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April 23 2012
April 12 2012
Do. It. Yourself.
We all have those little tricks up our sleeves…the tricks we use to fix it, shortcut it, or make it easy for ourselves.
Some years back I posted a quick little emergency “fixit” for those days when your last miniscule lav windscreen disappears. At the time I was experimenting with using my computer with a camcorder plugged in to see if I could record “live” into iMovie.
It worked. The way I shot the video I mean. And the trick works pretty well too. All you’re doing is creating a dead zone above the mike head that keeps wind from hitting the head.
Fast forward six years to today…or rather earlier this year. I needed a way to fix my Lectrosonics wireless receiver to my Panasonic HMC150. The body is so compact and nearly every surface has dials or gizmos that I couldn’t figure out where to put it. Out of desperation I would use the hand grip…or pocket it tethered to a long enough XLR cable. Awkward.
Looked around on the Internet, but most of the fixes either didn’t look like they’d work with my camera or were way too expensive. So I did what any sane person with too much time on their hands would do…I diddled and daddled and did some thinking to boot and came up with my own gizmo.
The solution was both effective and affordable. One two by four inch piece of plastic, about 3/5 inch thick. One cold shoe attachment. Industrial strength Velcro.
I’ll make a video later on…but here’s the drill. Countersink a threaded hold into the plastic. Fill said hole with super glue and screw in the cold shoe. Wait for it to dry. Attach Velcro to fit. Put mated piece of Velcro onto your receiver (or whatever else you want to attach to the camera).
Cost: assuming I could have bought just enough for this one holder, probably less than $10. As it was, I bought enough plastic for four holders (around $14), five of the cold shoes at around three and a half bucks each, and the Velcro roll ran nearly $15. The super glue I had lying around the workshop.
What would I do differently? I got the cold shoes cheap on Amazon.comAmazon. If I do it again, I’d probably go for more heavy duty shoes…I can tell the ones I got are not sturdy enough for long term use.
Oh – and once I went to all of this trouble, I found exactly what I needed (same basic design, but metal) over at B&H.
So – two of my tricks are out of the bag…and my partner in crime, Larry Nance, is working on more fixits, make-its, and shortcuts for our book, The Basics Of Videojournalism. The OMB, VJ – the current day Jack (and Jill) of all trades.
February 20 2012
Resources for learning about social media
I have been collecting posts, articles, tutorials and general how-to materials that relate to how journalists use social media. I started about two weeks ago, as I prepare for a workshop in Singapore.
They are curated here: Social Media and Journalists.
The collection is housed at Scoop.it, a curation site that goes a step beyond social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Diigo, and which privileges text and tagging — rather than visuals (like Pinterest). For this particular project, I’m finding it very useful.
One example of its utility is that I can offer up a link to a subset of the complete collection by using my own tags: see all posts tagged with “Instagram.” This kind of selection is always useful in teaching and training. Unfortunately, you cannot combine tags (e.g., Instagram + howto) to narrow the search results.
I could have chosen Tumblr for this project, but I’m liking the way Scoop.it works. One of its best features is that when you “scoop” a link using the Scoop.it bookmarklet, the Scoop.it interface opens in a one-third-screen vertical overlay (shown in the first screen capture above). This allows me to scroll up and down in the source material, which makes it easy to write my annotations and choose my tags. I don’t have to flip between browser tabs.
The toolbar shown above appears at the bottom of every posted item. It’s fast and easy to edit your posts and to change or add tags. It’s also easy for others to share your posts on a variety of social networks.
A big drawback is that I can’t download or otherwise preserve my collection. If Scoop.it goes bust, I will lose all my work. There is an RSS feed, but the links go only to the Scoop.it posts; there is no link to the source material in the RSS feed. Bummer.
Scoop.it isn’t brand-new — the site launched in November 2011.
January 17 2012
10 reasons Ph.D. students fail
December 30 2011
Year in Review: 6 Trends in Journalism Education
Education content on MediaShift is brought to you by:
Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs.
As the year comes to a close, it's worth a look at the some of the most intriguing developments in journalism education in the last year - from approaches to using social media and curation to new initiatives on data journalism, from academe's role in the news industry to leveraging publishing platforms.
Getting Social, But Not Too Social
1. Hanging Out is In: Journalism educators are constantly exploring new techniques that can bring some pizzazz to the classroom and better engage students. And one new tool that created lots of excitement this fall was the video Hangout feature of search giant Google's new social network Google Plus. Hangout lets users easily organize live video chats with up to 10 participants, group chat, screen share, co-view YouTube videos, access via mobile, etc.
