New.Journalism.Review

Dave Lee, at UKPG website, has been asking – Who’s using Dreamweaver? The debate kicked off (again), after Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com explained how he went about creating NY Times.

A dream candidate:

He came up ‘wishlist’ when interviewing candidates [See also coverage on Mindy's blog].

Ideally, recruits would have:

XHTML
CSS,
JavaScript
Flash;
a commercially viable comfort level
with database and application programming;
and “last but not least sound
news values”.

Vinh wanted to know who was teaching this kind of stuff? I can’t talk about the entire world (!), but in the UK I only know of  -  City University’s MA Electronic Publishing. This highly-rated MA is delivered jointly by City’s Department of Information Science and the Department of Journalism and may well come close.

Most journalism undergrad are not covering programming or how to code because they come out of arts faculties. If this is what Vinh requires then he better get used to teaching computer science grads ‘sound news values’.

Ban Dreamweaver. Teach open source [sorry Adobe]

But Dave Lee makes an important point: nobody is talking about Dreamweaver these days!   

It is clear that some students think: online journalism = creating websites = Dreamweaver. Also, some educators believe that just because Dreamweaver is installed on all the machines (part of CS)  = we should teach it. Whilst learning Dreamweaver is surely useful in life, so is learning how to bake lasagna. And you can do both at the nearest adult education college (presumably not in the same class).

One of the few rational reasons for teaching Dreamweaver is…well, there’s something to teach! People get worried in HE when they feel a sector is changing too rapidly. The argument is that content management systems are a) expensive b) complicated and c) change all the time. Universities seek industry standard software – like InDesign in magazine production and FCP or Avid in broadcast.

But this is missing the point. You can teach a lot of important transferable skills in online journalism via a class website and blog, created in something open source -  like WordPress or Joomla! It doesn’t have to cost the earth [bad luck Adobe].

Why am I so angry? It’s because contact time is SO limited. If you spend two hours a week for 13 weeks messing around with Dreamweaver, students will end up with a pretty-looking static website. But what about:

how journalists should handle user-generated material?
interactivity?
SEO?, Tags, RSS?, analytics?
AdWords? / online marketing?
Web 2.0?
social media and community?
…………..and, on, and on…

Student journalists should also be engaging with the local community online. Sure, this type of thing presents challenges to teaching methods and assessment. But teaching Dreamweaver is simply a cop-out, unless, of course, it’s a web design unit you teach.

The NME’s deputy editor, Krissi Murison, gave a superb guest lecture this week. The journalism students asked some good questions about possible advertiser influence in the NME (apparently it’s not a problem), role of women in music (it’s still an issue), the bust-up with Morrissey (no comment – the court case is pending) and a nice little anecdote about a boozy night out with Amy Winehouse (apparently she plays a wicked game of pool). She also spoke about the massive success of NME.com, which really begged further questions about how long the the paper product can last with its disappointing ABCs.

But most students were looking for tips about getting that first job in journalism. She had three main bits of advice: Firstly, Blog: Krissi revealed that the legendary music mag was seeking new opinion writers. Whilst they had their eye on a few established names, they were also actively searching out opinionated new talent. She said that running a blog was also handy for getting into gigs for free and generally getting noticed. We mention this to the students all the time, but it was good for them to also hear it from an industry person. 

Work experience: Really important obviously. It takes some early planning (the NME is booked up with workies until Jan 2009).  But she expressed disappointment with the attitudes of some students that got placements. Her advice – make the most of it.

Send in ideas speculatively via email: Writers that continually send in good ideas do get noticed.

All sound advice…

A particularly brilliant Guardian Media podcast [14th March] flowed from my Creative Zen Plus, through a pair of Sony cans, via my wingnut ears and into my brain this week. It raised a number of interesting reflections regarding the future of the world………

Monetizing content: When it comes to news sites it seems that ‘free’ is where it’s at. This got me thinking. Exactly ten years ago this month .Net magazine ran a front cover with the headline "The End of The Free!"  and asked the question "How long  will it be before we start paying for our favourite websites?". With the benefit of hindsight, we can now say at least TEN YEARS!!!  But back in 1998 most of us thought that Hotmail / Rocketmail would eventually start to charge. We didn’t think that Google would do good things like allowing free access to online word processor apps. 

Today, WSJ and FT.com are examples of only a handful of newspaper sites that have a pay-wall. FT has changed its policy. You get access to 30 articles a month for free. Above that, you’ve got to flash the cash (to the tune of 98 smackers). To me that just sounds like one of the most irritating and moronic subscription models known to mankind. Rival business newspaper the WSJ still has most of its stuff stuck firmly behind a wall. It has 1.3million subscribers – very useful in an ad downturn, but it doesn’t get you Google placements or indeed links on blogs.

