Teaching Online Journalism

Portrait of a great communicator

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:21:03 +0000

Yesterday I watched a documentary video I had TiVo’d earlier from the Sundance Channel:

Unfortunately it’s not yet available on Netflix (?!), even though it was released last May. I recommend that you file the title away so you remember to watch it later. It’s a very good example of documentary storytelling, for one thing. It also portrays Glaser as a lovely human being, sincere and compassionate, not spoiled by his great talent or his fame.

I think this video would be very inspirational for a lot of our journalism design and graphics students, because in it you can see how Glaser produced commercial work, paid his bills, ran a design studio in New York — and yet did not compromise his principles, did not grow a raging ego, and (deservedly) won a lot of admirers.

Of course, you’ll also get to see a ton of examples of his wonderful graphics and drawings in the video — and maybe, like me, you’ll appreciate for the first time how very broad and deep his oeuvre is.

21 examples of Flash journalism

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:25:57 +0000

These are interactive news packages I’ve selected to show to journalism students as we discuss some of the capabilities of Adobe Flash. Many are very recent.

1. Motion

The first thing students learn to do in Flash is animation. Although a lot of animation is merely eye candy, it can help to tell the story more effectively.

The motion in Super Stadium (2010) is window dressing, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In this segment, there’s a zoom on each level of the stadium as it flies out. In other segments, we see an alpha fade. These animation effects are easy to do on the Flash Timeline.

In Last Minutes of Flight 3407 (2009), a 3-D plane rotation illustrates what happened in the air. Other animation in this graphic traces the plane’s path on a map; the map then zooms in close to indicate where the plane went down.

An extraordinary feat of reporting: What happened: Death of Jean Charles de Menezes (2007) shows in 25 steps how London police pursued and killed an innocent man. With this level of detail, it’s essential to make sure the motion is fully accurate. The story is enhanced by inset videos taken from closed-circuit cameras throughout the city.

Manufacturing Chocolate from Seed to Sweet (2007) presents a step-by-step explanation of a process, with animations (such as milk pouring from a bottle) that are initiated by the user.

Four years ago, every winter sport appeared in these detailed animated graphics: Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games. They offer particularly good examples of motion used strategically to explain. Even if you don’t know a word of Spanish, you can learn from watching these.

2. Button symbols

To add interactivity to a Flash graphic or animation, you’ll need to master buttons — and that means dipping into ActionScript. It’s well worth the effort, as I hope these examples will show.

The rollover buttons in Damage in Haiti (2010) cause pop-up panels to appear. It’s possible for relative beginners at Flash to create this kind of typical map effect.

Black Tides: A Timeline (2005?) offers a more complex map interface, but the circles on the world map and on the timeline bar at bottom are buttons. Not shown: A vertical stack of buttons on the left side of the graphic. (Unfortunately, the photos that used to be in this package have now all gone missing.)

The Mekong: A River and a Region Transformed (2010): This beautiful interface, integrated loosely with a map, uses a photo button and a separate text button to open a slideshow; another text button takes you to a story page with audio.

In The Debt Trap (2008), a sequence of 10 invisible buttons display information about each year in the selected decade slice — a great data graphic. (To see this segment, select Start, then go to Lifetime/Explore.)

TKTS – A House of Glass (2008) uses the Times’s standard button bar with numerals + NEXT. I think the first time they deployed this button bar was in Small Plane Hits Building in Manhattan (2006).

3. Movie clip symbols

After a student masters simple interactivity with buttons, it’s time to tackle the real power of Flash — and that means movie clips. Movie clips make possible a lot of functionality that can’t be accomplished with basic Timeline animation.

What causes earthquakes? (To see this cutaway diagram, click the second tab at the top.) The moving red arrows and the radiating circles are movie clips.

Slot machine (2009): The rolling sections inside the machine and the light on top are movie clips.

Budget Forecasts, Compared with Reality (2010): The drag slider at the bottom and the rollovers on the fever chart are movie clips.

In Scenes from a Ruined Boulevard (2010), a different kind of slider movie clip (bottom center) drags across a long panorama to show the destruction of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Four pop-up text panels distinguish this design from the typical 360-degree panorama.

