Multiplatform Journalism

Amy O’Leary of The New York Times shares audio tips from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

This post on the PBS POV blog about the need for a hybrid form; should be of interest to those of you who are interested in (or studying) documentary.

For those who haven’t finished uploading their Soundslides or embedding their maps and timelines yet, remember the deadline is 5 pm tomorrow.  I’ll be grading your Soundslides and your overall blogs (pre-project) over the weekend, so grades should be up by start of class Tuesday.  I will send an email this evening with a list of student presentation dates: please let me know if you don’t get the email.

Mindy McAdams just wrote this guide to producing better slideshows, well worth checking out.

Remember, we’ll be working with preexisting data — but if you do have an Excel spreadsheet with some interesting numbers, feel free to bring it along. In addition to our discussion about data, we’ll be doing a quick refresher on Vuvox and talking about where to put all your digital assets for your final presentation. You’ll also have time to ask questions about your Soundslides – remember, they are due next week, not this week.

…produced by grad students at Stanford.  Interesting use of data — if depressing.  Play around with it by clicking on the tabs (the window will fill with text).

Take a look at this post about slideshow errors while you’re thinking about how to order your images.  Note especially what he says about images that interfere with a speaker’s subjective observations.

This tutorial walks you through some of the basics of Soundslides, if you need a refresher.

Download

Your own photos and audio for Soundslides.  Those of you who missed class last week will do the packaged exercise first and then work on your own piece.  You have an exemption from posting this week, but I’ll talk to you all in class individually about your projects and have you fill out a planning sheet.
All grades for completed work will be up on Moodle by class time Tuesday.

Here’s a tutorial for those of you who will be using Soundslides and will need to upload a project to their server space:

1. Open Cyberduck – you will see a screen like the screen above.  Fill in the server information as you see it on the screen, and then enter your username and password.  Your username is you netname (remember to capitalize!), and your password is your student ID number.

2. Once you have connected, you will see a second screen

If you have not yet set up your server space, you need to go to your “sites” folder and delete the files that are already there (do this ONLY for the files in sites).

3. Now you are ready to upload the contents of your Soundslides folder to “sites”.  Remember to upload the entire CONTENTS of the “publish to web” folder, but not the folder itself, to the site file.

3. Your Soundslides is now published to  http://132.205.57.26/Jour202/netname/sites/index.html (insert your netname).

4. Next, create the HTML code that will display the slide show in your blog.  This process is generally referred to as “embedding”.

Use your Web browser to open http://www4.soundslides.com/apps/utilities/, then enter your slide show’s URL in the form. Click CONTINUE

5. The utility will now create the code to embed your slide show. You should see a preview of your slide show when the page loads. Below the preview you’ll see a text box containing your new embed code.

6.  Now go to your Edublogs “Create New Post” page. Go in to the HTML view, and paste in your embed code.

7. You should now see your slide show displayed in your Edublogs weblog.  If the slide show disrupts the layout of your blog, you may not have saved the project as a “small” project. You can either resave your project and begin again, or you can change the dimension of your slides right in your HTML view. Go in and substitute these numbers– width=”330″ height=”533″ –for the width and height variables in the embed code. You need to do it in two places – keep playing around until it works.

8. Any questions, email me or come see me on Tuesday.

9. Please save a copy of your project on a flash drive, as I believe we will have to clean out the server next semester. If you want to keep your project out there in cyberspace, you will need to put it on your own server space.