As Emily Bell of The Guardian said: "If you’re not on Google people are not reading your journalism." You could also say that if people can’t link to you then they won’t be talking about you. Also people won’t buy your paper just because you don’t have a website. The people that look at your website are a different audience to those who buy the paper.

‘Reach’ first, followed by (hopefully) ‘revenue’. The web is all about reach. I still think newspapers need to come up with more innovative discounts for their loyal print readers – the type of people that get the paper delivered.

Finally DAB Radio: As with the manufacturers of Freeview boxes, DAB radios seem to be made by strange companies, like Pure and Goodmans. The likes of Sony and Panasonic aren’t that interested in supplying to little old-UK – not until there is a European DAB  standard. This also explains why Halfords won’t sell me a  DAB stereo for my car. And the boffins at Honda RnD lab in Tokyo care not one jot that I want to listen to BBC 6 Music in my Civic.This has the potential to stifle growth because your only other big audience for DAB is the housewives and the dish-washers of the world. Everyone else will access via broadband. Or you could listen via your digital TV (but that just feels REALLY strange to have the TV on, but no picture). The podcast was highly critical of Channel 4 Radio’s strategy on the DAB issue, but you have to take the Guardian view with a lump of salt as the publishers are rivals in this sector.

To make sense of the above download this fine podcast via: Media Talk podcast: a new future for Channel 4 and a round-up of the Changing Media Summit | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Link: Younger, Heavy Online News Consumers are Not Newspaper Readers, According to comScore Plan Metrix.

OK, so the fact that young people DON’T read newspapers these days sounds like research from the School of the Blinkin’ Obvious (SB0) at the Faculty of Not Rocket Science (FNRS), but read on….

The research from ComScore shows that contrary to popular belief, while young people (18-24) in the US may not read on paper, they are still often heavy consumers of news. The research finds that non-newspaper readers particularly enjoy websites of TV news stations in the US, like Fox New, CNN.com and CBS.

“TV news brands are also heavily visited by non-print newspaper readers,
underscoring the importance of sight, sound and motion to the digital news
experience.

Non-readers were 29 percent more likely than the average Internet
user to visit FoxNews.com and 15 percent more likely to visit CBS News Digital.”

We need to be careful about how we translate this to the UK. The BBC has struggled to engage with younger users at its BBC News site. Although this may have something to do with the the fact that younger groups sometimes view the BBC brand as traditional and old-fashioned. But the conclusions of the research could suggests that Five News has the right approach in reaching out to audiences on MySpace.

Those that believe in quality journalism may worry that a generation is coming through who do not feel obliged to pay their 40 or 70 pence for the news.

Here is a quick list of really useful Joomla! Extensions that I have successfully installed. I’m a near Joomla! newbie,,,so if I can install them they must be pretty easy!  Basically extensions are optional improvements you can make to your Joomla! site and CMS. 

JCE (a fantastic WYSIWYG editor)

This really falls into the "essential" download category. You’ve installed Joomla!, now download this! This text editor is more user-friendly (i.e more ‘Word-like’) and offers more text formatting possibilities than than TinyMCE (the standard editor you get with Joomla!). Inserting and resizing images is a hassle with the standard text editor – this works much better. But be warned JCE stores images in a different place than with TinyMCE -  this is another reason why it pays to get it set up early on. Any idiot can install it, here is an easy to follow Flash tutorial here. If it doesn’t appear , make sure that it is enabled for your particular user-name.

All Videos Plugin (an easy way to include vids, whether you host them yourself or have bunged them on YouTube).

It gives you the ability to easily embed online streaming
videos  (e.g. hosted on YouTube) inside your content as well as your own videos
uploaded on your server. Just place a tag inside your content like
{youtube}374536{/youtube}. It’s worth noting that it needs to be installed in the Manbots section, even though it’s called a plug-in. It claims to be able to cope with ALL videos and the list of places you can host your vids is really long….e.g. YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo! Vid etc etc etc. The one place it seems you can’t host is on Brightcove though. JoomlaWorks also does Simple Image Gallery for still images.

mXcomment (people can comment on your content).
This plug-in from Visual Clinic allows people to comment on your content, but it does a heck of a lot more than just that! Users can print, email, bookmark the article, add it to del.icio.us and find related articles. The buttons that appear on your site look brilliant, imagine the Apple website’s sleek design. You can tinker with what appears on your site using the equally sexy interface below. A fantastic replacement to AkoComment (also from Visual Clinic). A rival to mXComment is JomComment, which also has many fans.