Parting words for my J198 Multimedia Reporting students

This semester we took something of a leap when we introduced J198 here at Lehigh. As students in our department you’ve always had the journalism focus as part of your studies. The only thing that was narrow was the platforms you learned about: writing, photography, maybe some online work here and there.

This semester we learned (in the words of Cassie) everything. Yeah, we learned video. And photos. And Twitter. And blogging. And Web building. And maps. And a little Gowalla. And SEO. And podcasting. But there’s a common thread there. We used it to build something greater than the whole, and that something was the story. If there’s one lesson I want you all to take away from this course it’s something Steph said during her group’s presentation: When we learn the technology to the point where operating the equipment is second-hand, you realize something: It’s always about the story. Always.

You learned a lot about technology and networks this semester, and that kind of information will be vital. But now that you’re at the end of the term, zoom out and see the big picture. See how this all works together. For example, we didn’t use Twitter because it is all-important. We used it to build up networks and relationships with people, to listen to them in shaping stories and work with them to promote the work you did. We used it to get information and push information.

And it works. For example, Google south+bethlehem+arts and what do you get at the top of your search hits? Why, the very site put together by Andrew, Lauren, and Ope. Why is this? Because it was set for SEO, it had a clear title that was reflected in the URL, and it was sold in social media by both you and your followers. In other words, “everything.” All of it was pointed toward benefiting from Google’s system of rewarding clicks over big media brands. Read more

Steps forward in multimedia reporting

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. Read more

Gowalla: Trippin’ on journalism

A few months ago I blogged about Foursquare and its journalism implications. The post was pretty well received and it created a tremendous conversation online, but I wanted to post an update on our first foray into location-based offerings here at Lehigh.

When I was at SXSW last month I got my first look at Gowalla, which is similar to Foursquare in that it uses location services, check-ins, and little incentives for keeping you in the game. I like Foursquare’s interface a bit better and find their badge system more appealing, but Gowalla has a couple things it does better.

First, you can create trips. What this means is a user can go to the Gowalla site and create a themed trip (“top places to eat downtown” for example) that a user’s Gowalla friends can then participate in by following the trip by going to the places listed and checking in on their smart phone. I like this because it means you can have people participate in social mapping, but in a journalistic sense it also lets us put geolocation layers on stories and let the audience experience key locations in a story themselves. And Gowalla has done a great job integrating the Google map function into the application so that getting walking directions is easy. Read more

J198: The game is slowing down

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

Since it’s Super Bowl week, we’ll kick off with a football analogy. Old timer quarterbacks often compare the process of maturing as a player as being somewhat correlated with the speed of the game. Consider NFL great Warren Moon:

“You’ve seen pretty much everything. I think the big thing for older guys, at least for myself, is the game really slows down for you. It really is a slower game. And even though you might be slower because you’re getting older and you’re not as quick as you used to be, because the game has slowed down to you mentally and the way that you view it, you’re still at the same speed of the game.”

Experience, the “I’ve seen that before” kind of recognition, allows you to focus on the game and not technique. NFL rookie QBs get overwhelmed by how fast defenses are, but in time they adjust as they learn to read blitzes, recognize defenses, and so forth. What they’ve had to learn on the fly soon becomes instinct. The game slows down.

The game is slowing down for the students in J198 as well. The focus is shifting from the entry level work with technology and back to the familiar stuff: storytelling. 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.

J198: Multimedia reporting books

I finally selected my books to adopt for Multimedia Reporting (J198). I have known from the start that I didn’t want to have a textbook or a book heavy on online philosophy or culture, as I figure they’ve gotten some of that in their other courses. God knows the poor saps in my Media & Society course have been inundated with it.

Online culture: it’s what I do.

So, rather than turn next term into a giant World of Warcraft game, I wanted to make sure that book adoptions were based around a text that is practical. My ideal vision has been to pick a book that they would not want to sell back, something that would serve as a practical field manual for doing media across multiple platforms. Read more

J198: So we took the plunge

We ordered more Zi8 cameras for J198. Each of the four groups is going to have at least one of these things for use in the field, but we’re also getting a few for the Brown & White for next semester. We’re also going to give each group a kit that includes a mini-tripod. We’re still testing it against others, but we need to know whether adopting this thing widely works for us.

I really think these cameras are going to be a hit. I showed the Kodak to another student who has signed up for the course and she showed some excitement about the camera just upon seeing it. Buzz is a good thing. I can’t teach buzz.

Also on order is one of the Flip Ultra models, which will give us a good comparison point for cameras in this range. So while I’m still pushing the Zi8 to see how far it can take us, I’d like to see what other possibilities are out there.

This is going to be an interesting test of Web video vs. TV video. We’ll learn ‘em a little bit of TV-style storytelling, but it’s going to be just another tool in the toolkit along other forms of video work.

J198: Kodak Zi8: A good tool for the backpack

One of the cool parts of my job here at Lehigh is I get to play with toys. It’s a guy/eternal kid thing. If I had room for a couch in my office, you damn well better believe there’d be a fort made out of cushions. Throw in a dash of academia nerdiness and you can imagine how much fun it can be for me to do what I do.

The latest toy-playing has been trying out equipment for J198 Multimedia Reporting (I’m blogging my journey as I build this course, which you can access as a tag because that’s how I roll). Right now we’re playing with digital cameras in an attempt to choose the core devices for the course.

The class will have four groups of three people, and so we’re thinking of giving each group one or two finalist devices and using the course to assess the equipment. There’s a good reason for this, as what we end up using long-term will also potentially be adopted by The Brown & White student newspaper for general use (with perhaps a couple nicer devices as well).

My department chair Wally Trimble has been working with me to think through this after I have been passing on recommendations from my own research. There were a few things we felt like we had to have in a video device. The main one is we wanted something that would be a paradigm-shifter. We haven’t had multimedia here at Lehigh as part of coursework, so there is a potential problem with handing students a device that looks like something they’ve seen. Giving them something that looks like a digital camera would make them think still images. Handing them something that looks like a TV camera might make them think television news. We want them to think Web, and so it was important for us to have a device that looked like a Web tool first. Read more

Blogging out J198

Next semester will be my first foray into teaching multimedia journalism here at Lehigh. Planning for this course has been hard and exhilarating at the same time, because while I’ve enjoyed all the freedom I’ve had to plan this course it also is unnerving for a new PhD to know you’re doing something within a program that hasn’t yet been tried.

Thus, as with any venture like this, there are moments where I worry this airplane isn’t gonna fly. But that’s why I came to Lehigh. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I do really well when I’m handed challenges and given the freedom to come up with a solution. I’m OK even if I don’t have freedom or support (I did work at the Daily News, after all), but I find the result more gratifying when I feel like I’m given the tools to make it great.

The good news is that Lehigh has blown away even my high expectations. The students here are sharp and the faculty are top notch in terms of scholarship, interest, and support for new folks. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel blessed to have landed here.

Anyhow, back to J198 “Multimedia Reporting,” which we’ll offer next spring. It’s got two main components: weekly work and a semester-long team reporting project. Read more