By Mindy McAdams

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Teaching Online Journalism

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Notes from the classroom and observations about today’s practice of journalism online

Archive for August 2006

2006 SNDies finalists

Thursday, August 31, 2006

The annual SNDies competition honors the best “new media” design in journalism. The self-nominated entries favor interactive or multimedia packages (and slideshows). The competition is part of the Society for News Design, an international professional organization. (I’m going to their annual convention in Orlando this weekend.)
See my del.icio.us links to all of the SNDies […]

Online news design, Part 2

Thursday, August 31, 2006

I’m eager to get more nominations for good news fronts on the Web. These screenshots are full size from 1024 x 768 resolution in Firefox 1.5, no scrolling. Juan Antonio Giner nominated the top two. I nominate the following two. Click an image to see the site.
And nominate your own picks for best-designed news […]

Online news design

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Juan Antonio Giner doesn’t hold back. He looked at the design of The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman home page and wrote:
“The design of the web page is one of the best in the world.”
He’s right. It’s 100 times better than the average, than the majority of newspaper Web sites I have seen (and I have seen […]

Travels with Jane, a participatory adventure

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The travel editor at the Miami Herald goes on a low-budget road trip, blogs it all, and has her next move determined by … readers’ votes! (That’s got to count as interactive!)
Jane Wooldridge started out on Aug. 20, getting as far as Florida Caverns State Park, in the panhandle of our state (many people don’t […]

Too much information, lacking order

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Many news organizations have recently published anniversary packages related to the hurricanes of last year, Katrina and Rita. I’ve been looking at them as they are posted on the various journalism blogs.
The good news is, we can see how much remains to be done. No one should think that the mess has been cleaned up. […]

Web video streaming: Which is the best?

Monday, August 28, 2006

A new study examines five Web video streaming technologies: Flash, QuickTime, Real, VX30 and Windows Media. Researchers evaluated “image quality, streaming quality, accessibility, encoding and Web-authoring efficiency, and cost.”
Perhaps more interesting to educators and online journalists — the report includes tutorials for using each of the five technologies.
Edgar Huang and Clifford Marsiglio, researchers at […]

Hurricane tracking maps

Monday, August 28, 2006

Hurricane season — the minds of southeastern Americans turn to maps as stores sell out of bottled water and plywood.
The IBISeye map — from the Sarasota, Florida, Herald-Tribune — uses Google maps to provide lots of information.
The Weather Underground has a Flash map showing Ernesto today. I like the way rolling over the map markers […]