Social Media Fueling Resurgence of Infographics

Conventional wisdom said that infographics, those one-page, visual delights that packed lots of information into drawings and illustrations, were just about dead.

Social media looks as if it might change all of that.

BuzzMgr is a new firm that takes social media information and transforms it into great looking graphics. Here's what it did with information generated by the Republican convention. Take a look at how BuzzMgr captured the first night of the Democrat's convention.

Here's how BuzzMgr's founder, Kathleen Hessert  describes the goals of her company. 

A Great Example of a Multimedia Story Package

 This New York Times multimedia package put together by the New York Times on pop music vocal producer Kuk Harrell deserves a lot of praise.

The print story was well-written and the interior pages well-designed (I saved a copy if you want to see it). It works for those who only get their information to print and who are satisfied with the traditional media-to-audience journalistic approach.

But if you only read part of the story, and respond better to getting your news and information through audio and visuals, you have to head to the web version. There, you will find the print story, in some cases it is the secondary piece to the video and the interactive feature. The video features vocal producer Harrell and a group of singers he's producing. If you listen closely, you can hear the quotes that are in the story.

The best part of the package is the interactive "Build Your Own Pop Song" feature. Using Harrell's technique, you can build part of a song produced by Harrell. After you listen to your work, you can click to hear Harrell's choices. You can also listen to the complete song.

This is a great package and a good starting point for re-imagining how pop music--no all music--should be covered in a digital world.

Click here and enjoy.

The Power of Photo Slideshows

Here is a photo slideshow that I couldn't stop going through. These are photos for the cruise liner crash off the coast of Italy.
It looks to me as if there is a mix of professional photos and photos shot by passengers and crew.
Anyway take a look at the slideshow (Please notice how I just embedded a link to the slideshow. When you create your slideshows you should embed a link to it from your story.)
To embed a link, you can create a link using a word or a couple of words in a sentence. Or, you can just write something like "Click here" and embed the link in the word "here."

Why We Are Emphasizing Video This Semester

One of the goals of the Spring 2012 News Production & Management is to get everyone involved with video. We all should leave the class with at leas one video experience.
This experience can be you in a news video (either telling a story or using video as a companion to a written story).
You can interview someone in a video. You can have two people debate in a video.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times announced that it is "embracing" video as a primary reporting tool. That's right, a print product is going to stress video, at least for its online components.
If it is good enough for the New York Times, it's good enough for the Menlo Oak.
Check out the Beet.TV interview with the Times editorial director of video & TV on this shift.
Also, click here to for a story and video on how the non-profit group  One Laptop Per Child is developing a low-cost(in some cases around $100)  tablet so kids in the world's poorest countries can connect with technology, and the organization hopes, a brighter future.
Please watch the video. I think it is too long at six minutes, but it is a good online video, even with all the crowd noise in the background. I bet the writer is using his smartphone camera to shoot the video.

They covered up 'radio' in the sign at NPR headquarters

It's about time.
This photo was tweeted by a Los Angeles-based NPR producer.  “A picture tells a thousand words: ‘National Public Radio’ painted over by NPR at HQ,” the tweet stated.
In 2008 Jane Stevens led workshops with NPR  staff on how to shift from being a radio-centric journalism organization into a web-centric journalism organization.
Basically, Stevens and others asked the NPR staff to rethink how they tell stories and how their stories reach their audience.
It is an understatement that there was resistance to the whole idea. If the LA producer's tweet is any indication, there is still some anger about the shift in emphasis.
"Back in the days that there was just radio, your station was the only point of entry to all this content," Robert Spier, director of content development for NPR Digital Media told writers for the American Journalism Review. "You couldn't get NPR except through your station because it was only available on radio, and radio was time and geographically bound." Today, of course, "the user expects to be in control of his or her experience."
That has NPR rethinking how it operates. That's a good thing and what needs to be done if NPR is to survive in the digital age.
According to poynter.org, an NPR spokeswoman said the panel reading “National Public Radio” has been covered for several years. The new permanent sign has NPR’s logo and address.
The NPR staff, really, the entire journalism community, needs to embrace the digital age. There is no going back to the good old days.