Greetings all: welcome to Advanced Online Journalism.
During the semester you will get the opportunity to put the skills you learned in the basic online courses to use in real life situtations. You will also learn some additional techniques and methods, some of which are still in beta or only just released.
These additional skills include live coverage — and MoJo (mobile journalism) — plus multiple-media tools such as projeqt, cover-it-live and storify and the cloud/CDNs. You will also be get the opportunity to hone your technical skills via some set projects — including setting up web sites and an intranet.
We already have a handful of technical projects in the works – some for third parties. I hope to secure further projects, particularly if they are paid projects.
If any of you have freelance projects that you need help with, just shout.
News Room:
Class sessions will be treated in part as news editing sessions with the associated story budgets and planning. The stories you produce will be uploaded to the class website, vox-asia.com.
Please note this site is live so stories must be edited and verified as of professional standard before publication. In no case should the reporter ever file his/her own story. Articles MUST comply with the stylesheet (link to come) and the common pitfalls must be avoided.
What’s different:
In JMSC6091 projects were a little artificial in order to accommodate all the tools required. It would be very rare for a single story or package to use so many tools — audio, maps, diagrams etc. So more attention will be paid to the choice of tool(s) used.
That said, this is an online multimedia course so I would never expect to see a text-only or single-medium story. Each story will need more than one media element.
One major difference: There will be NO musical backgrounding to audio unless it is justified.
Vox-Asia
It’s been almost a year since the site was upgraded. We need to update it and consider whether or not to maintain the theme. We need to check and repair broken links and clean out spam comments.
Can each of you sign up for an account. Please ensure your byline is activated on the profile page. Please use your genuine byline (no first names, nicknames) unless you have permission to use a pen name.
Hong Kong Budget CE Selection / Mid-term
This takes place on March 25 and we will cover it live — and compare your performance and timings to the mainstream media, particularly the news agencies.
This will serve as your mid-term so everyone will have to play a part. We need to start work now because there will be leaks and hints appearing in the media between now and the event.
Coverage will include a truck (main) story, snaps and urgents (via Twitter but in competition with the wires), live video streaming, sidebars, breakouts, analysis and follow-ups. Everyone will play a role — so start thinking and checking on how various outlets have covered this sort of event in the past.
This will take considerable organisation, planning and versatility ….