Produced for the U.S. Library of Congress in 2001, Churchill and the Great Republic remains one of the great digital information packages (select the “Timeline” option to see this view). The way the timeline bars (lower portion of the screen) work in concert with the main display area is typical of movie clip functionality.

4. Maps and Data

Three of these examples are data-driven maps. Now you’re looking at the hard stuff — the integration of large data sets tied to dynamically generated objects.

Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid (2009): Both of the maps above come from the same package. Users have a lot of opportunities to explore and view the data that interests them.

Haiti, territorio devastado (2010): This beautiful 3-D map of Haiti allows the user to select various kinds of information to display as overlays. (There’s also an animated cutaway that shows earthquake activity beneath the surface.)

Top: Geography of a Recession (2009) provides data for each county in the United States. Compare that with the map below it — Immigration Explorer (2009) — and you’ll see how much sense it makes to build interactive graphics that use external data sources. Once you’ve got a map like this working the first time, you can swap out the data set and tweak it to serve a wholly different story.

Gay marriage chronology (2009): This map interacts with the timeline below it to show how states have changed their laws to allow or prohibit gay marriages.

Although it’s simpler than the preceding map examples, History of Religion tells a story efficiently and clearly with the help of color and motion, with a minimum of text.

If you have other examples to suggest, I’d be happy to see the links!

Spending time with Los Angeles homicides

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:02:34 +0000

Have you seen the L.A. Times homicides map? I’m sure you’ve marveled at the New York Times homicides map, and perhaps you have also admired the Boston Globe homicides map. The L.A. map, however, has a lot (a lot!) of fine features that the others lack.

One of my students wrote a critique of the L.A. map for an assignment, and that led me to go deeper into it than I had before. Turns out that it’s probably the best implementation I’ve ever seen of Adrian Holovaty’s 2006 call to action, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

I’m particularly impressed by the article level of the data — the story — for each and every victim of homicide (see here and here and here, for example). Check out The Homicide Report blog too.

(Props to Ken Schwencke, a Gator journalism grad, whose love of data and code is all over this thing.)

Recommendation for a low-end video camera

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:16:24 +0000

Read the review of the Kodak Zi8 by Derrick Jeror — at Amazon.com. Then read the 69 comments on his review (or at least scan them).

This is an extremely helpful review — it explains how to get the best sound quality for interviews and the best battery life, etc., from this under-$200 video camera. Derrick recommends a lavalier microphone and provides other good tips too.

In one of the comments, he explains why the Flip Mino is better for some applications.

3,000 followers on Twitter

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:49:20 +0000

Last March I had 1,000 followers on Twitter. Sometime earlier today, I reached 3,000:

I’m sure many of those folks have not signed on to Twitter since the week when they opened their account. so I’m not going to throw a party or anything. And Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, has 31,488 followers on Twitter, so I’m not even in the big leagues.

If by chance you want to follow me, I am @macloo on Twitter.

For articles and blog posts about Twitter, see these bookmarks.

I’m often asked if we should be teaching Twitter to journalism students. I don’t think there’s much to teach, really. I do think Twitter should be discussed in journalism classes — and maybe even more in public relations classes!

Twitter is most valuable when you choose a relevant set of people to follow. The introduction of Twitter lists made it easier for a brand-new Twitter user to find those people. For example, you can just check out Patrick LaForge’s mediapeople list — there are 310 journalists on it, and the stream usually has something of interest going on. Or take a look at my media-thinkers list — it’s visible in a widget in the sidebar of this blog too.

Updating Flash Journalism (Part 2)

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:01:26 +0000

The other day I received an e-mail from someone with a programming background who’s interested in learning how to build journalism packages in Flash. He asked how to get started and whether I was planning to release a new edition of my 2005 book Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages.

First I directed him to my December 2009 post about why I will not be updating my book.

I am recommending Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. It’s not directed specifically at journalists or news graphics reporters, but it’s easy to follow for the most part.

Then I gave him this outline of what he needs to learn:

Button scripting (for navigation through the package): Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 6; see also AS3 Buttons Tutorial
Loading external content dynamically: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 9
How to optimize images in Flash (Bitmap Properties): Imported Bitmaps
How to load and control external MP3s: Using Sound in ActionScript 3
How to load and control video: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 7 (starting on page 252)
ActionScript 3 and XML loading/controls (XML works awesomely well with AS3): I have built a tutorial for this that is meant to be used in conjunction with the files and the exercise in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 8 (download the files; 234 KB). Please note that the exercise will not make sense without the book!