Although the tool doesn't appear to have yet found its full potential with J-schools, the possibilities seem broad -- not only to improve interaction with students, but between them, as well as among faculty or even between schools. Some journalism educators this fall, for instance, used Hangout to bring expert speakers or even whole panel discussions into their classrooms, or to generate group chats with adjuncts or for news meetings. Among the possibilities: facilitating group projects outside of class, holding virtual office hours and hosting student Q&A sessions (here's more on Hangout, and more on the education potential of Google Plus). To grasp the full potential for the tool, some suggest letting students take the lead -- by showing them how Google Plus Hangouts works, then allowing them to find creative news uses on their own. Educators interested in Hangout might want to check in with USC Annenberg's Robert Hernandez of #WJChat fame, who's exploring a monthly Hangout about teaching.
2. Friending is Out, Subscribing is In: With the introduction of news-related services like subscriptions, the social networking powerhouse Facebook is finding more uses in J-school classrooms, where it's a tool for reporting and source development, user engagement and expanded distribution. But a stumbling block for many is the long-standing question - to friend or not to friend? Some folks won't do it as a matter of principle; others acknowledge the power politics by only accepting, rather than initiating invitations. But it's increasingly possible to bypass the dilemma. Using subscriptions, for instance, students can follow select faculty updates without the "friend" relationship. And the use of closed Facebook groups allows classes or larger groupings to share info without crossing any personal boundaries.
Curating and/or Creating News
3. Aggregation. Teaching aggregation may be controversial in J-schools (is it journalism or is it not?), but that hasn't stopped some from taking full advantage of one of the smarter curation tools - Storify. One fan is Hofstra's Kelly Fincham, who writes how journalism educators can use Storify not only to teach students to curate social media, and gain credibility and exposure, but also for faculty to organize readings and create virtual handouts for classroom use. Others have used it to curate training events and to teach beat reporting basics, or have taught it (and curation) as part of the core copy editor's function. Check out this Storify on using Storify for journalism education and another on tips for using Storify in reporting.
4. Players in Community News: It's long been a tradition for the J-schools to contribute to the general flow of news, but in the void created by the shrinkage of commercial news outlets they're now playing a far greater role in meeting community information needs. Beyond such ongoing projects and partnerships as those at USC Annenberg, Berkeley, Arizona State, NYU, the multi-university partnership of News21 and others, now add a new year-round news outlet from Columbia. The volume of university news sites has grown so extensively that American University's J-Lab has created a directory of dozens. Plus, journalism academe is getting into the money end of the business with the exploration of new business models to replace the collapse of the old -- for instance, CUNY, where I teach, has created the country's first master's in entrepreneurial journalism.
Hackers and Tweakers
5. The Rise of the Journo-Programmer. An ambitious hybrid of journalist and computer scientist is what some have in mind as part of the future of journalism. As Columbia was launching its dual-degree masters in journalism and computer science (more), Northwestern last winter announced a $4.2 million Knight News Innovation Lab run by the journalism and engineering schools (more). Other schools are focusing on just making student journalists smarter about doing data within their journalism courses, becoming adept at everything from simple programs like spreadsheets and web-based visualization tools to more sophisticated software like Flash. Influential online journalism educator Mindy McAdams proposes all J-schools have a full-fledged data journalism course, something a few schools appear to be doing (Columbia is one; CUNY is another). Meanwhile, the explosion of smartphones and tablets - the latter are starting to show up more in classrooms, though not without debate over best practices - has encouraged some schools to explore app development, whether through simple thought exercises or by actually building apps from the ground up in dedicated courses.
6. Portfolios, Off the Rack: While some instructors make the case to continue teaching basic HTML and Dreamweaver to journalism students, others are increasingly focusing on finding ways for students to quickly set up and customize simple professional portfolio sites. Wordpress seems to be the answer for most, urged upon or even required for students. Academics then actively swap the best themes and favorite plug-ins for everything from Twitter feeds to quizzes and maps, while touting their students' best work (examples here and here).
Of course, this column only just touches on major trends and key players, so feel free to suggest more in the comments below, and this column try to circle back around to report on them in more depth in the coming months.
