Teaching Online Journalism

Last March I had 1,000 followers on Twitter. Sometime earlier today, I reached 3,000:

I’m sure many of those folks have not signed on to Twitter since the week when they opened their account. so I’m not going to throw a party or anything. And Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, has 31,488 followers on Twitter, so I’m not even in the big leagues.

If by chance you want to follow me, I am @macloo on Twitter.

For articles and blog posts about Twitter, see these bookmarks.

I’m often asked if we should be teaching Twitter to journalism students. I don’t think there’s much to teach, really. I do think Twitter should be discussed in journalism classes — and maybe even more in public relations classes!

Twitter is most valuable when you choose a relevant set of people to follow. The introduction of Twitter lists made it easier for a brand-new Twitter user to find those people. For example, you can just check out Patrick LaForge’s mediapeople list — there are 310 journalists on it, and the stream usually has something of interest going on. Or take a look at my media-thinkers list — it’s visible in a widget in the sidebar of this blog too.

The other day I received an e-mail from someone with a programming background who’s interested in learning how to build journalism packages in Flash. He asked how to get started and whether I was planning to release a new edition of my 2005 book Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages.

First I directed him to my December 2009 post about why I will not be updating my book.

I am recommending Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. It’s not directed specifically at journalists or news graphics reporters, but it’s easy to follow for the most part.

Then I gave him this outline of what he needs to learn:

1. Button scripting (for navigation through the package): Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 6; see also AS3 Buttons Tutorial
2. Loading external content dynamically: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 9
3. How to optimize images in Flash (Bitmap Properties):  Imported Bitmaps
4. How to load and control external MP3s: Using Sound in ActionScript 3
5. How to load and control video: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 7 (starting on page 252)
6. ActionScript 3 and XML loading/controls (XML works awesomely well with AS3): I have built a tutorial for this that is meant to be used in conjunction with the files and the exercise in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 8 (download the files; 234 KB). Please note that the exercise will not make sense without the book!

Now, after you’ve got all that under your belt, you will need to spend some time learning how to use the Bandwidth Profiler (Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book, Lesson 10) to make sure no one can accuse you of building heavy (overly large) Flash files. Heavy Flash files are NOT an indicator that Flash is bad; they simply show that the person who built the files didn’t know how to do it right!

If someone tells you that Flash graphics do not show up in Google or Yahoo! searches — that is incorrect.

If someone tells you that SWF is a proprietary file format, or that SWFs can be created only with Adobe software applications, that is also incorrect.

You should also learn how to use SWFObject to embed your Flash files (SWFs) in regular Web pages.

I gave a couple of presentations to U.S. journalism educators in St. Petersburg, Florida, yesterday and today. For each presentation I made a page of links to resources, examples, etc. The PowerPoint for each presentation is also online.

Blogs and Journalism
This presentation surveys the ways in which professional journalists are using blogs to enhance their reporting, reach wider audiences, extend their influence, and encourage two-way communication with the public. The implications for teaching journalism students about blogging are clear; students need to gain experience with writing, researching, linking, and managing comments on blogs.

Resources for Adding Online Journalism to Your Curriculum
This presentation offers seven multimedia and online skill sets for journalists and recommends simple ways to add basic skills instruction into existing courses such as reporting, photojournalism, editing, and magazine journalism.

One of the ongoing challenges in teaching journalism nowadays concerns the choice of software for video editing. I’m going to pump out a brief overview here and hope that lots of people will weigh in with their own experiences and suggestions. The more the merrier!

