New.Journalism.Review

Review: Whittaker, J, (2009), Producing for Web 2.0: A Student Guide, Routledge
Whittaker, J (2009) Producing for Web 2.0 (Media Skills)

I’m on the hunt for a core textbook that I can recommend to students who take my Web Production units. The ideal book would provide an overview of the key skills in the creation, editing and production of interactive multimedia content. It would also discuss content management, design theory, usability, social media, online business strategy and legal and ethical issues. Is this too much to ask for?

I used to recommend Foust, J, (2005) Online Journalism: Principles And Practices Of News For The Web. It covers the key areas of what is online journalism?, HTML, writing for online, and opportunities and challenges. The book is well designed and the students find it easy to navigate.

But five years is a long time in dog (and web) years. Of course , Foust makes no mention of social media. Any advice regarding audio/video content is dispensed in just a few pages. It also slightly falls into the trap of assuming that online journalists would be doing their web authoring in Dreamweaver.

Quinn, S Filak, V (2005), Convergent Journalism: A Introduction and Quinn (2005) Convergent Journalism: The Fundamentals of Multimedia Reporting make a useful double act – the former is a practical guide and the latter looks at theory.

But whilst Quinn & Filak’s text has much to recommend it, they look like they were written at a time of massive change. The discussion of blogs and online writing is particularly weak and falls into the classic trap of confusing the ‘medium with the message’. It fails to understand the importance of such issues as audience talkback and interactivity.

If you’re going to write a book that covers this kind of area you need to know what to call it – ‘online journalism’ just doesn’t really cut it. I am also not that happy with that phrase – ‘convergence’. I’m not entirely convinced that the industry is using this anymore. Number one rule – give your book a title that people will find on Amazon! I’ve thought about this quite a bit and it isn’t easy.

So a gap in the market exists for a textbook about modern web production methods and Whittaker’s book seems to have learned from and addressed the mistakes made by others. Unlike the other texts, it takes into account the importance of social media for marketing and community building.

Its general structure is pretty straightforward: pre-production, production/design and post-production. It also provides the best balance of editorial and technical skills of any of the texts. It looks at MySQL, PHP, CSS and Javascript, but only in just enough depth. Whittaker knows his audience and it is not computer science students.

Modern production outputs are well-covered – social media, wikis and mashups. Content management is discussed using Joomla! as the example. There is a huge amount of software out there and it does a good job in informing tutors about the best technology to teach. The good news is that most of the software is open source and free (or very cheap) to deploy.

It sometimes feels (normally on a cold Monday morning!) that as tutors we’re simply training students to be ‘widget cutters’. Whittaker could improve the book by highlighting the transferable nature of the skills taught. The textbooks biggest let down is its weird two column layout and tiny font size – it just doesn’t work.

But Whittaker’s book has appeared at precisely the right time and fills an important hole in the market. Where it particularly succeeds is its near-perfect balance of ‘technical’ and ‘editorial skills’.

Whittaker, J (2009) Producing for Web 2.0 (Media Skills)

This month’s Web Designer magazine includes a tutorial on How to Build a News Site in Joomla! written by me (Steve Hill). By following the 24 steps, readers should end up with a decent looking news site. Well, that’s the general idea.

The tutorial will be particularly useful for charities or schools who are seeking to create a website quickly (I reckon it can be done in 2 to 3 hours!). But it’s well worth a read by anyone looking to create a decent site for (almost) zero cost.

If you read the tutorial and it worked for you, then I would love to hear about it. And if it didn’t work for you – I’m sorry! Let me know, and I’ll try to help out.

Web Designer (Issue 165 – Cleaner Code) is available now from all good newsagents in the UK.

Also, the issue has a wonderful feature lamenting the sad demise of GeoCities. Alongside Tripod, it was the site that got many of us interested in web design in the mid-90s. We’ll miss you GeoCities!

Xaraya or Joomla? We created our journalism news site using Joomla! CMS. A few weeks ago, I went up to visit BBC Sport Interactive. Having seen the CMS its journalist use, I feel pretty confident that our students are getting a good grounding in ‘real world’ working practices. But I’m just wondering if we should scrap Joomla! and teach Xaraya? 