A. Adam Glenn is associate professor, interactive, at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and a long-time digital journalist and media consultant. Connect with him on Facebook or LinkedIn, and follow his Twitter":http://twitter.com/AAdamGlenn feed. This monthly column draws liberally from conversations about digital journalism teaching practices on the online educators Facebook group of the Online News Association. The ONA Facebook group is currently a closed group but you can view ongoing conversations (see our group Q&A tracker), or join in via ONA membership.
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Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs.This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
November 14 2011
August 02 2011
How to Control (Or At Least Influence) Children's Media Access
This week, MediaShift will be running a special series on navigating the relationships between kids and media. Stay tuned all week as we explore topics like this one.
Once you have a child old enough to use a remote, the angst begins over how to control access to media. And absent the will to live a technology-free existence, media access is virtually impossible to control.
Still, I have been able to assemble some tips on ways to at least try to influence how children navigate the media landscape. These are some of the conclusions I've reached after talks with friends and family, and a lot of personal experience as a father.
TIP: RESTRICT TV IN THE HOME
Often, the first screen a child will access on his or her own is the TV. In earliest years, it's not too hard to put the remote control out of reach and monitor use closely.Once they get a bit older, you can turn on whatever parental controls your TV provider or set allows, sometimes even block access to certain channels.
A few friends and family members don't subscribe to cable TV. You can also go without TV, which one friend told me she has done since before the era of video on the web.
HINDRANCE 1: TV? What is this, the 1990s? Most media shown on TV is soon available on some other screen the child has access to. As I said to a friend whose children were issued notebook computers in middle school: "Once they get laptops it's game over."
HINDRANCE 2: Media is pervasive out of the home. Family members in Minneapolis don't have cable. So, their daughter for years has just gone over to the house of a friend who seems to have every channel known to man, as well as a giant plasma screen.
Even at school, your children might watch movies and shows without your explicit permission. I was unhappy, for example, to learn that my child during elementary school recess on rainy days was put in an auditorium to watch entertainment that was anything but educational.
HINDRANCE 3: Parental controls are often based on rating systems that may not match your values. My friends and I, for example, find sometimes startling levels of violence in programming that's considered "safe" for children, while a fleeting bare breast in an innocuous setting will cause a show to be blocked.
TIP: CONTROL NETWORK AND COMPUTER PERMISSIONS
You can restrict access and set permissions on your wireless router for different computers (via, for example, identifying the computer's "MAC address" -- a unique identifier code for every computer's WiFi antenna). Some routers allow different permission levels for different computers, so you can restrict them from accessing certain web addresses. On some routers, you can also monitor activity on the network.
You can also set yourself up as an administrator on a computer, and make your children simple users, then use browser tools to restrict access to certain web addresses and kinds of content.
HINDRANCE 1: Do you really want to be the admin on your children's computers and have to be called on every time they need to download some little plug-in to access something they may need for homework or to play a legitimate game?
HINDRANCE 2: Your progeny (they are smart, aren't they?) may find a workaround and get the content from some avenue you haven't blocked. If you restrict them at the browser level, for example, they may figure out a way to download through a different browser.
Another friend was able a few years ago to block his daughter's access to AOL Instant Messenger chats by, he said, denying access on his home router. But the means of accessing AIM and other real-time social engines have ballooned to where he knows it would be a losing battle now to even try.
My movie-obsessed 15-year-old nephew knows how to fake proxy servers and make a website think he's coming from a different IP address or country to get around restrictions where he lives.
TIP: CUT OFF WIRELESS ACCESS
Instead of trying to restrict access over a home network, how about doing away with it altogether? One friend told me he and his wife decided to go retro. "We cut off our wireless Internet at home, and instead ran cables through our house" so everyone had to physically plug in to access the web there, he said.He and his spouse also require their children under the age of 16 use computers in open areas of the house rather than their bedrooms.
HINDRANCE 1: Neighbors. My friend and his wife noticed their children doing homework in a cramped area near the front porch. It turned out they were accessing an unprotected wireless network named "Stevo" emanating from next door.
HINDRANCE 2: Going without wireless can tie your own hands. My friend, who is a busy hospital doctor, found it to be a hassle when he had to get online at home and find a free port while the kids were doing homework.
In a house like mine, where I'm constantly accessing media in all corners for work and pleasure, I have trouble imagining going without wireless.
HINDRANCE 3: Children often have access to smartphones and tablets, on which they can consume media over a cellular network, and sometimes tether to a computer to give it wireless access.
