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.

Week 8 assignment (by 9am the day of class): Upload one or two of the best photos that you have taken so far for your advancer story (cropped and adjusted but not resized) to your Flickr account and add it to the NMW group. Also prepare 15-20 seconds of accompanying audio to go with it (can be a “soundbite” from the person in the photo or some other sound from the scene). .

Progress report: by the beginning of next week’s class, please post a “progress report” on your blog letting me know how your story is coming along, whether you have any concerns or questions, etc.

Week 9 ADVANCER STORIES DUE. See Assignment Desk for your exact due date. Feel free to start putting up your content early if you would like comment or feedback before the deadline.

NOVEMBER 18 DISTRICT COUNCIL ELECTIONS: This is a Sunday. You are required to attend class on this day, as a make-up for the missed class in Week 5. Exact time will depend on which coverage team you are on. Go to the class wiki for Election Day coverage teams. Some of your stories will be posted on the same day, and other wrap-up stories will be posted on Monday, as warranted.

Final blog post assignments are due Monday December 3rd by 9am. More here about the assignment.

We are starting to form Election Day coverage teams. You need to sign up for your preferred time and role.

You should all have accounts on the Hong Kong Stories website.

We will spend the first half of class learning how to do the following:

• Posting on HKStories
• Uploading photos
• Adding and formatting photos in your story
• Slide Shows (without sound)
• Audio in HKStories
• (How to embed your Soundslides project coming soon – meanwhile see the end of this post.)

In our remaining time I will introduce you to Soundslides, and demonstrate the workings behind a simple Soundslides project.

You will get a chance to practice using Soundslides with Jerry next week.

Remember, 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.

NOTE: THE BJ AND MJ ASSIGNMENTS ARE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT. Be sure not to confuse them.

Don’t forget to review the resources linked in our Week 7 Class Notes. I will be able to tell from the quality of your finished product whether you have absorbed the concepts discussed.

Week 7 assignment (due 9am next Tuesday): Write a blog post. Now that you know what your “advancer” story will be and when it will be due, your assignment this week is to make a plan. What are your elements? Who will you interview? What kinds of photos will best illustrate this story? What audio will you record? Which online and real-life sources will be most useful for background information? Link to any websites and articles that are relevant to these things.

Week 8 assignment (by 9am the day of class): Upload one or two of the best photos that you have taken so far for your advancer story (cropped and adjusted but not resized) to your Flickr account and add it to the NMW group. Also prepare 15-20 seconds of accompanying audio to go with it (can be a “soundbite” from the person in the photo or some other sound from the scene). More detailed instructions to come next week.

Week 9 ADVANCER STORIES DUE. See Assignment Desk for your exact due date. All BJ’s are working in teams, mainly of two. Stories should around 500-800 words (though they may vary a bit depending on subject matter and the mix of other non-text elements) and should emphasize the use of photos, graphics, soundslides, and audio. Some video may be possible with instructor permission. (The info and resources team will have a somewhat different assignment, which I will discuss with them separately.)

NOVEMBER 18 DISTRICT COUNCIL ELECTIONS: This is a Sunday. You are required to attend class on this day, as a make-up for the missed class in Week 5. Exact time will depend on which coverage team you are on, TBD once we get a better idea of the timeline for that day. Some of your stories will be posted on the same day, and other wrap-up stories will be posted on Monday and Tuesday, as warranted.

As we start the second half of the semester, we begin to focus in on our District Council election coverage. Your “Advancer” stories and your election day coverage will be published on the Hong Kong stories website.

In class today we will discuss your various story ideas and organize our story assignments for the stories you will post before the election.

We will also get introduced to the the Joomla content management system, which is what the Hong Kong stories website uses. I have posted some useful how-to’s and tutorials for posting your stories on the HKStories Joomla platform here.

Some examples of online storytelling from last semester include stories by Jonathan Magee, Fion Li, and Nick Westra, Eileen Jong, and Mona Lam. Note your assignments this year are going to be different because you’ll be doing an “advancer” plus covering breaking election news. So your advancer does not to be nearly as long as their story packages.

We go through Mindy McAdams’ Online Journalism website for the best collection of tips. In particular, see Online Media Types and Using Online Media Types. Also see Chunks: Writing for the Web.

The Elements of Digital Storytelling breaks down the different kinds of elements used in online journalism. It also includes some very useful examples. This class doesn’t cover all the skills needed to create the advanced multimedia examples, but reviewing these examples helps you think about online storytelling, and how the approach differs from print or TV. Berkeley’s multimedia story planning tutorial focuses on how to plan a story for a stand-alone website, rather than the contributions you’ll be making on a group website, but many of the concepts in terms of mapping out your elements still apply.