Now, after you’ve got all that under your belt, you will need to spend some time learning how to use the Bandwidth Profiler (Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 10) to make sure no one can accuse you of building heavy (overly large) Flash files. Heavy Flash files are NOT an indicator that Flash is bad; they simply show that the person who built the files didn’t know how to do it right!

If someone tells you that Flash graphics do not show up in Google or Yahoo! searches — that is incorrect.

If someone tells you that SWF is a proprietary file format, or that SWFs can be created only with Adobe software applications, that is also incorrect.

You should also learn how to use SWFObject to embed your Flash files (SWFs) in regular Web pages.

Ideas for journalism educators

Mindy McAdams — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:55:06 +0000

I gave a couple of presentations to U.S. journalism educators in St. Petersburg, Florida, yesterday and today. For each presentation I made a page of links to resources, examples, etc. The PowerPoint for each presentation is also online.

Blogs and Journalism
This presentation surveys the ways in which professional journalists are using blogs to enhance their reporting, reach wider audiences, extend their influence, and encourage two-way communication with the public. The implications for teaching journalism students about blogging are clear; students need to gain experience with writing, researching, linking, and managing comments on blogs.

Resources for Adding Online Journalism to Your Curriculum
This presentation offers seven multimedia and online skill sets for journalists and recommends simple ways to add basic skills instruction into existing courses such as reporting, photojournalism, editing, and magazine journalism.

Thoughts about video editing software

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:13:31 +0000

One of the ongoing challenges in teaching journalism nowadays concerns the choice of software for video editing. I’m going to pump out a brief overview here and hope that lots of people will weigh in with their own experiences and suggestions. The more the merrier!

First, an outline of the programs that generally dominate the conversation in most j-schools:

iMovie (free)
Windows Movie Maker (free)
Final Cut Pro or Studio or Express (three different price tags)
Anything else

Second, let me note that those who teach students aiming at television news jobs have a different list (although you’ll find the Final Cut products on that list too). Here I’m looking at the broader population of all journalism students, who might end up anywhere at all (especially online) — not necessarily in TV.

iMovie or Windows Movie Maker (WMM)

These two free programs solve a lot of problems simply because they are free, stable, and very easy to use (and to teach). However, they can also create problems because in many j-schools, some percentage of your students will have “the other one.” I think it’s a waste of the instructor’s time (and class time) to teach both, so pick the one that fits the computers in your lab. Be prepared for frustration from the students who don’t want to come to the lab on campus to do their assigned work.

Is iMovie better than WMM? I don’t think so. (I use both.) The two are decidedly different, but both will get the job done. Both have very limited capacity but do allow you to trim clips, insert cutaways, layer a second track of audio, and adjust audio volume. You can add titles and end credits easily in both. Both offer a plethora of cheesy transitions (don’t be tempted). WMM has a more traditional timeline interface. iMovie hides the timeline tracks, but you can access them via the Precision Editor (via a menu option).

A huge problem with WMM is that more and more point-and-shoot cameras save video in the MOV format, and WMM will not open MOV files. These must be converted to AVI or WMV first. Some degradation may result.

iMovie supports lots more cameras and formats (read all about it), including MPEG-4, AVCHD and H.264.

Another problem with WMM is that it has slight, annoying differences on Vista (and presumably Windows 7) vs. the previous versions of Windows. Most students can figure these out, but some get stuck and need help.

Final Cut Pro or Studio or Express

These are Apple/Mac only (unless you use an emulator, which I would not recommend). Studio includes Pro, plus a lot of other stuff. Express is like an entry-level version of Pro, but Apple has made our lives hell by making it impossible to move projects back and forth between Pro and Express. That little detail is often blissfully ignored by people who say, “Let’s buy Pro for our lab, and the students can buy Express for their MacBooks.” A road to disaster! (You can open a FCE project in FCP, but after a project has been saved in FCP, it will not open in FCE.)

Check Final Cut higher education prices at the Apple Store (search for Final Cut there). We’re talking about roughly $900 vs. $200 — nothing to sneeze at!

