Rachel Nevares

“Every college journalist should have a blog” – Mark Briggs.

I couldn’t agree more. This chapter, which deals with blogs, shows how news organizations and journalists have used blogs, how to get started with your blog, and how RSS can be used to beat the competition, how to manage a community of comments, and how to direct traffic to your blog.

Blogs have become the new wave of sharing information. They are FAST, INTERACTIVE, and MODERN.

Three characteristics define a blog:

1. Frequently updated Web site that displays entries/posts in reverse chronological order;
2. Posts include a headline, body, links to other information and may contain photos, videos, or other graphics;
3. Links for comments in which readers can post their opinions and thoughts on the topic.

WHY are blogs important? They have changed Web publishing and changed journalism.

According to Technorati, in October of 2009 the top 10 blogs were:

1. The Huffington Post                                    
2. TechCrunch
3. Mashable
4. Gizmodo
5. Engadget
6. The Official Google Blog
7. Boing Boing
8. Lifehacker
9. Ars Technica
10. TMZ.com

Important things to consider in your blog: name, theme, page elements, fonts and colors, editing HTML, new templates, widgets, extras, image header, edits to your CSS, and extras.

Bulding an audience for your blog:

• Put your readers first
• Organize all your ideas
• Be direct and to the point
• Authority with a personality
• Be civil
• Scanable posts
• Links, summarize, and analyze
• Specific headlines
• Good attitude
• Photos and screenshots are key

In conclusion, blogs have become an excellent source of news, a way to network, and a way to get one’s information out there.

Tags: Advanced blogging, Blogs, Briggs

Mandy Jenkins came to our Comm. 361 class to speak to us about an array of things concerning online journalism and the rise of social media. Jenkins works as a social media producer for TBD.

TBD is a local news website for the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. area. It’s a wonderful news website that has a great tool called News Near You where you can type in your area code and get specific news correlated to where you live.

Jenkins, who is from a rural town in Ohio, explained how as soon as she was introduced to the web she was hooked. She became an addict and was always searching for more.

“Networking is all about building a relationship online,” – Jenkins

Jenkins personal blog helped her connect with people she knew who were doing the same thing. It helped her build a foundation to further her work.

She explained that her discovery of Twitter in 2007 lead her to making wonderful connections and relationships in her field of work. She actually ended up meeting her employer through Twitter. This just goes to show the power of social media.

Jenkins explained how it’s important not to ignore people’s comments and always try to respond to them. Whether they’re positive or negative.

“I always try and do my best to respond to everyone who writes to me, even if they didn’t have anything positive to say,” -Jenkins

Jenkins ended her presentation by giving the class some very helpful websites to utilize as online journalist. Here they are:

• Twello
• Muckrack
• Storify
• HootSuite

I thought her coming to class was very helpful and gave a good inside perspective to how social media is really the wave of the present.

Tags: Blogs, Briggs, Mandy Jenkins, TBD, Twitter

The title of the first chapter in Mark Briggs book, JournalismNext, is “We Are All Web Workers Now”. He starts off the chapter explaining how important the Internet and World Wide Web have become in the life of a journalist. One quote that sticks out to me is:

“But if we take online technology for granted, we can miss some important opportunities to leverage it to gather information better, to communicate better and to create better journalism”.

Listed below are the main points I took away from this chapter:

• The Internet is a network of connected computers that share lots of information while the World Wide Web is a way to access all this information throughout the network.
• A cache is kind of like a temporary storage file that saves all your downloads while surfing the Web.
• RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS serves as an information tool that delivers information directly to you via an RSS reader or Web brower. Saves TIME and puts everything in ONE place.
• FTP stands for File Tranfer Protocol. Basically it’s a process for moving files that are too big for simple e-mail to handle.
• HTML is the collection of various tags that tell a Web browser how to display it’s information on any given Web page. Ex: To bold a word you’d enter <b>word</b>.
• CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables one to make changes to the outlook and design of a Web page.
• XML is Extensible Markup Language. XML serves as a complement to HTML and is basically customizable tags to deceifer what certain data is.

Copyright: Photo from web-worker.co.uk

Tags: Briggs, Internet, WWW

Claudia Holland, GMU’s Copyright Officer, came to our Comm. 361 class to speak about copyright issues.

She explained how the three copyright traits are:

1. Expression
2. Originality
3. Fixation

She then went on to explain and give examples of protected works and works not protected:

Protected works: Almost anything is a protected work.

• Literary
• Architectural
• Sounds recordings
• Motion pictures
• Graphics
• Plays

Works Not Protected:

• Ideas
• Basic facts
• Public domain
• Titles, names, short phrases, slogans
• Anything published prior to 1923

She then went on to explain that fair use was intended to benefit the public and that individuals can use these items without permission in certain circumstances. These factors are as followed:

1. Purpose and character of the use
2. Nature of the work
3. Amount of substantially of the portion used
4. Effect of the use on the potential market

A cool example she used was it dealing with a hit song. The lyricist and the composer actually own the rights to the song. With a hit song comes a bundle of rights such as:

• Reproduction: Cd’s, MP3s
• Derivative: Music videos
• Public distribution: Selling of Cd’s, MP3s, etc.
• Public performance: Concerts
• Public display: T-Shirts, bumper stickers
• Digital audio transmission: Podcasts

Holland ended her presentation by telling us about Creative Commons which is a website that “provides an infrastructure that consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates..” It’s basically a wonderful tool to use as an online journalist to make sure you’re not running into any trouble with copyrights.

Very helpful stuff that opened my eyes to a lot of useful information.

Tags: Claudia Holland, Copyright, Creative Commons

Above is my media pyramid. The items that are at the bottom of the pyramid are the places I get most of my news from. Word of mouth is definitely a big contributor as I’m surrounded by people everywhere I go. People are always talking about current events and that serves as a huge source of my information. Also, I log in to AOL mail everyday and there are always stories posted right at the log-in page. Another daily source of news. Then the very popular Facebook gives me tons of information with my friends status updates, news links, videos, and wall posts.

The middle part of my media pyramid includes The Washington Post, CNN, and George Mason University. My parents receive the post and I glance at the headlines every morning before leaving for the day. I receive CNN texts to my phone with breaking news, in which I tend to get on a weekly basis. Lastly, all the different media around campus serve as a big source of news.

The top part of my media pyramid has WTOP radio. I generally listen to my iPod in the car en route to my destinations, but will periodically tune in to WTOP for weather, traffic reports, and news.

Tags: Facebook, GMU, Media pyramid, The Washington Post, WTOP