First, an outline of the programs that generally dominate the conversation in most j-schools:

1. iMovie (free)
2. Windows Movie Maker (free)
3. Final Cut Pro or Studio or Express (three different price tags)
4. Anything else

Second, let me note that those who teach students aiming at television news jobs have a different list (although you’ll find the Final Cut products on that list too). Here I’m looking at the broader population of all journalism students, who might end up anywhere at all (especially online) — not necessarily in TV.

iMovie or Windows Movie Maker (WMM)

These two free programs solve a lot of problems simply because they are free, stable, and very easy to use (and to teach). However, they can also create problems because in many j-schools, some percentage of your students will have “the other one.” I think it’s a waste of the instructor’s time (and class time) to teach both, so pick the one that fits the computers in your lab. Be prepared for frustration from the students who don’t want to come to the lab on campus to do their assigned work.

Is iMovie better than WMM? I don’t think so. (I use both.) The two are decidedly different, but both will get the job done. Both have very limited capacity but do allow you to trim clips, insert cutaways, layer a second track of audio, and adjust audio volume. You can add titles and end credits easily in both. Both offer a plethora of cheesy transitions (don’t be tempted). WMM has a more traditional timeline interface. iMovie hides the timeline tracks, but you can access them via the Precision Editor (via a menu option).

A huge problem with WMM is that more and more point-and-shoot cameras save video in the MOV format, and WMM will not open MOV files. These must be converted to AVI or WMV first. Some degradation may result.

iMovie supports lots more cameras and formats (read all about it), including MPEG-4, AVCHD and H.264.

Another problem with WMM is that it has slight, annoying differences on Vista (and presumably Windows 7) vs. the previous versions of Windows. Most students can figure these out, but some get stuck and need help.

Final Cut Pro or Studio or Express

These are Apple/Mac only (unless you use an emulator, which I would not recommend). Studio includes Pro, plus a lot of other stuff. Express is like an entry-level version of Pro, but Apple has made our lives hell by making it impossible to move projects back and forth between Pro and Express. That little detail is often blissfully ignored by people who say, “Let’s buy Pro for our lab, and the students can buy Express for their MacBooks.” A road to disaster! (You can open a FCE project in FCP, but after a project has been saved in FCP, it will not open in FCE.)

Check Final Cut higher education prices at the Apple Store (search for Final Cut there). We’re talking about roughly $900 vs. $200 — nothing to sneeze at!

Now, if I had six or 10 or 15 weeks to teach Final Cut to students, that would be great. But I’m teaching an omnibus multimedia journalism course, and we have four weeks — four — to learn to shoot and edit and get it online. Don’t underestimate the learning curve of a high-end piece of software. As a colleague of mine quipped recently, most people have a simple hammer around the house — not many people go out and buy a nail gun.

It would be wonderful if every journalism student graduated with proficiency in Final Cut Pro. But the teaching resources required are not trivial.

Anything else (other editing software)

There are free Web 2.0 (all online) options for video editing (see list), and there are many other commercial packages such as Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas and whatever little doodle-dabble came with your HP or Dell, or with your video camera. And there’s Avid and who knows what all at the high end.

What I would caution you against is allowing students to use just anything they choose. When you teach video editing, you want to get certain basics across — for the sake of storytelling — and novices find it easier to follow along if everyone in the room is clicking the same buttons. In other words, variation in software will get in the way of what you really need to teach, which is cutting together sequences, laying in the audio, lining things up neatly, adding titles and credits and lower-thirds, and exporting the file in a decent-quality format for uploading or whatever.

And for goodness’ sake — telling the story! Don’t forget, that’s what we really need to teach them.

For tutorials and other video editing links, see the Journalists’ Toolkit video section.

This post is for anyone who teaches Adobe Flash to journalism students. It might also be useful for journalists (especially graphics reporters) who are learning Flash right now, or who might be intending to learn Flash over the holidays or sometime soon.

In 2004 I wrote a book titled Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages. It was published in early 2005 by Focal Press/Elsevier. It sold pretty well. It was well received among working journalists.

The book is now outdated. If you’re using Flash CS4, you cannot use the book. At all. It’s okay to use it with CS3, but only if you do everything in ActionScript 2.0. But I do not recommend that. You should be using CS4 and ActionScript 3.0.

