Blogging the News

Directions for sixth and final blog post: This post should show your cumulative knowledge about journalistic blogging. The topic should be interesting and directly related to the blog’s mission. You should include some kind of multimedia – either a video, or audio clips or photos – and a text component. So, you should write a post of 350-400 words and have the multimedia complement the story in some way. You should have interviewed at least one person. You should write a strong headline and include hyperlinks. POST MUST BE ADDED TO YOUR BLOGS BY THE START OF CLASS ON MONDAY, DEC. 15.

What to expect for your final blog review:

Final will be an evaluation of overall effectiveness of blog. Does it meet goals of mission statement? Were you able to establish a voice? Did your writing and reporting break new ground on the topic?

Specific areas I’ll be looking at:

Does the blog include six original posts and a seventh post that that includes a news roundup. This seventh post should have been completed in class. If you were absent that day, you are still responsible for creating this post.

Does each post have a strong headline that clearly states what the post is about?

Does each post include hyperlinks and has it been assigned a category (each blog should have four to five categories)

Is each post clearly written, grammatically correct and include some original reporting?

Has some effort been put into making each post visually pleasing? Here, I’m looking at the body of the post. Are there visuals? Has the text been broken up into shorter paragraphs? (No big blocks of text). Has your multimedia been clearly introduced?

How does the overall look (theme, title, header image) reflect the mission of the blog? (There is still time to change the header image)

Have you noted comments you received from me in grading, especially the comments made for the midterm, and incorporated changes I suggested into your blog.

If you did not meet all the requirements of the midterm, have you gone back and made sure your blog meets them all?

In case you forgot the midterm requirements, here they are:

MIDTERM ASSIGNMENT – JOURNALISTIC BLOGGING

–Created a blog using Blogs@Baruch, including the name of the blog in the URL. The settings on this blog must be set to public. Go through the different themes that are available to you through Blogs@Baruch and choose the one that works best for your blog.

–Uploaded a unique header image that reflects the character of the blog and includes the name of the blog and a cutline. (USE YOUR OWN PHOTOGRAPH. DO NOT TAKE IMAGE FROM ANOTHER SITE)

–Created an “About” page (Condensed version of mission statement, aim for 200 words)

–Created a blog roll of related blogs and websites. (INCLUDE FIVE TO SEVEN SITES)

–Posted THREE stories to your blog each illustrated by a photo. (This number includes the post you sent to me today. Therefore, you must report and write two additional posts before Monday, Oct. 20. Each post must include relevant hyperlinks.)

–Created five categories for your blog and tagged your posts appropriately.

Review of grading:

Midterm: 25 percent of grade
Final: 25 percent of grade

Opening blogging analysis paper: 10 percent
First post: 10 percent
Multimedia post: 10 percent
Election night analysis paper: 10 percent
Social media strategy paper: 10 percent

Journalistic blogs need interactivity so it is important to add multimedia to your posts. On a very basic level, this involves photos, audio and video. All these features are easily captured using a smartphone.

The Journalism Department has a fantastic online resource site covering many aspects of multimedia journalism that you will find very useful.

Home

Another great resource is a blog by journalist Neil Augenstein. It has guides, tutorials and tips.

http://iphonereporting.com/

PHOTOS:

Using the built-in camera on your phone will give you good quality photos that you can easily use on your blog.

If you want to edit them on your smartphone, I suggest an app called Snapseed. It’s free for iPhone use and allows you to brighten, sharpen, crop among other editing moves. I know professional photographers who use this. It’s also available for Android phones through Google Play.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapseed/id439438619?mt=8

Snapseed tutorial:

http://iphonephotographyschool.com/snapseed-tutorial/

Here’s a great tutorial taking better photos:

Fundamentals of Composition

You can also build photo slideshows that combine images and text. I very simple application is Google Presentations.

Here is a tutorial:

Creating and Posting a Photo Slideshow

Or create a slideshow using Flickr
Tutorial:

Making Flickr Slideshows and Embedding Them in WordPress

AUDIO:

Including audio clips from interviews or performances or music to augment a report is very effective.

For iPhone, there is a free, usually built-in app called Voice Memo. Once you have the recordings, this app allows you to email yourself the files.

From there, you can download them to your computer and edit using desktop software such as Garageband on Apple computers or Audacity, a free downloadable audio editing software for Macs or PCs.

