Inspiration and technique

I'm watching a lot of videos and want to learn how to do a better job creating them, beyond my rudimentary skills. Here's one I like. It's called 'William and the Windmill' and its from Toronto Star.

I can't make the embed work at the moment, so to see this 3-minute video, click the link below the picture. I like the content, and I like seeing how the videographers and storytellers used various techniques to keep the story visually interesting. I found a reference to it on an online journalism workshop from the Czech Republic, 2010 that multimedia journalist/guru Mindy McAdams participated in.

Click on this link to go to the video.

TGIF: Commonalities that bind

Long time no write. Hmmm.

Well, one thing that comes to mind is it's Friday, June 8, 2012. And for workers of the world, which is most of us (in one fashion or another), Friday's are a big day. I have Facebook'd that I love Friday. But I guess I'm not done with that sentiment. So, just to have more fun getting it out of my system, here's some visual expressions of this feeling. Click on the image and it will get bigger and more readable.

See how universal it is? Crosses species, crosses belief systems.

The nun got me because I spent 12 years in Catholic School, and those poor women must have had some way to help them cope. God provides.

For the record, I like to work and I like my jobs and projects. My TGIF-ity is based on having done it for more than 30 years. Wouldn't it be something if Fridays disappeared? If in the economic meltdown, the 7-day work week became the NORM?

God forbid. Every soul needs some space for his or her psychic cells to leaven and expand. Enjoy yours.

Video snippets from the Rage City Rollergirls

Rage City Rollergirls Slideshow, Oct 1. 2011 bout

Monarch butterflies, 2010 Ski for Women

In the dead of winter, so see such vibrant, BIG butterflies was an enornous treat. How did they do it?

Enjoying JAWS: Women & Journalism Symposium at Snowbird

I'm at 8,000 feet at Snowbird in Utah, attending the Journalism & Women Symposium

Up at 4, Pete taxied me to the airport at 5, and I was airborne by 6:30, doing homework at 35,000 feet.

This group is an impressive assemblage of long-serving strong women journalists. They are gathered to consider the future of the craft they devoted themselves to, and women's role in its future. Lots of young journalists got fellowships to come.

One of my favorite things today was listening to Becky Wade read Maya Angelou's appreciation for the Texas journalist Molly Ivins shortly after she died in 2007. Molly Ivins Shook the Walls with her Clarion Call appeared in the Washington Post on Feb. 2, 2007, just days after Ivins had passed. It's worth the click through to read. I can hear Angelou's strong voice as I read it.

Becky Wade, by the way, was one of the three women journalists who sued the New York Times in the 1970s over its treatment of women journalists. Pulitzer Prize winner Nan Robertson told the story in The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times.

It was a long day of travel, more as the conference unfolds.

Holidays: My Mom came to visit

Just wanted to share this image of my Mom. Taken on the Coastal Trail at 8 a.m. Dec. 27, out walking the dog Clare. My Mom is 86, lives in San Diego. We walked every day out on that trail, sometimes for two hours at a time, watching dawn arrive on the way home. And it was c-o-l-d the whole time she was here. She's great.

Making my dog stay up too late

It's 3:27 a.m. on my last day of holiday vacation. Come Monday morning, I'll be out at the bus stop at 7:12 a.m. in temps predicted to be minus 2. I've got a good coat, good boots, an iPhone, a newspaper, the New Yorker to read on the bus. But it will be daunting. So...I think I am staying up late and deliciously anticipating sleeping in on Sunday. Last chance. And my good dog stays up too....as best she can. This isn't the first time I've caught her napping, either.

Job changes for me

It's in the minuses up here -- really cold and for days on end. Here's a shot out of my bedroom window to the birch tree in my front yard. The snow on top of the branches makes me think of reverse shadows.

On Oct. 17, I ended a 26-year career at the Anchorage Daily News. But I haven't given up on journalism. I just felt like I wasn't making a significant contribution at a time when the newspaper could ill afford anything short of miraculous. So I side-stepped to a job over at the University of Alaska, Anchorage adding video and audio podcasts for their web site. And so I am back in the business of learning more new technology and practicing it. I work with great people, and the university offers a lot of cool benefits. I miss a newsroom, but one must do what one must do.

So far, I've edited a pretty short video of the chancellor addressing a committee, and an audio podcast of an economist discussing Alaska's status with respect to the crash in the US. I am also writing a story for a magazine about 6 students who are the first in their families to go to college. I'm loving the interviews and the people behind this story.