I’m not going to update the book. There are a bunch of reasons, but to make a long explanation quite short, it takes far too many hours to write such a book, which includes creating and testing all the example files to be used in Flash. It’s a matter of time. I just don’t have that kind of time available.

Losing my book puts me in a tough spot as a journalism educator. I teach an advanced Web course each spring, and 10 of the 15 weeks are spent on Flash. When people compliment me on the clarity of my Flash book, I tell them that every lesson in the book was battle-tested on real, live journalism students. That’s a fact.

So now I’m left without a book. Well, I gave that a lot of thought last spring, when I knew I was teaching with my own book for the last time. Our computer labs did not get CS4 until summer 2009, so I was able to use my book last spring. And yes, I taught those students ActionScript 2.0 (with a wee bit of AS3 thrown in here and there). Quite frankly, I was  still learning AS3 last spring (you never really stop learning ActionScript). And I had no access at all to CS4 until late in the spring semester.

A New Book and a New Syllabus

What to do? Well, first I had to find a book. The good news is, I’m pretty happy with the book I’m requiring my students to use this spring: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than the Flash books that were out there in 2003.

Second, I have to reconfigure two-thirds of my syllabus, because I can’t teach the 10 weeks of Flash the same way I used to — not only am I using a different book, but Flash has changed so much in CS4, I have to adjust the way I teach it. So that’s what I’m in the middle of right now. Getting ready for spring and my Flash class.

And why should you care? Because I’m going to share, that’s why.

The syllabus is not finished yet, but I can tell you about the first four weeks of the 10. And I’ve been busy making some supplemental materials for my students, so I’ll link to those here.

One really good thing about the CS4 Adobe Classroom in a Book (hereafter ACiaB) is that lessons 1 and 2 provide a very solid foundation in both the Flash CS4 interface and tools and also how to draw, import image files, and create text. So I’m off the hook for that stuff (hoorah!). There is nothing more boring than pointing at the projection screen in front of the room and saying, “Click this little widget here.” But if you don’t have a good book, that’s what you have to do.

Those two lessons in the book should take the students about two hours to complete (maybe three hours for some students). We will do them both in the first lab.

In the lecture before that first lab, I’ll show them some recent examples of how journalists use Flash — mostly from The New York Times — so they will know what Flash is good for.

After Drawing, Animation

Here’s where I hit a snag in ACiaB: Lesson 3 was tedious and unnecessarily long and complicated. It teaches some essential stuff, but this is where my Flash experience comes into play — it’s stuff we need to get past quickly at this stage so that we can get on to animation, and the students can feel successful and competent. They need to be animating and making stuff move in the second week. But the book’s lesson 3 does not let them animate anything.

Fine, you might say — skip to lesson 4 in the book. Yes, that is the first animation lesson. But even there, the author has loaded up too much complexity for the average journalism student (typically not an artist, and not trained in complex visual compositions).

So what I need to do is give the students a more cut-to-the-chase lesson in symbols and animation. I need to make the basic animation techniques clear and simple before I let them loose on lesson 4 in the book (which they will spend their second lab working on).

So I had to make some tutorials. I made three (all short), and there will be one more (maybe next week). They are all linked here, under the heading Animation Basics.

And yes, we will skip lesson 3 in the book altogether. We’re not even looking at it.

As for lesson 4, it’s a pretty long one. I’m not sure how far most students will be able to get in two hours during our lab, but I’ll be finding out sometime in February. A good thing about this text is that it includes an extensive section (in lesson 4) about how to use the new Motion Editor, which is one of the really huge changes in Flash CS4 (different from all previous versions).

We’re also going to skip lesson 5, which goes into deep detail about the new Bone tool in CS4. This is no doubt great for professional animators, but it’s just cognitive overload for most journalism students.

Buttons and ActionScript 3.0

The chapter of ACiaB that totally sold me was lesson 6, which not only provides one of the most practical Flash lessons I have ever seen anywhere (with files on the included CD, I might add) but also supplies a clear and practical guide to using ActionScript 3.0.

