The Evolving Newsroom

ReadWriteWeb have done a nice end-of-year profile on Common Craft, the clever folk behind those RSS in Plain English and other videos which explain social media and web stuff.



It's a nice read and the part about why Common Craft deciced to move away from its custom video service into its current licencing business model is interesting:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved.

"People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

One of the most useful aspects of Twitter for me is following the links people post to their blogs and things they've been reading/watching. There's always good stuff in there.

But Twitter's like a 24-hour water cooler - people drift in for a while then move on and you never know who's going to be there when you show up nor what you've missed in the meantime.

You can look at someone's Twitter timeline and see everything they've been doing in the past few hours or days, but that can take a while.

Enter Twitturly, which lets you see what people have been linking to. It searches a Twitter user's timeline and pulls out posts containing links, filtering out the rest.

Go to http://twitturly.com and type in someone's Twitter username or type http://twitturly.com/user/username into your browser address bar.

Say you want to see what New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson's been linking to. Go to http://twitturly.com/user/fredwilson and you'll see a page like this:
















Type in http://twitturly.com/user/starrjulie and you'll see what I've been linking to.
















Nice.

My colleague Stephen Harlow put me onto compfight.com on Tuesday last week and I was so taken with it I immediately included it in presentations I did on Thursday and Friday.

















Compfight.com makes light work of searching Flickr for images. Type in a keyword or two, hit enter and you get a full page of images to look at - small enough to see lots on one page but not so small as to be hard to see. If you see one you like, click on it and it takes you through to the image page on Flickr. Genius.

A particularly useful feature for me is that you can easily restrict your search to images with Creative Commons licences - which are more likely to be available for use in presentations, blogs and the classroom. You can already do this in Flickr using the Advanced Search function, but compfight.com makes it much easier.

Telegraph.co.uk has partnered with Wesabe (a site that got a positive mention in Nat Torkington's 'Privacy and the Cloud' presentation I pointed to earlier) on a co-branded site that lets users manage their money online.

Here's one of the Telegraph's personal finance reporters giving it a spin, and here's the announcement from Wesabe.

More from Mastering Multimedia (loving this blog at the moment), this time top tips on making better audio slide shows.

• I shoot the photographs for my slideshow like I shoot a video sequence–by taking wide, medium and lots of tight shots. This gives my shows visual variety and allows me to cover my audio by opening with a wide shot, then transitioning to a tight shot of the same scene.
• It’s best to open your show with a bit of natural sound rather than with a subject talking. The ramp up into your story is important. If you don’t pull the viewer in fast they will bolt. Natural sound eases the viewer into your story without jolting them with dialogue.
• Stop having the subjects introduce themselves. Really, stop it! The biggest cliché in audio slideshows is the “Hi, my name is…” intro. Instead, use a lower thirds title.
• Use passionate subjects for the narrative of your story. If your subject has a boring monotone voice, then maybe you should write and voice some narrative bridges yourself to help move the story along.
• Like video, try to match up photos to what the narrator is talking about. The same goes for the natural sound. When you do this, your story will really start to crackle.
• Get yourself a decent flash card recorder. The cheap one makes your show sound amateurish. You use a $3000.00 digital camera to shoot the pictures. A $200.00 recorder is a small price to pay for decent sound quality.
• When you record an interview, make sure to do it in a quiet spot. Then add your natural sounds (at a reduced level) under the narrative to give it sound depth.
• Record a minute of room tone wherever you are taking photographs. Use it to cover the sound gaps between or under the narration.
• Never, I mean NEVER have dead air sound gaps in your audio narrative. Cross-fade your audio between clips or add room tone to prevent this at all costs.
• Your final audio edit should be as smooth as butter. Nothing should take you out of the moment.
• Make sure your show is paced correctly. Too fast and you make the viewer mad, too slow and you bore them visually.
• Use music for a reason, and not because you need to make a boring show more interesting. Don’t use music to manipulate emotion. If it is not in the narrative or photos, don’t force it with music.
• Finally, create what I call a nat/narrative weave with your audio edits. Start your show with natural sound, and then weave your narration and ambient sound in and out.

More at Mastering Multimedia.

This comes under the category of cool tools:


Type the url of any website into urlmetrix and you get instant numbers on what that site's Google page rank is, how many times it's been bookmarked to Del.icio.us, its Technorati rank, Compete rank, Google and Yahoo backlinks and more.

