Teaching Online Journalism

These are interactive news packages I’ve selected to show to journalism students as we discuss some of the capabilities of Adobe Flash. Many are very recent.

1. Motion

The first thing students learn to do in Flash is animation. Although a lot of animation is merely eye candy, it can help to tell the story more effectively.

The motion in Super Stadium (2010) is window dressing, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In this segment, there’s a zoom on each level of the stadium as it flies out. In other segments, we see an alpha fade. These animation effects are easy to do on the Flash Timeline.

In Last Minutes of Flight 3407 (2009), a 3-D plane rotation illustrates what happened in the air. Other animation in this graphic traces the plane’s path on a map; the map then zooms in close to indicate where the plane went down.

An extraordinary feat of reporting: What happened: Death of Jean Charles de Menezes (2007) shows in 25 steps how London police pursued and killed an innocent man. With this level of detail, it’s essential to make sure the motion is fully accurate. The story is enhanced by inset videos taken from closed-circuit cameras throughout the city.

Manufacturing Chocolate from Seed to Sweet (2007) presents a step-by-step explanation of a process, with animations (such as milk pouring from a bottle) that are initiated by the user.

Four years ago, every winter sport appeared in these detailed animated graphics: Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games. They offer particularly good examples of motion used strategically to explain. Even if you don’t know a word of Spanish, you can learn from watching these.

2. Button symbols

To add interactivity to a Flash graphic or animation, you’ll need to master buttons — and that means dipping into ActionScript. It’s well worth the effort, as I hope these examples will show.

The rollover buttons in Damage in Haiti (2010) cause pop-up panels to appear. It’s possible for relative beginners at Flash to create this kind of typical map effect.

Black Tides: A Timeline (2005?) offers a more complex map interface, but the circles on the world map and on the timeline bar at bottom are buttons. Not shown: A vertical stack of buttons on the left side of the graphic. (Unfortunately, the photos that used to be in this package have now all gone missing.)

The Mekong: A River and a Region Transformed (2010): This beautiful interface, integrated loosely with a map, uses a photo button and a separate text button to open a slideshow; another text button takes you to a story page with audio.

In The Debt Trap (2008), a sequence of 10 invisible buttons display information about each year in the selected decade slice — a great data graphic. (To see this segment, select Start, then go to Lifetime/Explore.)

TKTS – A House of Glass (2008) uses the Times’s standard button bar with numerals + NEXT. I think the first time they deployed this button bar was in Small Plane Hits Building in Manhattan (2006).

3. Movie clip symbols

After a student masters simple interactivity with buttons, it’s time to tackle the real power of Flash — and that means movie clips. Movie clips make possible a lot of functionality that can’t be accomplished with basic Timeline animation.

What causes earthquakes? (To see this cutaway diagram, click the second tab at the top.) The moving red arrows and the radiating circles are movie clips.

Slot machine (2009): The rolling sections inside the machine and the light on top are movie clips.

Budget Forecasts, Compared with Reality (2010): The drag slider at the bottom and the rollovers on the fever chart are movie clips.

In Scenes from a Ruined Boulevard (2010), a different kind of slider movie clip (bottom center) drags across a long panorama to show the destruction of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Four pop-up text panels distinguish this design from the typical 360-degree panorama.

Produced for the U.S. Library of Congress in 2001, Churchill and the Great Republic remains one of the great digital information packages (select the “Timeline” option to see this view). The way the timeline bars (lower portion of the screen) work in concert with the main display area is typical of movie clip functionality.

4. Maps and Data

Three of these examples are data-driven maps. Now you’re looking at the hard stuff — the integration of large data sets tied to dynamically generated objects.

Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid (2009): Both of the maps above come from the same package. Users have a lot of opportunities to explore and view the data that interests them.

Haiti, territorio devastado (2010): This beautiful 3-D map of Haiti allows the user to select various kinds of information to display as overlays. (There’s also an animated cutaway that shows earthquake activity beneath the surface.)

Top: Geography of a Recession (2009) provides data for each county in the United States. Compare that with the map below it — Immigration Explorer (2009) — and you’ll see how much sense it makes to build interactive graphics that use external data sources. Once you’ve got a map like this working the first time, you can swap out the data set and tweak it to serve a wholly different story.

Gay marriage chronology (2009): This map interacts with the timeline below it to show how states have changed their laws to allow or prohibit gay marriages.

Although it’s simpler than the preceding map examples, History of Religion tells a story efficiently and clearly with the help of color and motion, with a minimum of text.

If you have other examples to suggest, I’d be happy to see the links!

Have you seen the L.A. Times homicides map? I’m sure you’ve marveled at the New York Times homicides map, and perhaps you have also admired the Boston Globe homicides map. The L.A. map, however, has a lot (a lot!) of fine features that the others lack.

One of my students wrote a critique of the L.A. map for an assignment, and that led me to go deeper into it than I had before. Turns out that it’s probably the best implementation I’ve ever seen of Adrian Holovaty’s 2006 call to action, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

I’m particularly impressed by the article level of the data — the story — for each and every victim of homicide (see here and here and here, for example). Check out The Homicide Report blog too.

(Props to Ken Schwencke, a Gator journalism grad, whose love of data and code is all over this thing.)

Read the review of the Kodak Zi8 by Derrick Jeror — at Amazon.com. Then read the 69 comments on his review (or at least scan them).

This is an extremely helpful review — it explains how to get the best sound quality for interviews and the best battery life, etc., from this under-$200 video camera. Derrick recommends a lavalier microphone and provides other good tips too.

In one of the comments, he explains why the Flip Mino is better for some applications.

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.