• Unlike Joomla!, Xaraya is used by large media publishers in the UK [so that gets a tick!]
• It’s free [two ticks]
• Its open source [we like Moodle, we like Joomla!....we just LOVE open source]
• And it has a scary name which I can’t spell.[All good CMS have sinister sound names - my favourite is Tridion, which sounds like the latest nuclear weapon system].

So is this something we should be teaching our journalist degree students? How easy is Xaraya to learn and who offers hosting? Will students be able to spell its name, when they already struggle with Joomla!? That’s J-O-O-M-L-A.

So many questions…. 

I’ve been busy attempting to create a university news site using Joomla! CMS. The budget: zero. The aim is to teach online journalism students about the workings of an open source CMS and how to upload content. The focus is on online editorial skills, so we don’t want them spending ages learning loads of code.

Hosting:

If you’ve not seen the previous post, the story so far is that I went with a cheap hosting provider in the US – ZZHosting. I liked the name. It reminded me of those bearded Texans, ZZ Top.  Ironically, the drummer Frank Beard was the only one in the band that didn’t sport one.

Back to the point, ZZ Hosting offers all the scary stuff that your host must provide, like PHP and MySQL. It also offers Joomla! pre-installed (part of the Fantastico list of software). You install Joomla! at a click of a button with Fantastico. Creating a site takes ages, so you might as well save time at the start (well, that’s my theory). But Fantastico has its critics and it’s worth reading-up about it. 

ZZ Hosting’s uptime has been excellent – not that we’re doing anything particularly "mission critical".

A quick review: Beginning Joomla! From Novice To Professional by Rahmel

I got hold of Beginning Joomla!: From Novice To Professional by Dan Rahmel. The reviews on Amazon.co.ukare pretty bad – just 2.5 stars out of 5. Reviews on the US site,  Amazon.com, are a lot better (4.5 out of 5). But the book rightly tops the chart of best selling Joomla! books on both sites.

A criticism of the book was that the chapter on Setting up a Joomla! site in 20 minutes focuses mainly on hosting it using GoDaddy, a large US provider. But if you use a host which offers Fantastico (such as ZZ Hosting) you can skip all this.

Half the battle with any CMS is understanding its organisation. In the case of Joomla! you need to get your head around things like ‘categories’, ‘sections’ and ‘modules’. This is an area where Rahmel really excels. He advises the reader to plan the various sections of your site before uploading any content. In some respects you are being forced to put the proverbial ‘cart’ before the ‘horse’ – but the guy is certainly right. Uploading content is pretty easy when you’ve got the basics in place.   

I was less impressed with the chapter on creating your own template. It’s a lovely idea, but the explanations made zero sense to me. This was really something for the professional end of the readership. You could write a whole book on creating your own templates – I wish someone would!

Even if you take the time to create a template from scratch using Rahmel’s methods, I have a feeling the results would still not be as good as if you spent five minutes downloading one of the numerous free template available at Joomla24 (easily the best Joomla! template site). Call me lazy, but you can customise the free templates to get them looking how you want.

The version of Joomla! you download is pretty basic. You can really improve it’s functionality and make your own life easier as an administrator by ‘pimping your ride’ with some extensions. In fact I would make it compulsory to download them early on – some are pretty essential.

Extensions come in a number of different flavors – ‘components’, ‘modules’ and ‘plug-ins’ and Rahmel provides a good explanation here. He recommends a few decent ones, but I didn’t bother with them. I just read a load of the reviews on the excellent Joomla! Extensions directory and took my pick. I will write a post about the extensions I’ve personally enjoyed very shortly.

All in all, Rahmel provides a good beginners guide to the CMS. He has a companion site (created using Joomla!, of course) at Joomla! JumpStart. Within an hour of sitting down with the book, it all starts to look a lot more user-friendly.

Creating a news site using WordPress (yep! – that’s the blogging tool)

Something different. Andy Dickinson has written a fantastic post about creating a similar thing to what I’m doing using WordPress. I thought that WordPress was just a humble bit of blogging software, but it turns out you can create a good looking news site as well. The results are impressive. WordPress is certainly far more user-friendly than Joomla!