Great fun punching in sites you know and seeing what comes up.

Lee LeFever, he who makes those wonderful 'in Plain English' videos, posted a reality check recently about how those of us who spend a lot of time online forget that most people don't.

"We make videos, we put them on the Web, people watch them. We track our views, our Technorati links, our mentions in Twitter, our blog comments. A good percentage of people we see in social situations in Seattle are aware of our work.

"Viewed from the comfort of our living room, bookmarked pages and social circles, the Web looks pretty small and awareness looks pretty big. It's too easy to assume that people have heard about the tools and sites we use everyday. But they haven't.

"I sat back [at a conference] and asked myself - forgetting Common Craft - do these people know about Twitter? Has Flickr become part of their world? What about wikis, do they care? Are they using RSS readers? My completely anecdotal evidence says the answer is no. In our own little online world, it's too easy to assume they do."

I agree. Another assumption is that young people 'get' the web and know all about it. But I've been consistently surprised this year when I've asked students about their online lives.

Very few blog, most don't know what RSS is, almost none have heard of Twitter and few are using Flickr. Say Seesmic, Pownce, Twine, Friendfeed to them and you get a blank stare back. This is as true of degree-level students as it is of of the Waikato 15- to-17-year-olds I spent the day with yesterday (giving them a taste of journalism). It's also true of adults; I'm pretty sure some of my friends think I'm making this stuff up.

Their experience mostly boils down to Bebo, MySpace or Facebook, Google, Yahoo and YouTube. Aside from that, the only difference between these kids and me growing up is that boys these days can type.

Still on the theme of newsroom technology I wanted to point to this post from Rich Gordon on Mediashift Idea Lab about a Knight Foundation initiative to grant journalism scholarships to computer programmers. He notes that Georgia Tech is already running a computational journalism course.

Every now and then I get the feeling another piece of the puzzle is fitting into place. This, I think, is another piece of the puzzle.

It's not uncommon to find the odd programmer in a newsroom - they're the folk who fix the broken widgets and figure out how to translate the editor's bright ideas into code. But there's often only one, they're often not on the editorial payroll and sometimes they're not even on the editorial floor but tucked away in an IT department cubicle.

But imagine if you had a programmer at the morning news conference or weekly planning session. Someone pitches a story, it gets tossed around the table - what can we do for the paper, what can we do for the web, what's the community potential? The picture ed pulls up some images on the screen, the reporter mentions some data he came across that's relevant and a news editor recalls previous stories that dovetail nicely and an old series of pics that would be perfect. Round the table you go, asking: Can we do this? Would that work better? Are we telling this story in the most compelling way?

Instead of having to scurry off and find someone to ask what's possible or, sigh, put in a request form, the programmer can say right then and there - no, that's going to take too long and I can't be sure it'll work properly, but I have a better idea and I can do it if you give me x, y and z.

Now the editors can allocate staff and tech resources accordingly. The editors know what they're getting for the web and the paper, the reporter knows what words and data are required by when, the designers can get to work and the pic editor can get researchers or the duty snapper on the case.

Ah, it's a lovely world in my head.

Rich Gordon sees 'journalism programmers' as creators of a new generation of newsroom tools. Here's his take on why that's so important:

"Many journalists just aren't comfortable with technology. And even if they learn to use technology tools successfully in their work, few want to delve deeply into the process of developing new technology. And most media organizations don't seem to value their programming staffs or involve them in the journalism process. Instead, their work supports back-end systems like payroll and billing.

"But there's also clearly a need to educate computer scientists about journalism, which is why what Georgia Tech is doing is so important. When computer scientists think about journalism, it seems they often are most interested in trying to create software that replicates what journalists do - or makes them unnecessary. Think Google News - or the Northwestern InfoLab's News at Seven, an automated system that generates TV news 'shows' by harvesting information from the Web, translating it into human speech and delivering it through avatars.

"Don't get me wrong - if an algorithm can truly replace what a journalist does, I'm happy to let a computer do the work. But I'm convinced that the most indispensable things that journalists do - reporting, interviewing, analyzing, writing and editing - need to be done by humans.

"I'm also convinced that most technology professionals just don't understand how journalists do their jobs, what makes them essential to a democratic society, or how technology is helping destroy the business model that has supported the creation of original journalism. I'd like to see computer science scholars and professionals thinking more deeply about how technology can help journalists do a better job, not just put them out of a job."