My team, which is comprised of Melissa, Ryan, Nick, Lijam and Julia, is doing our project on theraputic hockey. We are specifically focusing on the NoVa Cool Cats hockey team based in the Northern Virginia area.
Our team created a storyboard on MindMeister, which can be found here.
My role in the project is to create a slideshow of pictures from the Cool Cat’s practice, contribute blurbs and information for our ZeeMap that we’re embedding on our final project and helping Melissa with the information for the feature story.
This is how guest speaker Jon DeNunzio, user engagement editor for washingtonpost.com, started off his presentation that was given to our Comm. 361 class.
DeNunzio gave us some interesting background information about himself to begin:
Worked for a few small papers after college
1994: Started at The Washington Post
2000-2007: Covered high school sports at the Post
2007-2010: Web sports editor
April 2010: User engagement editor for washingtonpost.com
He gave a very good list as to WHY we use social media that included:
It’s where the users are
It helps our reporting
It allows us to build a relationship with users
A very bold statement that he said in conjunction with Marshall McLuhan‘s very famous “The medium is the message” quote in stating:
“It’s not the media, it’s the social.” – DeNunzio
His point to that statement was to be social with your users whenever you can.
Examples of this are:
Running a poll
Paying attention to comments
Asking for ideas
Asking for photos
Hosting a debate
Bottom line is to make it clear how you utilize programs to connect with people.
Here are some helpful websites DeNunzio presented to us:
The article talks about how the city of Atlanta, GA got hit with a few inches of snow that then got topped off with a sheet of ice back on Sunday January the 9th of this year. At about 2 a.m. on Tuesday morning videographer and web developer Brian Danin and his wife spotted a skater skating on Peachtree Street. While Danin didn’t have his normal equipment, he shot the footage of the skater with his Droid X smartphone.
“It was one of those ironic moments, ” Danin said.
Danin then uploaded the video to YouTube. Andrew Nendel, the skater, had handed his pocket video recorder to a security guard and uploaded the result to Facebook, Vimeo and CNN iReport.
Neither Danin nor Nendel knew how popular this video was going to become. Not only did the video become widespread and an instant hit, but it also had an effect on the city of Atlanta’s snow removal system.
“The video became emblematic of the pressure on the city and the state to clear the roads and get things back to normal.”
I thought this was a really interesting article because it showed how the social media tool of YouTube was not only able to create an incredibly popular video and story, but also helped in fixing a problem with the city of Atlanta’s lack of proper snow removal measures.
This couldn’t be a better article for the relevance of this Comm. 361 Online Journalism class. This article gives an excellent overview of some innovative websites that can be used for classes dealing with journalism.
MediaShift is a website which tracks how social media, weblogs, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and online video are changing the media world.
This particular article, by Nathan Gibbs, gives a list of SEVEN social media techniques and websites that can be utilized in the classroom. The seven areas are:
Facebook
Group blogs
WordPress
Social Curation
Collaborative Writing
Mind Mapping
Experimentation
Facebook:
Facebook groups: students utilizing Facebook groupsis beneficial as students are already using Facebook so it eliminates making a new user name/password, it takes little effort to “like” or comment on students work, and it encourages more interaction.
Facebook pages: such Facebook pages can be utilized to post stories and get sources for other stories.
Group blogs: group blogs are a great way to introduce students to online writing and basic web publishing; the kind of work they’ll be doing as journalists. He suggests using Tumblr or Posterous.
WordPress: Gibbs explains how WordPress opens the door to extensive customization. Users are able to enhance the blogging experience and really take their work to a new level.
Social Curation: Gibbs explains how it’s important that students know how to collect and annotate messages from social media websites. Storify, Curated.by and Keepstream all allow users to gather and embed social media messages for use in blog posts and articles.
Collaborative Writing: Gibbs explains how Google Docs is an excellent editing tool that allows multiple contributors to write at the same time and track revisions.
Mind Mapping: Gibbs explains how structured brainstorming helps people organize their ideas based on their relationship to other aspects. He suggests using Mind Meister to implement online collaboration.
Experimentation: Trying new things and learning what works and what doesn’t is a huge component to journalism. Making sure to apply one’s journalistic curiosity by exploring how new social tools can further your storytelling skills.
Journalists across all platforms have become incredibly obsessed with how many people are viewing theirarticle(s), as opposed to the next person. Has journalism driven away from it’s true purpose and turned into marketing?
He, as every other smart journalist, knows and realizes that journalism has taken a sharp turn for the Web. He jokingly expressed that because people are now able to see how many views they’ve gotten on a particular blog or article, this will change the way journalists do “business”.
I find this to be very true. Journalists are striving to be the best at their profession, and that’s what they should be doing. But at one point is it a competition instead of getting out good, solid, well-thought out information?
A very good quote from his article is when he states:
“Here’s a metric I think we ought to keep in the mix: Gut instinct. A reporter’s own sense of a good story. That means being willing to ignore the latest page views and use your professional judgment to produce great journalism.”
He concludes with, “News outlets will never get anywhere if they’re obsessed with chasing readers. They can, however, collaborate with them.”
I find this to be very true. Journalists as well as news outlets need to remember that they must write well, write what’s prevelant, and write for their audience.