Now, if I had six or 10 or 15 weeks to teach Final Cut to students, that would be great. But I’m teaching an omnibus multimedia journalism course, and we have four weeks — four — to learn to shoot and edit and get it online. Don’t underestimate the learning curve of a high-end piece of software. As a colleague of mine quipped recently, most people have a simple hammer around the house — not many people go out and buy a nail gun.

It would be wonderful if every journalism student graduated with proficiency in Final Cut Pro. But the teaching resources required are not trivial.

Anything else (other editing software)

There are free Web 2.0 (all online) options for video editing (see list), and there are many other commercial packages such as Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas and whatever little doodle-dabble came with your HP or Dell, or with your video camera. And there’s Avid and who knows what all at the high end.

What I would caution you against is allowing students to use just anything they choose. When you teach video editing, you want to get certain basics across — for the sake of storytelling — and novices find it easier to follow along if everyone in the room is clicking the same buttons. In other words, variation in software will get in the way of what you really need to teach, which is cutting together sequences, laying in the audio, lining things up neatly, adding titles and credits and lower-thirds, and exporting the file in a decent-quality format for uploading or whatever.

And for goodness’ sake — telling the story! Don’t forget, that’s what we really need to teach them.

For tutorials and other video editing links, see the Journalists’ Toolkit video section.

Updating Flash Journalism

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:44:03 +0000

This post is for anyone who teaches Adobe Flash to journalism students. It might also be useful for journalists (especially graphics reporters) who are learning Flash right now, or who might be intending to learn Flash over the holidays or sometime soon.

In 2004 I wrote a book titled Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages. It was published in early 2005 by Focal Press/Elsevier. It sold pretty well. It was well received among working journalists.

The book is now outdated. If you’re using Flash CS4, you cannot use the book. At all. It’s okay to use it with CS3, but only if you do everything in ActionScript 2.0. But I do not recommend that. You should be using CS4 and ActionScript 3.0.

I’m not going to update the book. There are a bunch of reasons, but to make a long explanation quite short, it takes far too many hours to write such a book, which includes creating and testing all the example files to be used in Flash. It’s a matter of time. I just don’t have that kind of time available.

Losing my book puts me in a tough spot as a journalism educator. I teach an advanced Web course each spring, and 10 of the 15 weeks are spent on Flash. When people compliment me on the clarity of my Flash book, I tell them that every lesson in the book was battle-tested on real, live journalism students. That’s a fact.

So now I’m left without a book. Well, I gave that a lot of thought last spring, when I knew I was teaching with my own book for the last time. Our computer labs did not get CS4 until summer 2009, so I was able to use my book last spring. And yes, I taught those students ActionScript 2.0 (with a wee bit of AS3 thrown in here and there). Quite frankly, I was still learning AS3 last spring (you never really stop learning ActionScript). And I had no access at all to CS4 until late in the spring semester.

A New Book and a New Syllabus

What to do? Well, first I had to find a book. The good news is, I’m pretty happy with the book I’m requiring my students to use this spring: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than the Flash books that were out there in 2003.

Second, I have to reconfigure two-thirds of my syllabus, because I can’t teach the 10 weeks of Flash the same way I used to — not only am I using a different book, but Flash has changed so much in CS4, I have to adjust the way I teach it. So that’s what I’m in the middle of right now. Getting ready for spring and my Flash class.

And why should you care? Because I’m going to share, that’s why.

The syllabus is not finished yet, but I can tell you about the first four weeks of the 10. And I’ve been busy making some supplemental materials for my students, so I’ll link to those here.

One really good thing about the CS4 Adobe Classroom in a Book (hereafter ACiaB) is that lessons 1 and 2 provide a very solid foundation in both the Flash CS4 interface and tools and also how to draw, import image files, and create text. So I’m off the hook for that stuff (hoorah!). There is nothing more boring than pointing at the projection screen in front of the room and saying, “Click this little widget here.” But if you don’t have a good book, that’s what you have to do.

Those two lessons in the book should take the students about two hours to complete (maybe three hours for some students). We will do them both in the first lab.

In the lecture before that first lab, I’ll show them some recent examples of how journalists use Flash — mostly from The New York Times — so they will know what Flash is good for.

