles a week.

I called it Smarter.

If you’re not on Tumblr, you can follow it on my blog, where there will be one post each Sunday.

Blog post 23: Multimedia

Choose any one story from this list of 2013 winners: Best of Photojournalism 2013 Multimedia. Please choose a different story from other students who posted before you did.

Read both Kern, chapter 6, and Kobré, chapter 12, before you view the multimedia.

NOTE: Be sure to select a STORY with AUDIO.

In your blog post, do all of the following:

1. Provide the title of the story, and make the title a direct link to the main story page.
2. Summarize the story (do not copy/paste anything; use your own words).
3. Tell how the story made you feel as you watched and listened to it.
4. Discuss the images (specify whether they are video or stills or both). You may compare them to images from some other visual media; for example, are they cinematic? Are they like print news images? Are they like TV news images?
5. Discuss the audio — both its content and the way it contributes to the story.
6. Separately, discuss the use of natural sound (nat SOT) in the story.

Blog post 7: Journalism ethics

Last week you had an optional reading link to NPR’s ethics statement. This week, you will find an ethics statement on the site of a different news organization. The organization can be primarily magazine, newspaper, radio, television, or online. However, it CANNOT be a professional group organization, such as SPJ, ASME, RTDNA or NPPA. It must be an organization that produces journalistic products, such as magazines, newspapers, TV or radio news programs, or online news.

The idea behind this assignment is to get you thinking about what kinds of things journalists want to include in a public statement about their ethics.

No two students may write about the same organization. So, as soon as you decide which organization you’re using, REPLY TO THIS POST and write the name of the organization and ALSO paste the complete URL of their ethics page on their site. If you are first, you can write about that one. If someone else named that one first, then you must choose another.

The reply with the organization name and URL is separate from your later reply, with the link to your own blog post. So you are going to reply TWICE to this post. Your second reply is for your blog post, which will be graded.

Data 2: Maps and Google Fusion Tables

The resources we used in class: Week 10.

First, make sure you use the county assigned to you. If you use another county, no points.

Next, go to the resources page (linked above!) to find the link for mailing addresses for all Florida schools. Download the giant spreadsheet. Open in Excel. Find your assigned county and copy all the rows for your county. Don’t miss anything.

Paste all the rows you copied into a new Excel spreadsheet.