I'll be back with more thoughts on adding (trying to add) Twitter and Facebook to my life. I find I start them, but don't sustain them. I'm so slow at this, I get frustrated. Tomorrow I am gonna practice doing an audio slideshow with my dog and my voice....I have to start somewhere.

Speaking of starting, I'd like to start a master's studying business models for newspapers. OK, news organizations. We've got to find a way to finance high-quality local journalism. I hardly feel like the genius who'll figure this out, but at least I'd like to go out trying. It seems daunting. But, the only place to start is at the beginning. Here's a photo of a lump of clay I keep on my desk for the times (many) when I feel overwhelmed about where to start.

Doggie tug-of-war in the backyward

Clare (black dog) and her good buddy Rudy (white dog) having a doggie battle in the backyard. Clare doesn't usually win anymore. On walks, she starts a tug-of-war, but when she can't win, she feigns disinterest. Here, she wins. She is 9 and Rudy is about 3, and he outweighs her by far. They stay over at each others' houses when their humans travel. We take Rudy for lots of dog walks in Kincaid Park. Clare is bossy, and Rudy is totally cool about it all.

Test with Flip cam

Here's a video shot at Kincaid Park walking my dog Clare and our friend's dog, Rudy. Peter is in the shot. This is a test post.

Can't resist

:

Twitter tips

Just caught this on the Spokesman-Review editor's blog.

In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.

We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors need to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.

The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.

This feels like familiar territory. Our audience has discovered reader-submitted galleries and those are hot. We have a hot politics blog. Everything else is percolating at a much lower energy level. We just had layoffs and I think there's a hangover from that.

I am new to twitter and generally find good referals there to things I would find valuable to read. This SR pointer came from twitter, Jay Rosen specifically, as did, I think, these interviews with Beat Bloggers on Mevio.

Greetings, here comes my monthly post

Yikes, I can't believe how quickly time nips by. And yes I am embarrassed. Between the last time I posted here, I changed some job duties at my newspaper. I had been straddling print (managing and editing print reporters) and online (video, community blogs), but now I feel more focused in online. I am producing something called the Alaska Newsreader, online only, every weekday.

The schedule is a bit rigorous, but now that I have it down (just finished three weeks of it, and don't they say if you can do anything for three weeks, you can make it a habit?) The habit I had to create was getting up at 4 a.m. to get to work by 5 a.m. to produce an opinionated aggregation of news from around the state and around the world related to Alaska.

This is not my creation, I have inherited it, and I did so with much enthusiasm. I like the service it provides to readers. I like getting to itemize and comment on a topic and then provide links to the many different ways that various news outlets have handled it. So readers get different views on a topic of interest to them.

The Newsreader is almost always in the top five most visited pages on our Website. It also has right-side content that can change constantly -- a bit of a display image and definition that you can click through to the catalogued item. I will start gathering and publishing that material this week.

This is fun, if solitary. It feels like something I can get better and better at, making it more and more fun and useful for readers.

The other aspect of my work right now is creating adn.commons, an arena for community bloggers. We host their blogs for the purpose of gathering eyeballs on our site. The premise is people organize around their areas of interest, and if we can host that area of interest on our site, we've created community (and clicks) to adn.com.

In the image below, the blue pull down menu shows our staff blogs (at the top) followed by community blogs, starting about halfway down. I hope to pull these off into a separate index page so they are easier to locate and use.


I've started about 17 of them so far, everything from an Iraq war amputee headed to Walter Reed to get fitted for a prosthetic leg, to a locavore blog to a bride blog to a chef blog to a health policy blog.

I hope in a week or so to start up a citizen watchdog blog -- the folks who show up at community meetings and pay close attention on the local level to what public officials do. We have lots of significant local, state and national elections coming up, and at least on the local and state level, it will be valuable to get their perspective on campaigning and let readers compare their commentary alongside our staff reporting. Just another way to add a perspective.


And now, it's time take my dog out to Kincaid for a good, rainy day walk. Good for the soul.




Her name is Clare and she loves Kincaid Park as much as I do.