Back in September, Hong Kong blogger Roland Soong who writes the influential blog, EastSouthWestNorth, gave a nod to our District Council election coverage with this very detailed post. This month he has helped us out some more with the following posts:

Hong Kong District Council Elections: A Preview Based Upon Previous By-Election Results – Derek Greyhound analyzes how the DAB did well in the last several District Council by-elections and says that this has caused some of the Pan Democrats to lose confidence.

The Hong Kong District Council Ballot – Johnson Lau at Derek Greyhound thinks that the ballot is badly designed and could create confusion.

Hong Kong District Council Election Candidate Profile Analysis – statistics from 2003 and 2007, showing an “increasing professionalization of the candidates.”

Hong Kong District Council Candidates – In-depth profile of four candidates translated from Next Weekly.

Interview somebody briefly about the District council election. They can be a candidate, a campaign volunteer or worker from one of the political parties, a political analyst, a voter, or a journalist who covers local politics. Take his or her picture. Then create a blog post containing the following:

• The person’s picture – in action if possible. Nicely cropped and resized.
• A 2-5 minute interview segment (If you interview them for longer, you must edit it down to something NO LONGER than 5 minutes.)
• One written paragraph summarizing the most interesting things they said in the interview. Include any relevant hyperlinks that would be useful for the reader.

NOTE:

• The interview must be in English, OR you will need to overlay English translation over the person’s answers.
• Save and keep the full recording, especially if it is much longer than your edited interview segment, along with any notes you take. You may want to use other quotes or soundbites from the interview as part of your election coverage project.
• When you decide who you will interview, please list it on this page of the wiki next to your name.
• If you have suggestions for people who your classmates can interview in English, please post them on the experts & interviewees wiki page.
• If you know of political events where there are likely to be interesting people to interview please share them on the Events wiki page.
• Sign out an MP3 player if you need one on the equipment sign-up page.

Review these resources before recording and editing your audio:

• Super-Fast Guide to Audio Editing (PDF) and Editing Audio With Audacity (PDF) by Mindy McAdams.
• Audio section of the J-Learning website.
• “Chapter 7: Digital Audio and Podcasting” from Journalism 2.0
• Handy Audacity Tutorials

In class today we will learn to do the following:

• Record clear sound on an MP3 player
• Transfer sound files from the MP3 player to the computer
• Use Audacity to edit your sound file
• Export your edited sound file as an MP3 file
• Upload the file to your blog.

Important resources for your future assignments using audio:

• Super-Fast Guide to Audio Editing (PDF) and Editing Audio With Audacity (PDF) by Mindy McAdams.
• Audio section of the J-Learning website.
• “Chapter 7: Digital Audio and Podcasting” from Journalism 2.0
• Handy Audacity Tutorials

DUE TUESDAY 9AM: Shoot a photo essay, and choose the best 3-4 pictures that go together to tell a story. Use photoshop to clean them up, crop them, resize them, and upload them to your blog with appropriate formatting. Write accompanying text to go along with the photos. The goal is to use the pictures to tell a story in a more vivid way than would be possible with just text alone.

What topic should you choose? If you can find a photogenic subject that relates to local Hong Kong politics or the District Council elections, that is ideal. Will any of the political parties be holding events that you are able to attend? If not, you can choose a subject that relates to some kind of community issue in Hong Kong, and which you think may come up as a citizen concern for voters this Fall. Examples include: a controversial redevelopment project, environmental concerns, housing issues, etc.

It may be helpful for you to refer back to last week’s recommended resources and readings about good online photography.

Other Photoshop tutorials & references. For reminders about what we went over in class plus more detailed, advanced tips see these resources:

UC Berkeley Photoshop tutorial

Photoshop how-to’s from the J-lab:

• Preparing Images and Photos for the Web
• Checking and Changing Resolution
• Getting Familiar with Photoshop I
• Getting Familiar with Photoshop II
• Editing Photographs

DON’T FORGET YOUR ONGOING DC WATCH:
As explained last week: Keep an eye on the feeds and tags you have subscribed to about the district council election, and continue to update/add to them as needed. Post ONE PARAGRAPH (no need to be long) on your blog linking to and describing anything that comes up which you think is potentially relevant to our district council election coverage. (NOTE FOR THIS WEEK: If your photo essay is on the same topic as your DC watch post, you can combine them. It depends on what photos you get..)
Based on your new discoveries make one contribution (new item on the ideas list, a note about or an addition to an existing idea, etc.) to the story ideas or experts and interviewees page on the class wiki. (Feel free to help re-organize material your classmates have added into logical story clusters with headings.)