HINDRANCE 4: Laptops can be carried to places with WiFi over which you have no control.
TIP: CONTROL ACCESS TO PAID SERVICES
You can set up a separate log-in or account for your children's access to services like Netflix, and monitor what they're watching.HINDRANCE: My 14-year-old daughter and nephew are masters at finding whatever they want to watch. They're fans, for example, of the British version of "Skins," which is considerably more frank about sex and drugs than the American knockoff.
If they can't get what they want through Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and other legitimate services, they seem to find it some other way. When they can't get a whole show, someone inevitably posts choice bits to shared sites like Tumblr or YouTube.
I have told my daughter of the agreement reached between content providers and cable companies to limit access to unapproved content, so she can better understand the dangers of downloading material that our ISP finds illicit.
TIP: WATCH TOGETHER
In our house we encourage media consumption together, as a family. That way, at least, we can ask and answer questions, discuss what we're seeing and hearing, and I can gauge reactions and levels of sophistication. I'd rather have an idea of what's being consumed than believe I can place blanket restrictions.
HINDRANCE: Many children, once they're old enough, will resist watching shows with the family. Friends and I have experienced various excuses and explanations.
Our children will say they've already seen a show we want to watch and don't want to watch that episode again, or that something they want to watch isn't appropriate for younger siblings.
CONCLUSION: TEACH YOUR CHILDREN
Let's be frank: Part of growing up is doing things your parents don't approve of and testing limits.Rather than resign myself to losing battles, I try to influence media consumption -- and production -- habits by instilling values and judgment. My daughter at this point would have to be pretty dull, for example, to not understand the risks of a) putting embarrassing personal material online or b) interacting with someone she doesn't know.
I try to encourage her to tell me what she's watching and listening to, even if it makes us both squirm a little at times.
An upside for a media professional like me is that children often act as a window into other media worlds. My daughter told me of YouTube sensation "Fred,"":http://www.youtube.com/user/Fred whom I've since researched and now use in lectures to demonstrate the power of the new social ecosystem.
I also believe we can't lord it over children if we're going to let them have rich, interactive lives, while hoping they have gained values and judgment that buffer them from the worst possibilities.
I know my daughter won't share everything with me. Yes, I can see her Tumblog and am her "friend" on Facebook. But I also am well aware that there may be other Tumblogs, social networks and websites where she does things she hides.
I do hope I've helped arm her with values so that in creating and consuming content she shows the good sense I've seen on so many other occasions.
Read more stories in the Kids & Media series on MediaShift.
Photo of family watching TV together by Paul Emerson via Flickr.
An award-winning former managing editor at ABCNews.com and an MBA (with honors), Dorian Benkoil handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift. He is SVP at Teeming Media, a strategic media consultancy focused on attracting, engaging, and activating communities through digital media. He tweets at @dbenk.
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
July 13 2011
Your Google+ (Plus) guide - 15 tips for newbies
Huffington Post :: While Google+ has a slick design and Google clearly tries to make the platform as intuitive as possible, but your first few days with the new social network can still be overwhelming. You may expect to log in and immediately see all your friends' activity with no effort at all. Or perhaps you're looking for a Facebook clone in every sense. You'll find neither on Google+.
So many new terms - what exactly are these "Sparks" and "Circles? And what are the other key features of Google+? Craig Kanalley has prepared 15 tips for newbies.
Continue to read Craig Kanalley, www.huffingtonpost.com
October 04 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – community news advice
The Knight Digital Media Center is providing a live blog of its five-day event which started yesterday offering advice on setting up a community news start-up, including how to move an idea from concept through to implementation and how to work with volunteer contributions. Tipster: Rachel McAthy. To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – dealing with data dumps
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – adding maps to websites
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – improving Facebook pages
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Editing audio on the go
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – blog writing advice
September 17 2010
5 Mistakes That Make Local Blogs Fail
So you're thinking about starting a local blog. Maybe you're a reporter tired of office politics and lowest-common-denominator assignments. Maybe you're a neighborhood gadfly who wants to create a new place for locals to gather. Maybe you're a realtor who wants to generate new leads.
Either way, your local blog, like most new things, will probably fail.
It will fail to support you.
It will fail to win an audience.
It will fail to have real impact in your community.
