Category: Journalism

National Writers Workshop: Highlights and notes

What? Another conference, you ask?

Greg with Leonard Pitts
Greg with Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts. Photo by Lilly Echeverria.

Yes.

This past weekend (Sept. 19-21) I attended the National Writers Workshop in Fort Lauderdale, an annual conference hosted by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Among the speakers (A-Z):

I liveblogged the conference using Twitter and updates can be found by searching greglinch + NWW or NWW.

I’ve posted on Google Docs my notes from a Saturday morning session by Jacqui Banaszynkski, Knight chair in editing at University of Missouri School of Journalism.

I’ll be taking about a month to catch my breath before the next conference, a trip covered by The Miami Hurricane:

Associated Collegiate Press and College Media Advisers conference in Kansas City, Oct. 29 to Nov. 2.

I’ll be flying up on the evening of Oct. 30 and leaving Nov. 2. The Hurricane is sending a total of eight students, plus our adviser.

Related Posts

Using Twitter to cover Barack Obama event on campus

What could be better than waking up to the sweet sound of a little bird chirping the news? (see photo below)

Beginning at around 8 a.m. Friday morning, I will use the The Miami Hurricane‘s almighty Twitter account to liveblog a Barack Obama rally at the University of Miami.

The event, “Women’s Rally for the Change We Need” rally, will take place on the main campus in Coral Gables.

To easily find the related tweets, search miamihurricane + obama.

Read The Hurricane story, Obama to campaign on UM campus Friday; will focus on women’s issues.

Watch the UMTV livefeed online.

Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and Obama is scheduled to speak at 11:45 p.m.

Tickets, which were available online, sold out in less than two days of the university announcement on Tuesday, according to a university e-mail newsletter. Because more tickets were allotted than the BankUnited Center (our basketball arena) can hold, there is likely going to be quite the crowd early Friday morning.

I’ll be there to provide updates and photos using TwitPic.

Background

This will be the third large-scale event I’ve used Twitter to liveblog for The Hurricane, the first two being a baseball game last spring and the first home football game this fall when we played Charleston Southern University at Dolphin Stadium.

For the football game tweets, you can search for miamihurricane + football on Twitter. Also, I liveblogged the bus ride to the stadium (search for miamihurricane + bus).

For fun

Check out some random photos I’ve snapped using my photo and uploaded to TwitPic.

ONA 2008: Starting from Scratch – Las Vegas Sun

Speakers

Josh Williams, new media projects editor, Las Vegas Sun

Tyson Evans, design editor, Las Vegas Sun

Highlights

(There has been a lot of discussion of the Las Vegas Sun site online, but here is a tour from two guys who helped create the site.)

They launched the new site using Ellington (Django-based) on Jan. 10, choosing that date to capitalize on the national attention around the caucus. They previously had no videos, no blogs and no comments.

They are only an eight-page paper daily. They had no guidelines when they started redesigning the site.

Videos are 998 pixels wide; you can download in standard or hi-definition.

Videos are fully integrated into their content management system. They mostly shoot video on the Panasonic HVX200.

Photographers only have to upload photos and audio — CMS automatically creates slideshow.

Panoramic feature that features different audio depending on where you navigate in the panorama.

There is a feature built into the CMS that allows Web producers to pull something directly from YouTube or Flickr and embed on the site.

They’ve avoided the broadcast model in doing Web video [their videos are pretty sweet].

What’s next?

They are preparing for video to move to an IP-distributed system (look at the Ethernet jack in the back of your digital cable box). Also, they’ve partnered with a local TV station because they know most people in the city are getting their news on TV, not in print.

Check out

How did they do it?

Technology

  • Javascript, Google Docs, Linux, API, Djano, Python, RSS, CSS, XHTML, Final Cut Pro, Ajax, HD video, Flash, etc.

“Agile Development”

  • Semantic, accessible and standards-driven
  • Separating content, logic and presentation
  • Software that fosters quick creation
  • Etc. (too many to type here)

Misc.

They brought production, editorial and programming people together and do it all in-house. They showed a diagram to display how the 40-person team came together.

Production people almost never enter CMS — they create the apps for the content gathers to use.

They update the software everyday.

They aren’t tied to any old legacy programming technologies, such as ASP or PHP.

Advice for student news site

  • Evans: Look for open-source solutions, such as WordPress.

UPDATE (Sept. 13): Check out Mindy McAdams’ post about the sesssion.

ONA 2008: Like Minds session

I’m using Twitter to liveblog this session, which opened with Anthony Moor, managing editor for interactive at the Dallas Morning News. His presentation will be online at Slideshare.net and on ONA’s site.

Check out what I’ve been writing: #ONA08 tweets and Moor tweets.

We just started the newspaper breakout part of session, which will be led by Jennifer Carroll, vice president for digital content at Gannett. See the newspaper breakout and Carroll tweets.

Conference craziness: Looking back at SPJ and forward to ONA

It’s conference season, folks! Get out your complimentary tote bags and notepads.

Greg meets Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward at SPJ 2007.
Greg meets Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward at SPJ 2007.

Last Thursday through Sunday, I attended the Society of Professional Journalists convention in Atlanta, Ga. This is the second SPJ national convention I’ve attended — the first being last year’s in D.C.

The sessions at this year’s conference offered much more in terms of online, multimedia, blogging, etc. and I say kudos to that. But my gripe was that there was no Wi-Fi available in the conference center, so liveblogging was not possible.

Instead, I tweeted most of the sessions I attended using my phone. Check them out @greglinch or search for all SPJ-related tweets (greglinch + SPJ08 can be found here).

Other people who did some good tweeting:

For more about the convention, check out the stories written by the Working Press.

Looking forward, I’ll be flying to Washington, D.C. tomorrow evening for my first Online News Association conference. There will be Wi-Fi in the conference areas, so stay tuned for some liveblogging and tweeting.

I had thought about doing some livestreaming video, but — as some of you know — my MacBook Pro is being disagreeable and I’m back on my old HP laptop.

If you’re going be at ONA and want to meet up, direct message me on Twitter or contact me. Hope to see you there!

ONA-related links