New Media Workshop

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). Upload it to the “files” section of the JMSC6019 Google Group.

Progress report: by the end of Monday, 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.

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 before and during class, as warranted.

Election coverage posts may be completed on that Sunday or may need to be completed on Monday/Tuesday, tbd.

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.)

You will practice with the help of some photos and audio I have uploaded to our Google Group.

In our remaining time I will introduce you to Soundslides, and demonstrate the workings behind a simple Soundslides project. You can embed Soundslides projects into your blog and into the HKStories website. See more detailed instructions below.

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.

EASIEST 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 allows you to have room for large pictures.

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

I am going to list your assignments for the next four weeks here.

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 on those websites or not.

Week 7 assignment (due 9am next Monday): 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. (NOTE THAT THIS ASSIGNMENT HAS BEEN REVISED SINCE I FIRST POSTED IT ON MONDAY.)

Week 9 ADVANCER STORIES DUE. See Assignment Desk for your exact due date.

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 before and during class, 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. But first, a discussion of how online journalism gets put together on websites.

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 emulate the advanced multimedia examples (Jerry’s class will), 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.

In class today we will first use the wiki to organize your story ideas into a final story list. Then we will assign due dates at the virtual Assignment Desk.

If there is time remaining, the final part of class will be spent on an introduction to the Joomla content management system, which is what the Hong Kong stories website uses. I have posted some useful how-to’s and tutorials here.

Examples of successful 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 slightly 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.

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

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. With the holidays this week and next, there could be a number of community activities.

DUE MONDAY 9AM.

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

Optional recommendation – at any time – for those who want to maximize photo skills: Take the online News University Course, Best of Photojournalism: What Makes a Winner.

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 MONDAY SEPT 24, 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 Sept 24 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 MONDAY NIGHT’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.

This week we will spend the first hour talking to Chester Yung of the SCMP. She will discuss her experiences covering district councils and local politics. Hopefully you have read her two recent articles that I sent to our Google Group last week. Also make sure you have read the note/blog post from Friday about the difference between the district council elections and the Legco by-election.

We will spend the remainder 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.).

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 MONDAY SEPT. 17TH) 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. (One paragraph.) 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? Which research tools discussed in class this week do you find most useful in finding information for this kind of subject, and why?

Today we will:

Learn about Web2.0 and its key tools

Set up Google Reader and learn how to use it

Set up accounts on del.icio.us and learn how to use them.

We begin class today with a video, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us by Prof. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography project.

Last week we learned about the difference between the Internet and the Web. This week we learn the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and what that means for us as journalists.

As you learned from the video, everytime you click on a website or link to one, or create a blog, you are contributing to the living web. Google is currently the most powerful mechanism through which influence on the web is measured and attention is directed. See GoogleGuide’s How Google Works, and Evaluating What You Find. Also see Web Search for Beginners and Web Search Tricks. In class we will do several searches and discuss what appears in the search results, what doesn’t and why.

In “Web 1.0″ we could link between pieces of content via hyperlinks. In “Web 2.0,” content is freed of its container thanks to innovations like “feeds,” which you read about in last week’s readings: specifically, Chapter 1 of Journalism 2.0 and in Chapter 2 of Dan Gillmor’s We the Media. See Feeds101 at the Feedburner website. The New York Times, BBC, Guardian, South China Morning Post, this blog, and the meta-blog Global Voices Online all generate RSS feeds. But they use them differently and we will discuss how so.

Another part of Web2.0 is “tagging” or social bookmarking. Popular websites that use tags are del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg. See the video, Social Bookmarking in Plain English, for an excellent overview.

Search services like Technorati are built on top of feeds and tags. In class we demonstrate how to track conversations on the web and see what people have flagged as interesting through Technorati.

For a long time now, journalists have been joining e-mail groups and list-servs to get connected to communities of experts who will give them story ideas and help them find interesting people to interview. I am on quite a number of e-mail groups, which I will show you in class. Beyond that, journalists are even starting to use social networks like Facebook to find people to interview on certain kinds of stories. I will give some examples in class of how one might use Facebook to find interesting interviewees in Hong Kong.

Readings:

Rebecca MacKinnon, Web-savvy young journalists in demand – and Chinese language doesn’t hurt either!

Dan Gillmor, We the Media, Chapters 1 and 2. (Download the chapter pdf’s from the book’s website.)