After Drawing, Animation

Here’s where I hit a snag in ACiaB: Lesson 3 was tedious and unnecessarily long and complicated. It teaches some essential stuff, but this is where my Flash experience comes into play — it’s stuff we need to get past quickly at this stage so that we can get on to animation, and the students can feel successful and competent. They need to be animating and making stuff move in the second week. But the book’s lesson 3 does not let them animate anything.

Fine, you might say — skip to lesson 4 in the book. Yes, that is the first animation lesson. But even there, the author has loaded up too much complexity for the average journalism student (typically not an artist, and not trained in complex visual compositions).

So what I need to do is give the students a more cut-to-the-chase lesson in symbols and animation. I need to make the basic animation techniques clear and simple before I let them loose on lesson 4 in the book (which they will spend their second lab working on).

So I had to make some tutorials. I made three (all short), and there will be one more (maybe next week). They are all linked here, under the heading Animation Basics.

And yes, we will skip lesson 3 in the book altogether. We’re not even looking at it.

As for lesson 4, it’s a pretty long one. I’m not sure how far most students will be able to get in two hours during our lab, but I’ll be finding out sometime in February. A good thing about this text is that it includes an extensive section (in lesson 4) about how to use the new Motion Editor, which is one of the really huge changes in Flash CS4 (different from all previous versions).

We’re also going to skip lesson 5, which goes into deep detail about the new Bone tool in CS4. This is no doubt great for professional animators, but it’s just cognitive overload for most journalism students.

Buttons and ActionScript 3.0

The chapter of ACiaB that totally sold me was lesson 6, which not only provides one of the most practical Flash lessons I have ever seen anywhere (with files on the included CD, I might add) but also supplies a clear and practical guide to using ActionScript 3.0.

The scripting in Flash drives a lot of people away (some of them probably screaming as they run). If you ever learned to write any kind of programming language in a class in school, you would not find ActionScript difficult, I’m sure. But most journalism students have never learned even one single line of computer programming. What’s more, a fair percentage of them have math phobia. (I can empathize with them.)

Buttons in Flash must be scripted, though, and buttons are the heart of what makes an interactive journalism package work. No scripting? No buttons. No buttons? No interactivity.

So lesson 6 (which is likely to take two to three hours to finish, but luckily we do have a three-hour lab period) is worth the price of the book, for me. It’s a really good introduction to the most useful way to work with buttons in Flash CS4. I built a small supplement to the book for basics of button scripting. It’s not likely to make sense on its own, but combined with the book, I think it will make the material very clear.

Is this all the ActionScript 3.0 a Flash-savvy journalist needs to know? Hardly. And in fact there’s some stuff coming later (I’ll save that for another blog post) where ACiaB falls woefully short (in particular when it comes to audio control).

So by the start of week 4, the students will have animation and button scripting under their belts. Then they will be ready to begin building interactive Flash packages.

What’s Next?

This is what remains to be covered:

Movie Clip Symbols
Video in Flash
Packages with Loaded SWFs
Sound Controls (ActionScript and external files)
Loaded Data (XML and ActionScript)

The ACiaB text is pretty good for video (including use of the Flash Encoder) and for loading external SWFs, which allow us to make our packages very modular and light. The book doesn’t include anything about XML, but I’m working on a tutorial for that now, and I’m going to adapt the book’s lesson 8 to an XML version — which is how any news organization would handle a project similar to the one used in lesson 8. Nowadays I think journalism students really need some exposure to XML, and this should be a pretty neat way to get that done.

So stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how the remainder of the Flash instruction will be divided up.

Journalists’ use of social media

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:51:35 +0000

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) has put out a very simple list of social media guidelines for its journalists and staff to follow:

Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.

Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.

Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.

Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

– Posted Nov. 5, 2009

These seem sensible to me. They’re so straightforward, you might think no self-respecting journalist needs guidelines such as these. But they are also valuable for what they do not say.

When The Washington Post disseminated its new guidelines for social media use (posted Sept. 27, 2009), much discussion ensued. Steve Buttry, for example, wrote:

The Post’s top editors need to start using Twitter and other social media more, so they can lead on these issues from a position of understanding, rather than ignorance.

I found myself agreeing with Steve when I read The Post’s guidelines:

When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism. … This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online. (Sept. 27, 2009)

The ABC’s guidelines indicate that management regards ABC journalists and staff as responsible professionals. The Washington Post guidelines indicate a lack of respect for the intelligence and integrity of the organization’s journalists.