The scripting in Flash drives a lot of people away (some of them probably screaming as they run). If you ever learned to write any kind of programming language in a class in school, you would not find ActionScript difficult, I’m sure. But most journalism students have never learned even one single line of computer programming. What’s more, a fair percentage of them have math phobia. (I can empathize with them.)

Buttons in Flash must be scripted, though, and buttons are the heart of what makes an interactive journalism package work. No scripting? No buttons. No buttons? No interactivity.

So lesson 6 (which is likely to take two to three hours to finish, but luckily we do have a three-hour lab period) is worth the price of the book, for me. It’s a really good introduction to the most useful way to work with buttons in Flash CS4. I built a small supplement to the book for basics of button scripting. It’s not likely to make sense on its own, but combined with the book, I think it will make the material very clear.

Is this all the ActionScript 3.0 a Flash-savvy journalist needs to know? Hardly. And in fact there’s some stuff coming later (I’ll save that for another blog post) where ACiaB falls woefully short (in particular when it comes to audio control).

So by the start of week 4, the students will have animation and button scripting under their belts. Then they will be ready to begin building interactive Flash packages.

What’s Next?

This is what remains to be covered:

1. Movie Clip Symbols
2. Video in Flash
3. Packages with Loaded SWFs
4. Sound Controls (ActionScript and external files)
5. Loaded Data (XML and ActionScript)

The ACiaB text is pretty good for video (including use of the Flash Encoder) and for loading external SWFs, which allow us to make our packages very modular and light. The book doesn’t include anything about XML, but I’m working on a tutorial for that now, and I’m going to adapt the book’s lesson 8 to an XML version — which is how any news organization would handle a project similar to the one used in lesson 8. Nowadays I think journalism students really need some exposure to XML, and this should be a pretty neat way to get that done.

So stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how the remainder of the Flash instruction will be divided up.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) has put out a very simple list of social media guidelines for its journalists and staff to follow:

1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

– Posted Nov. 5, 2009

These seem sensible to me. They’re so straightforward, you might think no self-respecting journalist needs guidelines such as these. But they are also valuable for what they do not say.

When The Washington Post disseminated its new guidelines for social media use (posted Sept. 27, 2009), much discussion ensued. Steve Buttry, for example, wrote:

The Post’s top editors need to start using Twitter and other social media more, so they can lead on these issues from a position of understanding, rather than ignorance.

I found myself agreeing with Steve when I read The Post’s guidelines:

When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism. … This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online. (Sept. 27, 2009)

The ABC’s guidelines indicate that management regards ABC journalists and staff as responsible professionals. The Washington Post guidelines indicate a lack of respect for the intelligence and integrity of the organization’s journalists.

A new journalism concentration at New York University promises to take an innovative approach to j-school:

Studio 20 expects all applicants to have a keen interest in journalism and improving it, a strong command of written English, a devotion to high standards in reportage and verification, and a familiarity with creative uses of the World Wide Web. It also requires applicants to have obtained competence in at least one of the following three skill sets:

1. Capturing audio and editing it, or
2. Video recording, production and editing, or
3. Web skills (which could be production, design and coding, or Web journalism and blogging).

I found the three divisions of prerequisite know-how especially interesting. I like them.

First, I like it that still photography is not among them — it is not a sufficiently advanced digital skill to quality you for this program.

Second, I like the separation of presentation and data skills (No. 3) from the multimedia reporting skills (No. 1 and 2). Why? because too many folks think teaching “online journalism” means teaching HTML and CSS. What about the act of reporting? That is not done with HTML.

What I disagree with: Including mere “Web journalism and blogging” in No. 3 opens the door to a lot of people who are too scared of technology to succeed in this program, in my opinion. I’ve seen a lot of students who started up a free Blogger blog and barely even know how to add a link, let alone anything more challenging, to their online work.