Undercurrent

Adam Westbrook has written a practical, little booklet about multimedia & freelance journalism. Among the useful tips, for me:

The worst thing a multimedia journalist can do when producing video for the web is to replicate television – unless that’s your commission of course. TV is full of rules and formulas, all designed to hide edits, look good to the eye, and sometimes decieve. Fact is, online video journalism provides the chance to escape all that. Sure it must look good, but be prepared to experiment – you’lll be amazed what people will put up with online.

And of course it’s CC-licensed.

Twingly gives a first description of their new tool, Twingly Channels:

A Twingly Channel acts as a social filter on top of feeds and realtime search, allowing you to set up a social memetracker for any topic or event. The underlying idea is that by aggregating feeds and realtime search results into a channel where many people sharing the same interest can discuss and vote on the content (while also providing a filter to solve the prevalent problem of information overflow) we lower the learning curve to the realtime web.

The reason I find this exciting is that the paragraph above describes with 100 percent accuracy what I have been looking for for a long time. It’s impossible to determine from the screenshots if this is it, but they definitely raise expectations. So thinks TechCrunch.

Reuters has made its journalism handbook available online, free for everyone. Surely a very valuable resource for journalists, students, bloggers, writers all over the world. Dean Wright explains the reasoning behind the move in the following quote:

• “Transparency: At a time when trust is an endangered commodity in the financial and media worlds, it’s important that news consumers see the guidelines our journalists follow.
• Service: As we’ve seen over the past decade, the barriers to publishing have dropped so that anyone with an idea and a computer can be a publisher. But it’s also become clear that publishers have a varying standard of truth, fairness and style. Our handbook is a good place for budding journalists to begin.
• Geography: Reuters serves a global audience and the handbook recognises the cultural and political differences that our journalists face in reporting for the world. This is a handbook not just for English-language journalists in the United Kingdom or the United States, but for wherever English is used.”

I found the news at the excellent journalism.co.uk. site, which also tips about one of the good Delicious features: The lists of popular bookmarks, here for the tag “journalism”, where the Reuters handbook currently is no. 1. A good tool.

By linking to what we find interesting we who publish on the web are all curators. This is important manual work while we wait for more efficient recommendation engines, or whatever they might be called. For those of us interested in culture and politics, there are quite a few good super-curators out there. Some of my favourites: Bookforum (a recent discovery), signandsight, Arts & Letters Daily, and even Huffington Post.

The Washington Post has trained 185 of its staff in using video, writes journalism.co.uk. This is a good occasion as I’ll ever find to finally blog some notes I took when videojournalist Travis Fox of that newspaper visited a media conference in Bergen in May. The session with Fox was by far the most interesting I attended, and so much more rewarding than those boring debate panels (they are a waste of time, really). Fox, a few years ago more or less all alone doing video for the big paper’s website, shared experiences and tips. At least for a writing journalist, there was much to learn. Fox works a lot like a newspaper reporter, doing shooting and editing on his own (using a Sony HDV camera and editing on a Mac), not with a cameraman or crew. This gives him full control and allows him to produce “handwritten” stories such as this one from the Katrina disaster. A reason this story stands out is that it is shot from the victims’ point of view. Suddenly their decisions to stay at home sounds reasonable; a perspective you certainly did not get from TV stories shot from helicopters. Fox often works in team with a newspaper reporter, though; sometimes the reporter then does a more traditional stand-up as part of the story.

His productions are usually longer than a typical news piece on the traditional TV news. Do people watch videos that are more than two minutes, sometimes a lot longer? Yes, and if they don’t watch all of it at once, it’s not so bad, Fox explained – usually they will then just move to another part of the website, not disappear from the site altogether. Fox compared this to how people read newspapers – scanning, reading only some of the stories from beginning to end, only the first paragraphs of others, etc.

The stories function as evergreens on the website. Over time, they can attract a sizable number of users. The presentations on the web can have several parts: the video will often focus on characters to tell the story. Panorama photos will provide the visual overview. And they sometimes add blogs to “extend” stories by updating with new information about the characters and allow for interaction with users. Fox warned that starting seriously with video is a big step; post-production takes a lot of time and effort.

One of Fox’s most intriguing points: web video can function as a kind of hub for the media company’s content, and not just for the web:

• A text version for web and print can be produced with the video reporter’s raw material as source
• Still photos from the video can be used online and in print (one reason why HD is important)
• Sound can be used in audio versions for radio
• The web video can be sold/distributed as podcasts. More people watch the Washington Post videos via iTunes than on the website itself. In fact, Fox said, the internet is increasingly used as a distribution tool to move content _off_ the web!

There is also room for productions that are more like classical documentary, and here Fox showed excerpts from his story about a man who lost his son in the 9/11 Pentagon attack. Recommended.

Yes, we need that. From The Economist, links added:

But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink-not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things. All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.

The story also profiles Cooliris, among other developments.

Some web services are just self-evidently useful once you try them out. Goodreads is one of them. Not only because of the chance it gives you to be an amateur literary critic and discover new books through the recommendations of others, in an environment that’s much calmer than the very sales-focused Amazon. No, somewhat buried in there is a “secondhand books club” as well (when you rate and review a book, you have the option to sell or swap it with others). Very smart. Here’s a couple of enhancements I would like to see:

1. A way to compare professional and amateur reviews of titles.

2. A feature that would allow you to choose language. I would like to see reviews in Norwegian only, for example.

Oaø’s book montage

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