Prodigal blogger

Six months since I last posted. Last summer I came home to Alaska from the palm trees of Stanford and re-inserted myself in my newsroom, grateful for a job. Fall came, winter came, now it is spring in Alaska (snow still on the ground, sun shining brightly outside, husband Pete watching the Yankees and Red Sox on TV in the living room.) Feels like I'm a bulb that had to freeze so it could leaf out later. It's time to get back to work on this blog. Hello again!

Fighting weight

My news organization is looking at right-sizing the newsprint paper for the staff it has to produce it, weighed against the hungry demands of the web, an additional effort. I think this is wise. My impulse is to simply say: "Give us the car, let us drive it, we'll adjust as we go." That means that I see this smaller newspaper as a prototype that we will change as we see what works, what doesn't. I took design thinking at Stanford and their problem-solving principles are relevant to the state newspapers are in. There is no guaranteed success. There IS the challenge to try, listen and then adjust. So the commitment that goes into thinking about the new version must be there after it is launched, to listen and adjust and remake the prototype. Fail early and often is what they used to say in that class when encouraging us to throw together rough prototypes and get feedback on them so the next version would be that much better. So, newspapers, how about it?

Just another day, and then your mind get's blown

That sounds so....1960ish.
Here's how my mind got blown today.
First, a small piece of background, just a moment, really, in a normal newsroom meeting. A colleague who has been away is back, and we're talking about how to cover the final three weeks of the prep football playoffs. One thing we know readers like is the ability to post their own game photos on our site, in galleries. But instead of galleries by school, they want galleries by game.

At our meeting about the playoffs, we talk about organizing photos by game. I suggest our professional shots and our reader-submitted shots could both go in the same game gallery. I hit a nerve with my colleague, who referred to reader-generated photos as crap that would not be combined with professional staff work.

I get the point. And I think it's wrong. I was still mulling this over when I came home and read the Poynter site about a professor working to create a process for multi-thread storytelling using multimedia. This interests me right away, because I don't see multi-thread storytelling happening at my paper. I see linear storytelling, using the bells and whistles of multimedia. We are still selecting the entry point for readers.

A comment on the professor's blog directs readers to some new technology that hyperlinks photographs by content. The link is to a short talk at the TED conference. Suddenly, the world's photos -- professional and amateur alike -- come together to create a new fuller view of the world. Suddenly, the relationship between pro and am is not one of superiority and inferiority, but of collaboration. Watch for the composite of Notre Dame cathedral about 2/3rds in.

McClatchy's Howard Weaver on home turf

This Alaska panel on media gave me a flashback to Stanford in May, when McClatchy's Gary Pruit joined NYTimes Bill Keller and Harry Chandler, a former owner of the LA Times, and a young woman VP from Google, on a stage to discuss how the newspaper business was going to survive.

This time, McClatchy's Weaver, who was in the Stanford audience with other McClatchy-ites, was solo in his hometown of Anchorage, talking about the situation in which newspapers find themselves. He was joined by a local TV anchor, a radio producer, and a young woman who works in marketing for Clear Channel radio. Much like the woman from Google in May, other panelists looked at Clear Channel's Corinna Delgado as a spokesperson for anyone classified as young.

Weaver, known for inspiring news staffs, inspired his audience to consider the opportunity presented by the "phase transition" (think liquid boiling into steam) that the news business is undergoing. He talked about the opportunity, the scary but amazing opportunity, this era presents to news editors who make the right choices and help readers by sorting, routing, personalizing and adding value to information. He labeled the new morning newspaper as a "printed summary and orientation to the day" for the already news-saturated reader.

He encourages media participants not to buy into conventional wisdom that print is dead. Though a declining audience, it is still the largest. Half of all adults read a newspaper yesterday, he says. But he's also platform agnostic, subscribing to a point Delgado made -- deliver news when and how the consumer wants it.

One question the panel tackled briefly was young news consumers. Delgado confessed she's worried about the narrow information habits of young readers -- if it isn't pop culture, they don't care. This morning, I saw an announcement that may or may not counter her view. MTV is re-launching thinkMTV. They describe it on their site this way:

Think MTV has undergone a makeover. We have built a brand new community site where you can get informed, get heard and take action on the issues that matter to you most.

Register, and then you can sign up for news updates like these:

MTV News Daily Update
Never Miss A Top Story. Get the Latest Headlines Each Day, Plus Breaking News As Warranted.

And

think MTV
Stay in touch with the issues that concern you with this bi-weekly newsletter from think MTV. We'll update you on Sexual Health, Discrimination, Education, Environment, and Global issues around you.