I meet a lot of local bloggers and people thinking about starting local blogs who ask me for tips or for feedback. After having several of these conversations, it seems useful to pull these conversations together in one place modeled after a great piece Paul Graham of YCombinator wrote back in 2006. He found 18 mistakes that kill startups. I think the mistakes that kill local blogs can be condensed down to five.
Let's break them down.
Five Mistakes
#1. You're doing it alone.
The first reason your local blog will fail is because you don't have
the right people working on it. Notice I said "people." No, you will
not succeed working on this alone.
As a solo local blog founder, you alone will be responsible for creating the content, editing it, distributing it, selling ads around it, promoting it, collecting payment, accounting for the money collected and spent, and then covering all your legal bases. That's an incredible amount of work. More importantly, any time spent on any one of these tasks is time NOT spent on the others. If you go it alone, your business will be single-threaded. Everything will have to run through you before it can happen and you can't always be available. In a single-threaded business, if the one agent needs to take a break, everything else grinds to a halt.
As Graham puts it: "When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder." If it's really just you, then your team is weak and your blog will fail.
#2. You don't know your market.
The next reason your blog will fail is because you didn't do your homework. In the case of the local reporter who's been covering her beat for a few years, yes, she knows her subject matter inside and out, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of necessary knowledge for building a business around it. For example, does she know:
a. How many people are actively looking for coverage of her beat?
b. The average incomes of those people?
c. How many of them have Internet access?
d. How much time they spend online?
e. What businesses or organizations would like to reach those people?
f. How much money they spend annually in doing so?
I could go on. My experience has been that very, very few local
bloggers have answered any of these questions or have any intention of
answering them in the course of working on their blog. And these are
not tricky, obscure questions. These are questions that any business
founder would need to answer in order to be taken seriously or stand a
chance at success. If you don't know these things, then you didn't do
your homework and your blog will fail.
#3. Your content is weak
The third reason your blog will fail is because your content stinks.
It stinks because it lacks a point of view and it fails to address a
real, general human problem.
Whether you're a trained journalist, a neighborhood gadfly, or a
realtor, your content probably lacks a point of view. As a newspaper
reporter, you were trained to be objective. As a gadfly, you have
relationships around the community that you have to protect and worry
about. As a realtor, you will never say anything bad about the
community you cover and therefore will be a bore.
Your blog has to have a point of view and a voice because people only
engage with things they can wrap their heads around and get familiar
with. Your local blog will only succeed if it wins an audience. You
win an audience by building relationships between your stories and
readers. No one relates well to something they don't know and
understand. Your blog has to have strong, easily remembered stances on
local issues people actually care about or it will fail. Groupon
is a company that sells deals, not local news per se, but they have a
phenomenal grasp of the voice and point of view of their content. Read their style guide here.
Which brings us to the other reason your content is weak. It's weak because no one wants to read it. And no one wants to read it
because it doesn't address any real, general human problem. For all
the bluster about hyper-local coverage and blogging in the last five years,
as someone who runs a city-specific social news site where people vote
for the stories they actually are interested in, it seems pretty clear
that most people don't give a fig about what's happening day in and
day out in their local elected bodies. That stuff matters a great deal
to other elected officials, people who do business with elected
officials, and the political/news nerds in your community, but that's
it.
If your local blog is focused on covering local government, it should be a subscriber-only, paid newsletter that goes out to just those people. It should only be a public blog if there's mass interest in the subject matter, which there just isn't for a lot of the stories showing up on hyper-local blogs. If your content lacks a point of view and is centered around things that the general public isn't interested in, it will fail.
#4. You haven't thought through your business model
Let's assume you figured all this stuff out. Now how are you going to
make money? Ads, you say? Okay, great. Have you answered these
questions?
-What kind of ads? Banners? Text links? Sponsored posts? Real-time ads?
-Who's going to sell them?
-How are they going to sell them?
-What are you going to charge?
-Who are you going to sell them to?
-What's the value proposition of buying your ads over someone else's?
-How many ads do you need to sell to cover your costs?
-What the heck are your costs?
Until you answer these questions and more like them, your blog will make no money and it will fail.
#5. You have no distribution strategy
Finally, your local blog is going to fail because you can't
distribute it to enough people. If your local blog is ad-supported,
then your ads are your product and your content is a marketing tool
created to bring people to look at your ads. In order for you to sell
ads, you need to have people coming to look at them. You need
eyeballs on your blog. How will you get them?
