iHaven’tseenityet, but iWantone

My dad has this habit of printing out e-mail. Occasionally he’ll get something that captures his interest or makes him think or makes him laugh, but his first reaction sometimes centers on this urge to print the thing out and pass it around. When I go home to visit my parents these days, it’s almost a guarantee that at some point dad’s going to break out the paper e-mail to share a joke or something that he read about.

Needless to say, I think this is weird. It’s not how I use e-mail and feels like one of those Stuff Old People Do kinds of things. If I wanted to share it, that’s what the “forward” button is for. But even as I shake my head at the notion of my dad clear-cutting whole forests to share that latest e-mail joke going around the Intertubes, I realize that there is something there. We live in a networked world, and we like to share our media. It’s just that he likes to physically hand his e-mail to me.

And I do my fair share of, well, sharing. One of the things my wife and I have had to work out as fairly newish married folk is the use of laptops in the living room. We both have work to do at nights at times but it seems nicer if we’re at least spending time together in the same room, even if we have our heads down and are staring at our laptop screens. And while we might be exchanging information back-and-forth in that Only In The 2000s kind of way, there can be some sense of human disconnection even as we collaborate.

Even tougher, sharing something on my screen is more difficult if all I’m doing is playing. You can’t just pass a laptop to someone so they can quickly read an email, see a photo, or watch a video, and so I’m stuck with either e-mailing it to her or sitting next to her and trying to orient the crazy thing so she can watch it while still being able to access the controls. The former is just another impersonal manifestation of our highly wired society, whereas the latter is just clunky.

And this is why I want an iPad. I haven’t even held one in my hands and am stuck with presentations and commercials, but I want one.

This is a post about the iPad, but not from an insider who was lucky enough to touch one yesterday. This is about me, the consumer looking at all of this stuff and deciding whether it’s worth being an early adopter. For the first time in a while, this is an Apple product I’m actually excited enough about to think about getting at initial release. Read more

J198: First week recap

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

So we all survived the first week, and by that I mean all of us. This week was all about basics of working the camera, simple work with video files, and getting them uploaded to YouTube.

The lab assignment was pretty simple: interview another person in class with the camera by asking three questions, download the file to the computer, create a movie with the clip using the video-editing software, then upload to YouTube. The second half of the assignment was to edit that longer clip so there is only one question, create a movie out of that, and upload it. The goal was to just give them a feel for how to work the camera and work the software, plus a very basic editing technique involving simple video cuts.

The sense I got from the students is that they were surprised by how easy it was. The Kodak Zi8 cameras we’re using were chosen just for for that reason, that it’s literally a push-button form of video shooting that is accessible to newbies. There were some questions about the video editing and pressing the wrong buttons there, of course, but overall it was pretty smooth. Read more

J198: Equipment and software choices

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

I already wrote that we’d chosen to use Kodak Zi8 cameras for our class, but I wanted to complete that thought with a word about how we’re working video. As we planned the course last fall, my department chair and I talked about different ways we could do things. The easiest thing to do would have been to buy a bunch of iMacs with iMovie and put Final Cut on there and use that. But because we haven’t done this here before, it was a question of need. If these are baby steps in multimedia, does it make sense to roll out all of the nicest tools until we see how much we actually will use them? In addition, the entire production process for other classes and the student newspaper was already PC-based, so did it make sense to go out and by a bunch of iMacs just for video editing?

For us, video will consist of cutting, splicing, titling, and some work with sound. We could do more (a LOT more) but we are focusing on the basics for this first foray.

So we both agreed that sticking with the new Dell PCs that we have was just fine and that buying a lab full of Macs didn’t make sense. I did check into Sony Vegas as a Final Cut type of program, and because it’s priced at different levels it actually isn’t cost prohibitive to use it. We decided, though, to stick with Windows Movie Maker, which comes free with Windows and has all of the basic features we need for this course. Read more

Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

Read more

J198: Start your engines

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

New semester starts tomorrow here at Lehigh. Courses for this semester are COMM 100 Media & Society, the second semester in a row for this course, and JOUR 198 Multimedia Reporting.

It’s the latter course that has me excited as well as a little nervous. I’ve been planning and thinking through this course for a few months, but as I’ve been tweaking the syllabus the past few weeks I’ve had to come to grips with what I don’t know. Specifically, the baseline skill levels of the students entering the course, because it really affects what direction all of this takes.

I go back and forth on on whether I’m being too ambitious or not pushing them enough. In the end, I just don’t know. I have to get my hands in the dirt with this group and figure it out, and that work starts tomorrow. I know they can tell stories because they’ve been doing that. But there are always differing levels of ease in understanding the common threads in telling stories in narrative writing versus multimedia platforms. There’s always that light bulb moment in their head. The central question as it relates to any new platform we’ll be learning (audio, video, photo) is how fast we can turn that bulb on. And, of course, most of them have never held a video camera in their hand.

