Month: August 2008

Producing audio slide shows

Photojournalist Joe Mahoney has been telling stories with pictures for decades, but it’s only been fairly recently that he’s begun producing audio slide shows for the Richmond Times Dispatch. During a training session for graduate students in Virginia Commonwealth University’s…

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A fun writing tool

You know the old saying: A picture is worth a thousand words.  How about a picture of a thousand words (or more)?  That’s basically what you get from a “word cloud”–a visual representation of text, with the most frequently used…

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Network-local collaboration

CBS News has broken new ground both behind the scenes and on the air in collaborating with local TV journalists.  For the first time, the network enlisted the help of reporters at local affiliates in reporting an investigative story and…

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How to handle online comments

Whether it’s a blog, reader reaction link or online forum, news organizations have been struggling with the issue of user comments.  To moderate or not to moderate, that is generally the question. Recently, Editor & Publisher’s Ernest Wiggins surveyed the 10…

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Online video experiment

What kind of video will online users actually watch? To find out, Cyndy Green tried a small experiment this summer at the Lodi News Sentinel.  The results are interesting, if not terribly surprising. Her working assumption was that viewers will…

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Rating news by credibility

The latest entry in the online news aggregator market offers a new twist on story rankings. Unlike other social media sites, NewsCred doesn’t rank stories by popularity.  Instead, it asks users to judge whether stories, authors and publications are credible,…

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The written word still matters

Yes, it’s a multimedia world.  But the most important skill any journalist brings to the job is the ability to write, says Geoff Dankert, assistant news director at the Fox station in Chicago, WFLD-TV. At this week’s NLGJA conference in…

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Where we get the news

Americans still turn to television as their main source for news, but online news consumption continues to grow while newspaper readership plummets. That’s the headline from the Pew Research Center‘s latest survey on U.S. news habits. After years of decline,…

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What print bosses want

Despite all the changes in the newspaper business, top editors say the most important skill for journalists is still good writing.  A survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 88% of editors ranked writing skills as “very…

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Multimedia ethics: E-mail interviews

In our text, Advancing the Story, we talk about some of the ethical issues raised in the digital age of newsgathering.  One newsgathering technique that’s becoming increasingly popular is the use of email to conduct interviews.  So, what is your…

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