All this brought up my own newspaper's staff of teen writers on Perfect World. As the digital natives, they may serve to guide us on news appetites in terms of content and delivery. The idea that young people don't care about news doesn't seem right. MTV seems to have an inkling. Social networking, a new way to make community, may be the ticket in.

MTV is soliciting teens as reporters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Now that's a heck of an opportunity for a kid to get involved.

And the Knight Foundation wants to deliver up to half a million dollars to anyone who can "figure out how to push journalism into the digital age."

Here's their pitch to kid innovators:

Believe it or not, people used to read newspapers! But now of course, we're all online and on mobile, logged onto our individual gadgets and disconnected from our community. So how can we use new technology to transmit news and actually bring people together? We've got some ideas, but we bet you've got some amazing ideas!

The messy public

I'm a fan of comments at the end of stories, anonymous, not even registered on the newspaper site. I'm a fan of engagement.

So it's disappointing to find out that the half dozen folks commenting at the end of a story are sniping at each other like unhappy siblings, or speculating about the sex lives of the subjects in the story. Tiresome hardly begins to capture the disappointment.

Where is the civic discourse? And how long will it be before my newspaper will adopt slashdot community self-policing of comments? I don't think newspaper editors are meant to be the only adult in the playroom, clicking off comments, cluck-clucking their distaste for the rabble.

So, tonight I watched the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and paid close attention to the interview with Andrew Keen, author of "The cult of the amateur." You can read the full interview here.

One taste:

ANDREW KEEN: The key argument is that the so-called "democratization" of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information and high-quality entertainment. By replacing mainstream media content, high-quality radio, television, newspapers, publishing, music, with user-generated content, we're actually doing away with information, high-quality information, high-quality entertainment, and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.

Well, Andrew Keen would be describing the forums on my newspaper. One of the main worries is that thoughtful people will be so turned off by the lowbrow nature of existing commentary that they'll bypass this opportunity to engage. I'm still thinking about all this. I have a great faith in the group to throw up a glint of genius, a profoundness that speaks to us all. Yet, I have seen plenty of evidence that the group fails to produce.

Still, I have faith. All true things are complicated, and the good mingles close by the bad. We need to talk about it and think about it and write about it before we understand.

So, even though I've been disappointed, I don't want to turn off public comments. I put my two bits on the cyber community to say out loud so as to be heard by all: We're talking seriously here. If you aren't, find someplace else to talk.

Here's Andrew Keen on a panel discussing the democratization of media. Think about it.

Quick observations before the week begins

See that white up high on the mountains? That's not a cloud up there. That's snow. Time is passing, the season is changing.

(Note to readers: Frankly, I think every blog post needs an image, and today this is mine for you.)

Here's a few observations from this week.

• Print has authority.

1. My newspaper invites readers to send in their "nice catch" fish photos. This is Alaska and we get a ton and post them online in a gallery that gets lots and lots of hits. We use these reader-submitted photos with the print solicitation to send in more fish pictures. Now, all the people sending images into the web are asking: "When will my photo run in the newspaper?"
2. I was out at a local high school talking to some students who want to start a publication. There's already a student newspaper, but in their estimation, it covers only fluff. They want the freedom to report on issues that go beyond football, prom, homecoming. They want to write about their community. Because they are digital natives, I wondered if they wanted to create a Website for their stories. NO! came the answer. Why? I asked. "Because if it is in print, it has much more authority."

• Multimedia has power.

1. Alaska is in the midst of a political corruption scandal with many revelations emanating from courtroom proceedings. We've been working to obtain the court exhibits (which include undercover video and audio recordings) to get as much of that up on our Web site as we can. It's fascinating to hear a 70-year-old Bill Allen, who pleaded guilty to bribery, tell a courtroom which legislators he has bribed, and why. His testimony is slow and stilted, he suffered from an accident about five years ago that impaired his speech. The man sounds broken. Short of being in the courtroom and hearing him in cross-examination, listening to these audio recordings reveals a layer of tragedy worthy of a book. No entity but my newspaper is making the effort to listen to hours and hours of transcripts and prepare them to go online at our Web site. This is a huge public service. So, print may have power, but multimedia -- audio and video, seeing it and hearing it with your own eyes and ears, that is POWERFUL.

• The two in combination? Look out.