Here are some tutorials:

Audacity tutorial:

Editing Audio With Audacity

Garageband tutorials:

GarageBand Tutorial for Podcast Editing

Editing Audio in GarageBand

Once your podcast is edited, export it out of program as an MP3 file, then upload it to SoundCloud, a hosting site for audio. This will provide iframe coding to embed into your post.

https://soundcloud.com/stream

SoundCloud tutorial:

Using SoundCloud

Another great app for audio is Audioboom. This app will let you upload an audio clip (not an edited report) together with a photo and embed that into your post.

http://audioboom.com/

For more sophisticated, track editing of audio try an app called Voddio. This, too, is an app used by professional broadcast journalists to report from the field. You can download the app for free, but if you want to share your files anywhere, it will cost you $9.99. It could be worth the investment for someone who’s familiar with audio editing and wants to work on mobile editing.

http://vericorder.com/solutions/mobile-reporting

Tutorial of audio editing with Voddio:

http://iphonereporting.com/2013/05/18/how-to-edit-a-radio-wrap-with-voddio/

VIDEO:

Video shot with the built-in camera is good quality. One important tip: always shoot your video holding the phone in the horizontal position. Otherwise you’ll get a narrow strip of video with black spaces on either side. The horizontal position allows you to shoot video that fills the screen.

I see two main categories here. The first is posting quick clips, not necessarily edited into a package, using social media sites readily available to you. Once posted to these sites, the videos can be embedded into your WordPress post.

Instagram now allows you to post up to 15 seconds of video to its site. This can add a nice splash of interactivity to a post if used wisely.

Here’s a description of Instagram’s video feature:

https://help.instagram.com/442610612501386/

And instructions for embedding it into WordPress:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/instagram/instagram-images/

Second option like this is Vine. Six seconds might not seem like a lot but sometimes it can add depth to a blog post.

https://vine.co/

The next category is using more sophisticated apps to actually edit a video package on your phone.

Voddio again seems to be the app that many journalists are using. I experimented with it a little and there is a learning curve even for someone who has done editing on other programs. But, for those of you who want to do more video, this is a good one to master.

The company has a whole channel of training videos:

http://vericordertraining.vericorder.org/channel/voddio/

Voddio is by no means the only option for video editing on your smartphone. Here are few others. They all have a price.

iMovie for iPhone, $4.99

Tout, looks like a popular video platform. I’m waiting to get a demo to try it out.

http://www.tout.com/#works

Splice, $1.99

http://spliceapp.com/

PLEASE email me your first posts by today. I will be marking off for late arrivals. I will send you back edits and comments by the end of this week. Please email me your rewritten posts by Wednesday, Oct. 15. I will be grading these posts.

Here is your midterm assignment:

DUE: MONDAY, OCT. 20

By the above date, all students must have completed the following work:

—Created a blog using Blogs@Baruch, including the name of the blog in the URL. The settings on this blog must be set to public. Go through the different themes that are available to you through Blogs@Baruch and choose the one that works best for your blog.

–Uploaded a unique header image that reflects the character of the blog and includes the name of the blog and a cutline. (USE YOUR OWN PHOTOGRAPH. DO NOT TAKE IMAGE FROM ANOTHER SITE)

–Created an “About” page (Condensed version of mission statement, aim for 200 words)

–Created a blog roll of related blogs and websites. (INCLUDE FIVE TO SEVEN SITES)

–Posted THREE stories to your blog each illustrated by a photo. (This number includes the post you sent to me today. Therefore, you must report and write two additional posts before Monday, Oct. 20. Each post must include relevant hyperlinks.)

–Created five categories for your blog and tagged your posts appropriately.

–Added a post to our class blog with the URL of your individual blog by class on Monday, Oct. 20.

OUR CLASS ON WEDNESDAY, OCT. 15 WILL BE A PRODUCTION CLASS DEVOTED TO WORKING OUT ANY PROBLEMS OR ISSUES WITH YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG.

Report and write your first post. You now have your mission statement. You have an editorial plan. Time to get started.

For this first post, you will find and interview a person who is doing something interesting related to your blog’s mission – or you will cover an event related to your blog’s topic, interviewing at least two people for the post.

You will write a blog post – 400 words.

You will include at least three hyperlinks.

You will take a photo to illustrate your post.

