TV Stations and Citizen Journalism
October 9th, 2008
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Applying for college? Send video!
October 2nd, 2008
(As reported online by David DeBolt at the Chronicle of Higher Education)
According to Michigan State’s student newspaper, The State News, the university now lets prospective students finish their applications by creating personal videos in addition to their written statements. Applicants can upload their videos to public Web sites like YouTube and then send the clips to CollegeSupplement, a site that forwards videos to university admissions offices.
My final ONA session
September 13th, 2008
“We needed to break down the silos.” Sound familiar? “We’re all going to get there together or we’re not going to there at all.” From which university are these comments originating? Answer: The panelists at this session (titled “Setting Up A Multimedia Newsroom”) are from the LA Times. It was the most recent opportunity for me to confirm that the challenges/tensions in the field are remarkably similar to the same challenges/tensions I have experienced in academe during the past few years.
For my own saneness, the point is (recalling Leslie’s point at the retreat that our College is somewhere in the “middle” of the pack) not to perseverate on the notion that we’re “behind.” Perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that some of the largest news organizations – and many if not most of the smaller ones – are at approximately the same point that the academic community is in redefining our multimedia mission. One “take home” message that I learned from this ONA session is that ONE converging assignment desk in a newsroom can be shared by several teams who pump content on the Web, on the air and to the pressroom. For example, the Times’ owned TV station (KTLA) is now setting up an assignment desk in the paper’s newsroom. Perhaps we should – in time – be thinking of additional ways that our print, web, radio and television students can collaborate to search for, consider, discuss and decide which stories to cover and how to cover them.
My initial reflections
September 13th, 2008
Thanks for setting this up!
I agree with Matt that the “silo” boundaries continue to blur for many or – for folks like us – have already faded into the pages of the “history” textbooks titled “mass communication.” This moment in multimedia is tremendously exciting to me since I finally see opportunities to parse the different modes (textual, audio, video, etc.) and their related techniques and then deciding how all of these elements can be used to tell one coherent story. For the typical news consumer seeking the latest information, good bye to linear video, multiple paragraphs of text, stand alone Flash documentaries or any one of the above without supplemental content from another. Of course there will always be a specific audience for this long form journalism, but that’s not the focus of my interest.
Maryland is in a unique position to devise courses with experts that address BOTH the tools of the trade and the CONTENT produced by those tools. There was little discussion about content production at the story level in the ONA sessions I attended. In other words, great tools, great short-cuts, nice designs and interesting ways to collect, illustrate or aggregate info, but I didn’t see examples of individual multimedia stories that communicate different types of information or a comparison of why one multimedia story is better than another. Perhaps this will be the direction for ONA in the future. Read more…