New Media Workshop

We will spend the first part of class going over your chosen topics for the final blog post. Each person will be asked to talk briefly about why you chose that subject and what you’ve found out about it so far.

After the break we will talk about censorship circumvention, privacy and anonymity. These are important issues for journalists to understand in any country – but in China they are especially important because many of you may work in China or travel to China for reporting at some point.

We will discuss the concepts, documents, and links outlined in my document: Working from Mainland China, which is linked from the left-hand side of this blog.

If you are interested in learning more about how to license your work under Creative Commons, or how to find and use other people’s CC-licensed works, please join us this coming Saturday morning for a Practical Workshop on Use of Creative Commons Materials organized by our very own Ben Cheng.

Here is the text of the announcement:

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses that let you share your work easily with other people all over the world – by making it “Some Rights Reserved” instead of “All Rights Reserved”. You can also remix and reuse creative works under Creative Commons licenses legally, without the fear of infringing others copyright.

In this workshop, you will learn about:

1) What is Creative Commons, how it works, and what is the value of Creative Commons for Hong Kong, and its policy implications.

2) Tips, tools and practical skills of using Creative Commons licenses – how to use Creative Commons licensed work, and how to publish your work under Creative Commons license.

3) The variety of creative works available in the Creative Commons including music, photos, educational materials, and others.

Organizer: Centre for Development and Resources for Students of The University of Hong Kong

Date: 24 November 2007 (Sat)

Time: 9:30 – 12:30am

Venue: Rm 305, HKU SPACE Admiralty Learning Centre

Speakers: Chong Chan Yau – Director of Student Development, Centre of Development and Resources for Students, University of Hong Kong

Rebecca Mackinnon – Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong

Edmon Chung – Vice-Chairman of Internet Society, Hong Kong

Jack Qiu – Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Ben Cheng – Convenor of Intellectual Property Issues Watch

Admission Fee: Free Admission

Registration: Please send your name and contact details to email: mklwong@hkucc.hku.hk, or phone: (852) 2857-8383 (Ms Melissa Wong) *Seats are Limited

Congratulations for all your hard work on Hong Kong Stories over the past week. This week we will have a “postmortem” discussion about how things went and discuss the final blog post assignment.

The BJ class will have a guest speaker from the South China Morning Post’s multimedia section.

Everybody should be proud of the fabulous job you’ve been doing covering the District Council Elections for our Hong Kong Stories website. Covering an election for the first time isn’t easy – and doing it for the web is even harder. We’ve all been learning a lot. For the historical record, here’s a screenshot of our site as it looked in the early hours of Monday (click to enlarge to full size):

This week we are in the home stretch for the District Council elections!

Your advancer stories are due this week, according to the schedule on the wiki. I will publish your stories on the Hong Kong stories site after I’ve reviewed them and you’ve made any changes I request.

In class we will finalize our election coverage schedule. We will also discuss how to improve a couple of student stories that have already been uploaded in draft form. The purpose is to get everybody thinking about how to tell compelling news stories online.

In the last hour of the MJ class, Kevin Drew of CNN.com will talk to us about his experiences covering news online.

At the beginning of the MJ class Matthew Leung will give a quick tutorial on using Adobe Illustrator to make charts and graphs. (BJ’s already got the tutorial last week.) For future reference here are some other online tutorials:

• Illustrator Charts – another step by step tutorial
• 3D Charts in Adobe Illustrator CS
• liquidicity » Pie Charts in Illustrator
• Bartelme Design: Creating Graphs Part 1
• Bartelme Design: Creating Graphs Part 2

For the rest of the class, guest instructor Jeremiah Foo and Ben will guide you in how to create and upload a Soundslides project with the photos and audio you’ve prepared. They will also show you how to FTP the project onto a server so that it will be published on the web.

As I mentioned last week, the New York Times multimedia page has great examples of audio slideshows.

Here is a professional Soundslides project by a journalist working freelance for a local newspaper website in the U.S. Mindy McAdams has more analysis of it here. Other great examples of professional Soundslides stories are here and here.

I suggest you also take a look at the following Soundslides tutorials:

• Photopop Soundslides Tutorial
• Soundslides Tutorial Part 1 by Multimedia Shooter.
• Chaptered SS Tutorial by Multimedia Shooter.

Some extra how-to resources for your reference:

ANOTHER WAY TO PUT YOUR SOUNDSLIDES PROJECT ON THE WEB IF YOU HAVE A HKU.HK ACCOUNT:

All HKU students, in addition to having a HKU e-mail address, have a personal homepage. To access it type in http://www.hku.hk//YOUR_USER_NAME. Once you’ve confirmed where your homepage is, you can FTP your soundslides project onto it via Windows Explorer (only while on the HKU network) by following these instructions.

You can also send files to it from elsewhere via an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. A good one that works with Firefox is FireFTP which you can download for free and install as a plugin into Firefox. Chapter 1 of Journalism 2.0 explains what FTP is and how it works. I suggest you review that.

EMBEDDING SOUNDSLIDES INTO JOOMLA AND UNIBLOGS:

Embed Soundslides into HKStories (Joomla):
We will use an “iFrame” plugin. Click here to see what the final result looks like.
If the URL of the soundslides project is http://web.hku.hk/~rmack/publish_to_web/ , then you need to type the following code into your edit area: {iframe height="550" border="1" frameborder="1"}http://web.hku.hk/~rmack/publish_to_web{/iframe}
So in other words, {iframe height="550" border="1" frameborder="1"}URL{/iframe}

Embed Soundslides into Uniblogs:
If the URL of the soundslides project is http://web.hku.hk/~rmack/publish_to_web/ , then create a new post in your Uniblog. Click on the flash or “f” icon. A window will open. Paste in this http://web.hku.hk/~rmack/publish_to_web//soundslider.swf (in otherwords URL plus //soundslider.swf) You will then be asked to enter dimensions. Enter 620 for width and 533 for height.

This will only work well if you are using a blog theme that provides enough space for large pictures.

Embed Soundslides into other blogs and websites: This handy utility can help.