Today we start the class with veteran photographer Siuki Yip, who will discuss what makes a good news photograph. He will take a look at some of the photographs you posted to the NMW Flickr group and pick out a few examples for discussion about what works and what doesn’t work.

We will then go through a quick and dirty Photoshop tutorial to make sure that everybody knows how to crop, adjust, resize, and save their photos for the web.

Other important Photoshop how-to’s from the J-lab:
Preparing Images and Photos for the Web
Checking and Changing Resolution
Getting Familiar with Photoshop I
Getting Familiar with Photoshop II
Editing Photographs

We will then upload our properly cropped and resized photos onto our blogs, and learn a little bit about custom formatting with a little HTML.

Hong Kong’s most famous and influential English-language blogger, Roland Soong, has taken an interest in our coverage of the District Council elections. He writes: “District Council election can be very interesting because one can bring in demographic data, history, personalities and local party politics.” This week he posted a series of translations of blog posts on district council elections written by “a former political insider.” You can click here to read the whole thing.

A blog post from March 12, 2007 discusses the the by-election for the district council representative in the Kam Ying Constituency of the Sha Tin District Council:

Commentators at the blog pointed out that the pro-Beijing elements have apparently adopted a strategy — in middle-class districts (such as Kam Ying), they will run professionals or local powerhouses as candidates without any apparent political affiliation (only to be revealed after winning the election); in their traditional strongholds, they will obviously raise their banners high. Tong Po Chun may be the first test case of a “submerged professional.” Have we reached an age in which party affiliation is a political liability?

On May 21 there was another by-election, this time for the Kai Yip district Kwun Tong. The result? “On this day, it would seem that both sides got all the votes out that they could. But the DAB happened to have more votes.”

On June 21 there is a discussion in this post by Derek Greyhound of why the pan-democrats have not done well against the DAB in DC by-elections after 2003. Roland asks:

With respect to the by-elections in the Hong Kong District Council, the pan-democratic camp has lost 8 of 9 by-elections. What is the excuse? Government-business collusion? Chinese Communist suppression? If these reasons actually work, then it is time to give up altogther because the other side is infinitely more resourceful!

He concludes:

…the pan-democratic camp cannot suddenly discover the importance of local work five months before the elections! And it is not about realizing the importance of something — it is about what (if anything) can be done about it!

On September 12th Derek Greyhound predicted:

AFter the its huge loss in the 2003 District Council elections, the DAB began to rebuild in 2004. They basically followed a plan which delivered effective results. In the ten by-elections since 2004, DAB has basically won every District Council by-election (with the sole exception of Tsui Wan in eastern Hong Kong Island). Furthermore, they got very good totals to the point where their opponents had to consider whether to challenge again or switch to some other district to avoid a re-match.

By comparison, the pan-democrats were imposing in 2003. But victory got to their heads. They failed to capitalize on their advantages in the individual district and spent too much time and resources on the issue of political reform while ignoring local district work. This gave some breathing room to the DAB to re-organize. In 2005, the pan-democrats acted against the will of the public with respect to the political reform package and caused their support level to drop. As a result, the DAB nibbled at many pan-democratic strongholds. Many of the pan-democrats had been elected due to the 2003 July 1st effect, and their quality left a lot of desire. By 2006, some of them have run of energy as their local district work is undistinguished and they cannot even maintain normal office operations. The discontent of the voters will be reflected in the 2007 vote, to the advantage of the DAB.

Unless the Hong Kong Island Legislative Council election is raised to the level of an epic battle and thus cause the District Council elections to become a public referendum on universal suffrage, the DAB is likely to be the biggest winners. They are fielding 200 candidates and it would not be surprising to see more than half of them get elected this time.

Reading & resources for your photography assignment:

Journalism 2.0, Chapter 8: Shooting and Managing Digital Photos

How to take pictures for online use from the photography and graphics section of the J-Lab’s J-Learning website.

Hints from picture.com

Ten most common photographic mistakes by Andre Gunther.