You will email me your post as a Word document before class on Monday, Oct. 6.

For your next assignment, write up an editorial plan for your blog.  Let your imagination run. What are the possibilities? Add your editorial plan to the bottom of your edited mission statement and post them to the class blog by class time on Monday, Sept. 29.

INCLUDE:

Types of content

–  Q&As

–  Coverage of events

–  Reported posts about issues/personalities related to topic

–  Break down the numbers

–  Round-up of what other people are saying on web

–  Top tweets

How frequently (in an ideal world) you would post

How much time do you envision it will take to create posts

Include ideas on specific stories you can imagine would be good for the blog.

List some people you’d like to interview.

Include a description of multimedia that would be good for your blog.

Can you think of any special, reoccurring features?

For Monday, Sept. 22, write a mission statement for your new blog. The statement must be 800-to-1,000 words long and include the following information:

1. Statement of purpose. (What is the blog about?)

2. Who your targeted audience will be.

3. Why there is a need for this blog.

3. A description of the content.

4. A statement on what sets this blog apart from others.

5. Any other information about what makes your blog special.

6. An analysis of other blogs covering the same topic.

YOU MUST EMAIL ME YOUR STATEMENT AS AN ATTACHED WORD DOCUMENT BY CLASS ON MONDAY, SEPT. 22

For Monday, Sept. 15,  each student must post to this blog ideas for two blogs that he or she might like to start this semester. Write a paragraph of four to five sentences for each idea. Please include in each post, thoughts on why the blog is needed and what void it fills in existing news coverage. Please keep your ideas grounded in New York City (or suburbs, if they are more convenient) so that you will be able to go out and interview actual people over the course of the semester.

In class on Monday, we discussed whether a carefully curated Twitter feed can be considered a blog. I’m not sure whether we reached a consensus, but certainly it is a valid question to address in the context of our class. I want to push that discussion one step further: Is a carefully curated SnapChat feed also a blog? Editors at SnapCchat are doing just that — offering up a “live” feed from New York Fashion Week. The New York Observer has an interesting piece about this effort, saying it feels a lot fresher and more relevant than #fashionweek feed over at Instagram. Here’s an excerpt that explains what Snapchat is doing:

So what’s a live story on Snapchat? The startup did the same thing for Electric Daisy Carnival in April and the World Cup finals in July. Users could send their own videos and photos not only to their friends, but also to a team at Snapchat. Snapchat then curated the best media to be part of one massive Snapchat live story. It was pretty fun and effective, especially when the World Cup story showed revelers from around the world prepping for matches in Rio and cheering their teams on.

What I find interesting is that the Snapchat “live” feed requires editorial judgement by its employees and that it’s not just a hashtag that pulls in everything anyone is posting about a particular subject. That to me feels like some kind of journalism is at work.

NEW YORK blogs:

And for our discussion today on topics to blog about, I came across two that I thought were interesting that I want you to look at:

I Quant NY

and

The Christie Tracker

For Monday, write a three-page paper analyzing the effectiveness of an established journalistic blog. You can choose to examine one blog or compare two blogs that cover similar topics. Answer the following questions in your paper:

1. What specific topic or niche does the blog cover? How effective is the blog at clearly stating its purpose? Does it stay focused on its topic, or do you find it confusing.
2. What kind of content does the site produce? Describe in detail the types of blog posts that are published on this blog – reported stories, Q&As, reviews, videos, photo slideshows, opinion pieces, etc.
3. Who are the main competitors for this site? How does the quality of the blog’s content compare to its competitors’.
4. Try to ascertain who is writing the blog. Is it one person’s blog? Is it a blog that has many contributors? Is it part of a larger news organization?
5. How do you think the site makes money, or how do you think it contributes to the business model of the larger news organization it is a part of?
6. How active is the blog on social media? What kind of a strategy do you think it has?
7. How do you think the blog could be improved?

THIS IS A GRADED ASSIGNMENT. I MARK OFF FOR GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES.

You will be presenting your findings during class on Monday, Sept. 8

This course introduces students to the world of journalistic blogging and social media in all its diversity, from exploring complex policy, social and economic issues to offering commentary on local art exhibits, music clubs, and local food stands. Students will learn techniques for making their online writing engaging, how to make a point quickly, and how to develop ideas and find an original voice while hewing to journalism’s commitment to accuracy and clarity.