This will be a real learning semester for me. I’ve taught something like this course before, so I know it’s doable, but what I need to learn is where Lehigh students are and listen to them. One thing I do know is they’re good students and fast learners. I continue to be impressed with the high achievement level I observe in Lehigh students.

My syllabus has a built in note that the class is subject to revision. I have had classes like that due to their experimental nature, and I hate that. I’m a planner. As a student I needed to build my schedule and tasks around what was expected of me. So I’m sensitive that too much in-semester change would be a big problem; some revisions I might wait to make until J198 2.0, some I might adopt in term.

And then there are the millions of brainstorms that always seem to hit right as we’re entering the fray, such as a great conversation I had with fellow new mediaphiles Bob Britten and Jen Reeves on Facebook about journalistic uses of Foursquare, which I’ve been messing around with the past couple weeks. Together we did a mini-crowdsource discussion of ways to use Foursquare in the classroom, which is a blog post in itself that I’ll get to this week.

In truth it’s probably too much to squeeze stuff like Foursquare journalism into this term, if for no other reason than I don’t even know how many of my students have a smartphone. But the problem is that once I get these ideas churning in my brain I can’t help but wonder if I’m not giving the students my best if I don’t at least make it an option to tap into the scary world that is my brain on new media.

But, anyhow, we set sail tomorrow. I’ll be blogging it out and posting links to things as we go so people can follow the progress on Twitter and such.

Rethinking online networks and engagement

The situation in Haiti has my mind churning this week. The images and stories coming out of this tragedy after the earthquake have been heartbreaking, but I have been mindful of how mediated the whole thing is for me even as I blog about it. I’ve never been to Haiti, unlike a few friends of mine. My whole conception of what Haiti is and what its struggles are (and were, long before this quake) are coming to me via media. As I get ready for another semester of Media & Society, that perspective is still as fresh to me as ever.

There’s another aspect of this though that has me intrigued, and that is the use of social networks to raise donations for the victims in Haiti. I touched on it a bit the other day when I wrote about the SMS campaign being used to raise aid dollars, but it’s much wider than that. As I’ve been sitting here this week editing down my 200-page dissertation to a 2500-word abstract for a professional organization competition, I realize that much of what I’m seeing as it relates to Haiti and social media reflect what I found in that research.

First, a story, then some theory, then some explanation. Read more

Ubiquity and accountability

It doesn’t shock me at all that the early stages of the Haiti coverage were built on social media rather than professional media. We’ve seen this before when big news events happen and traditional lines of transmission inhibit the ability of news organizations to get the message out.

In the case of Haiti, the 7.0 earthquake damaged so much communication infrastructure that communicating the stories and images out of Port Au Prince was thrust upon the locals still shellshocked from the devastation. That my first thought after the disaster was to wonder how the citizen journalists on the ground would tell this story shows how far we’ve come. As a scholar I’m no longer fascinated and in awe of the notion of the citizen reporter. In my case, I found myself wondering last night what they’d do with it this time, how it would be different and more meaningful than past events.

Within hours, the New York Times was curating a social media roundup on its blog, soliciting voices from the region. The Los Angeles Times was aggregating tweets and attempting to verify whether the voices were hoaxes or actually coming out of Haiti, just one interesting professional media use of social media that looked like a next step highlighted today by the Sydney Morning Herald.

But that’s all stuff we’ve seen before, and as Mark McGwire would say, I’m not here to talk about the past. Read more

Dell catches the Cluetrain

Mashable posted an interesting interview with Richard Binhammer about how Dell has turned its Twitter presence into something that will make it money. You can read the full piece, but basically the words of advice are as follows:

1. Be on Twitter to build better relationships with customers, not make wads of cash.
2. Have a diverse approach. Don’t confine yourself to one account, but maybe have several accounts with your company’s brand that serve several purposes (i.e. one for news, one for customer service, etc.)
3. Don’t just be a spammer. Ask questions of your audience. Listen to them. Show it in your tweets.

My favorite Binhammer quote from the article:

“Dell first heard about Twitter at SXSW a few years back and got excited about the listening aspect of Twitter.”

All of this made me think about The Cluetrain Manifesto, a wonderful book I’ve been rereading this month in preparation for two independent study efforts I’m doing with grad students this semester. Cluetrain celebrated its 10th anniversary last year but remains as fresh and relevant now as it was in the late ’90s. The book is packed with ideas, but what sticks out to me is this: As media move toward more interactive and socially connected operations, businesses that survive and thrive in this new world will be ones that use social media to reconnect with their customers at a human level. Read more