Assignments:

BY TUESDAY OCT.2, 9AM: Create an account on Flickr. Join the New Media Workshop group. (NOTE this second step is VERY important!)
Identify some event or lecture on campus, an event or gathering anywhere else, or a place you were already planning to visit at some time in the coming week. Take your digital camera along and shoot some pictures as if you were going to do a news story about this subject. Upload 1-3 (one is fine – no more than three!) of the best photos to your Flickr account and be sure to add them to the NMW group, and also tag them with “jmschku”. No need to go anywhere you weren’t already planning to go this week – take advantage of an event or place that you will be going to anyway. But try to shoot it like a journalist, not like a tourist.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to retain the original versions of your photos on your camera and/or on a memory stick. When you come to class on Oct. 2 be sure to bring the cameras on which you shot the original photos and/or bring the original unedited photos on a memory stick. EITHER WAY, you will need to bring a memory stick on which to store the edited versions of your photos that we will make in class.

WEEKLY FROM NOW ON, ANY TIME BEFORE THE START OF WEDNESDAY’S CLASS: Keep an eye on the feeds and tags you have subscribed to about the district council election, and continue to update/add to them as needed. Post ONE PARAGRAPH (no need to be long) on your blog linking to and describing anything that comes up which you think is potentially relevant to our district council election coverage.
Assign this weekly post to a “District Council” category on your blog.
Based on your new discoveries make one contribution (new item on the ideas list, a note about or an addition to an existing idea, etc.) to the story ideas page on the class wiki.

We will spend the first half of class learning how to use a wiki for project collaboration, and using our class wiki to brainstorm about district council coverage ideas.

I will also explain how the Wikipedia pages for Hong Kong District Councils, District Council Elections, etc. got created and how anybody can modify them (including candidates, opponents, etc.).

We will spend the final hour of class talking to journalist Grace Kong, who now works in commercial radio but has also worked as a political reporter and editor for several Hong Kong newspapers. She will discuss her experiences covering district councils and local politics and will give you some advice.

Read on for some of the ideas that came from your blogs this past week:

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Based on some things that have been popping up in the delicous feed and on a few blogs I just want to make sure everybody is clear.

The District Council Elections, to be held on November 18th, are the subject of our class reporting project.

Key facts:

The nomination period for the 2007 District Council election will run from October 2 to 15.

There will be a total of 405 seats up for grabs in the 18 districts in the November 18 poll.

The Legco By-Election, set for December 2nd after classes end, is something completely different.

That is the race getting most of the media attention, in which we may see a face-off between Anson Chan and Regina Ip.

As I mentioned in class, there are several reasons that we are focusing on the District Council elections and not the Legco by-election:

1. The District Council election fits with our class schedule and the Legco by-election does not.
2. The Legco by-election will be a total media circus, making it impossible for students to get interviews with the candidates and difficult to do truly original on-the-ground reporting.
3. Because the district councils are Hong Kong’s most basic level of government, the candidates and issues will be much more accessible to students who want to cover the election with original sound and pictures from the scene as well as text.
4. The DC election is likely to be very under-covered by the local media, making it possible for all of you to make a unique and valuable contribution to public knowledge and understanding about Hong Kong’s local politics.

Our former BJ student Fion Li did a project about students running in the Hong Kong district council elections. Click here for the first part, then the sidebar will take you to the rest. She posted a collection of useful links and resources here.

Hong Kong political scientist Michael Degolyer recently wrote a sharply worded essay about why the Hong Kong government is holding these two different levels of elections at different times. Here is a news article in The Standard about the decision to separate the elections. (I smell a possible story angle…)

Remember that DC election day, November 18th, counts as a class for everybody – as has been noted prominently on the class schedule, and has been announced in class.

Please hit the comments section of this post or send an e-mail to the class google group if you have any questions or thoughts about this.

Readings:
Chapter 2 in Journalism 2.0
Mark Glaser, Your Guide to Wikis (This article will prepare you for the Week 3 class.)

Assignment:
Start setting up your personal online research and information system. Bookmark various Hong Kong websites that will help you follow the Hong Kong District Council elections (Chinese and English are both fine.) Subscribe to some feeds from websites and local Hong Kong blogs, then subscribe to feeds of any del.icio.us tags that you think would be worth following as you try to get more information about Hong Kong’s politics and local issues.

Write a blog post: (Due 9am Tuesday Sept. 18th) Describe (and link to) the sites and local Hong Kong blogs whose feeds you have subscribed to in Google Reader, or which you have bookmarked in del.icio.us. From looking at some websites about the Hong Kong District Councils, District Council elections, and local Hong Kong politics, what do you think some of the key issues could be in this upcoming election?