Mark Briggs, Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive Chapter 1 (until p.22) and Chapter 5 (How to Blog) (Download the PDF of the whole book from the book’s website.)

Homework assignment (due by 9am Monday September 10th):

Write a post on your new blog reacting to the readings and the Week 1 lecture: How do you think the Internet is changing journalism in Hong Kong, China or wherever you call home? What do you think that means for your future career as a journalist? Your blog post must contain several hyperlinks to other web sites or blogs. (Links to some Chinese-language websites are OK as long as you explain them in English on your blog post so that students who don’t know Chinese can read your post and understand what you are talking about.) Your post needs to convince me that you have read and understood the readings.

NOTE: Your post should be roughly 4-6 paragraphs. Short and clear sentences are best. Remember in blogging – and online journalism generally – less is often more! In real life, your audience has limited time and unlimited media competing for their attention. How do you convince the reader that your blog post is worth reading? You have to be clear, concise, and above all, interesting!

In the beginning, there was the Internet. As you’ll see from this timeline, its origins came from Cold War-era U.S. military researchers who wanted to figure out how to exchange data between computers in different parts of the country. In 1969, ARPANET, the forerunner to the modern Internet, first managed to connect computers in four different U.S. universities.

By 1985, the Internet was starting to get used broadly enough that news organizations were doing stories about its impact. Here’s one from the Canadian Broadcasting Network that somebody posted on YouTube. In the video, you’ll see shots of what the Internet looked like before the World Wide Web. Here is what a pre-web Internet news site looked like:

(From David Carlson)

Then came Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTML (Hyper-text markup language) and the first “web browser,” which enabled us to navigate the World Wide Web through the “web” of links that Tim Berners-Lee had made possible. Here is a simple exercise that demonstrates how HTML works.

Every web page has a URL or “uniform resource locator.” The reason why you can go to http://hku.hk anywhere in the world and get the same website is because the global system of domain names is governed by an international organization called ICANN. Every computer has its own unique IP address. You can purchase a domain name like rebeccamackinnon.com through domain-selling services like GoDaddy and many others. But in order to create a website located at that “address” you have to buy physical “real estate” on a computer. Your data actual does physically have to live on a computer somewhere in order to exist. Once you obtain “hosting” space on a computer server, get assigned an IP address that goes with that server space, then you have to direct your domain name to “point” to the correct IP address.

When you set up a blog on Blogger.com or Xanga or WordPress.com or Uniblogs.org where we will set up our blogs today, you don’t have to worry about any of the above (or even know anything about it), because the company “hosting” your blog is letting you share space on their domain (your blog becomes a “subdomain” of their domain name) and on one of their IP addresses.

The fact that people can now create their own personal media without having to understand any of the above – and without needing to pay anything – has revolutionized media. Hundreds of millions of people around the planet are creating various forms of online media. Media in general – and news specifically – are no longer the exclusive domains of professionals. I believe that professionals still have an important role to play in today’s news environment. But as a professional you need to make sure you are not lagging behind the average blogger when it comes to understanding how to tell stories online – and how to communicate with your audiences about those stories.

Hello everybody. I look forward to meeting you in the first week of September. Thanks to all MJ students who have filled out the Tech Skills Survey. If you did not receive an e-mail about the survey for some reason, please inform Shirley Wu immediately and she will make sure that I have you on my student list.

I am out of town until August 26th. However I’ve received a couple e-mails from students requesting advice about what classes to choose. If you are one of my BJ students, you have already gone through course enrollment by now. New Media Workshop is only offered once per year for BJ students.

MJ students are making their course choices this week. Here is what I told an MJ student who just e-mailed me:

The JMSC has sent you information listing our course offerings and explaining the requirements. They are also listed here.

You are required to take “Advanced reporting and writing,” “Critical issues,” and “Television and radio writing” in the Fall semester. “New Media Workshop” and “TV and Video Production” are also required courses, but they are offered both in the Fall and Spring, so you can choose whether to take them in the Fall or whether to take electives instead.

However, if you intend to take the “Advanced Web Skills” class in the Spring, you must take both “New Media Workshop” and “TV and Video Production” in the Fall, because they are prerequisites for “Advanced Web Skills.” If you do not plan to take “Advanced Web Skills,” you are free to choose when you want to take the New Media and TV Production classes. However, the Fall New Media class will give priority to the more technically advanced students.