By Mindy McAdams

The Doobie Brothers ringtonesDavid Bowie ringtones

Teaching Online Journalism

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

Archive for April 2007

I heard the news today oh boy …

Monday, April 23, 2007

An on-the-fly comparison: These are the headlines I can see in the feeds on my custom Google home page, which I always have open.
Russian ex-president Yeltsin diesBBC News (a perfect headline, as usual!)
Former Russian Leader Boris Yeltsin, 76, DiesThe Washington Post (more words than we need)
Russia’s MaverickGoogle News: TIME magazine (awful headline!!! Well, considering [...]

Examining the changes at USA Today’s site

Monday, April 23, 2007

At the Editors Weblog today:
Is USA Today’s orientation toward social networking detrimental to its journalistic purpose? a full examination by Jean Yves Chainon.
Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, considers the Web site:
… as a medium standing on its own. Thus as a unique and complete platform to distribute news, which features an array [...]

32 remembered (online graphics)

Monday, April 23, 2007

Compare two presentations that honor the victims at Virginia Tech:
From The Roanoke Times: Individual profiles linked at bottom; individual bios open in a new window.
From The New York Times: Pure Flash, even though some aspects look like Lightbox — but it’s a pure SWF embedded in the page with a database back-end. Links open a [...]

An easy way to survey your users

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Someone in my del.icio.us network posted a link to Wufoo, a new survey-building tool. When I saw that there is a free version, I thought I’d check it out. If you can’t see it below, your Web browser does not support the “iframe” tag. No worries — use this link instead.
Update (April 29): The survey [...]

Good stuff, bad stuff, and television

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Regina McCombs left this comment earlier this week:
… we have to be careful not to lump all the bad stuff with all the terrific stuff. The biggest problem with TV news is there’s too little of the good stuff out there, not that great storytelling can’t be done on television.
I have to agree with that: [...]

How Flickr could help your career

Friday, April 20, 2007

From a fascinating post on the popular (and excellent) flash photography blog, Strobist:
While Guðleifsdóttir’s experience is certainly the most famous Cinderella Story of the Flickr world to date, it is by no means unique. The explosion of digital photography — and legions of talented new photographers — is combining with the leveled playing field of [...]

What a hiring editor looks for (or, what’s your URL?)

Friday, April 20, 2007

Yet another sign of how out-of-touch some journalism teachers and professors are: Do aspiring young journalists need hardcopy of their clips today? (Do they even need clips at all?) Maybe the old-style packet of a printed résumé and photocopied clips is outmoded.
Meranda Watling has been the education reporter at the Journal & Courier, in Lafayette, [...]