Twitter and Facebook are good but not great answers here. Both can
drive significant traffic but require a lot of work on your end. Also, their purposes are at odds with yours. Facebook and Twitter are
your competitors. They sell ads to the same people you probably want
to sell ads to. They would be perfectly happy if you didn't start a
blog at all and just started a Twitter/Facebook account and posted your
content there. If you are a local blogger, Facebook and Twitter, not
your local paper, are your biggest threats. Why should someone visit
your blog when they can read your headlines alongside other
neighborhood headlines over there? They are useful but can't be your main tools.
Search could be a win for you, but have you devised a search engine optimization strategy?
In the end, the main mistake is looking at it wrong. You are not starting a blog, you are
launching a small business. You are no different from the guy opening a bar up the road. You are both starting small, local businesses. You need to know something about blogging
and social media, yes, but what you really need to bone up on is what
it takes to run a small business. Instead of going to the local
blogger meetups in your city, you should go to the local small business
owner and entrepreneur meetups. Instead of following the latest
social media news, you need to read up on the latest advertising,
marketing, and search strategies showing results for actual media
entrepreneurs in the field. This is the main mistake local bloggers make that dooms their efforts.
But if you can avoid this and the other five listed above, you'll have a chance to start something that will sustain you and have a real impact on your community. That's a special thing.
There are opportunities out there for local blogs, they just need to be considered and approached with the right frame of mind.
Thanks to @tracysamantha, @kiyoshimartinez, and @annatarkov for reading drafts of this.
September 09 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Editing audio on the go
Mark Luckie offers his advice on tools for recording, editing and publishing audio for reporters on the go on his 10,000 Words blog. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.
To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – guide to analytics
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – maps in newspapers
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- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – automated Twitter tools
- #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – building an offline community
August 03 2010
5 tips on data journalism projects from ProPublica
A few months ago I heard ProPublica’s Olga Pierce and Jeff Larson speak at the Digital Editors Network Data Meet, giving their advice on data journalism projects. I thought I might publish notes of five tips they had here for the record:
1. Three-quarters of the top 10 stories on the site were news apps
Online applications prove very popular with users – but they are more often a landing page for further exploration via stories.
2. When you publish your story, ask for data
Publication is not the end of the process. If you invite users to submit their own information, it can lead to follow-ups and useful contacts.
3. Have both quantitative and qualitative fields in your forms
In other words, ask for basic details such as location, age, etc. but also ask for ‘their story’ if they have one.
4. Aim for a maximum of 12 questions
That seems to be the limit that people will realistically respond to. Use radio buttons and dropdown menus to make it easier for people to complete. At the end, ask whether it is okay for the organisation to contact them to ensure you’re meeting data protection regulations.
5. Share data left over from your investigation
Just because you didn’t use it doesn’t mean someone else can’t find something interesting in it.
May 04 2010
What are your caching (and cache-busting) tips and tricks?
Many of us work on database-intensive web apps and rely on caching for site performance. So what are the tips, tricks and tweaks you've developed to keep your apps humming along while avoiding database meltdowns?
From the big things (got a great strategy for caching server config?) down to little plugin approaches (like the example I'll put below).
May 03 2010
Where/How do you store code snippets?
Anyone have any favorite ways of storing bits of code that you might want to incorporate at a later time?
I'm wondering what those in this group do (what your process is) when you're working on something that isn't quite ready for the formality of version control.
Scratch pad in text editor? Private repository? Whiteboard in the cloud? Commented-out code until cleanup?
Example scenario:
You're working on a project and decide you might eventually need some code that will provide cool Feature A. You create a chunk of Feature A. It's not quite ready for prime time and unnecessary for the project launch, but it could lead to something good. Where/how would you store the Feature A code?
A little further along, you come up with Feature B, which could be used in several other projects. Maybe. You put time and effort into Feature B, though, so you want to save the code, but again, not in a project. Where/how would you store it?
TIA.
April 20 2010
Start a news hack wiki?
Anyone interested in creating a wiki focused on hacks and processes specifically for online news production and CAR? The topic pages could cover things like web-scraping, "How to turn a spreadsheet of names/lat/lngs into a embeddable Google map", or scraping a PDF. I tried out wikia but all the javascript and colors scared me.
March 26 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – the importance of ‘deep linking’
March 24 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – easy screengrabs and links
March 22 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – adjusting YouTube video code
March 16 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – tracking Freedom of Information requests
March 12 2010
#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – creating well-designed news
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
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