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.

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

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

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.