A trip to the Everglades

I journeyed to Everglades National Park with a photographer, visual journalism student Johnfrank Dieguez, Friday to report a project for my CNJ 595 In-Depth Reporting for Convergent Media, which I took last semester.

Our subject was La’Keisha Harris, a law enforcement park ranger. Johnfrank took the pictures and I captured audio; we make a good team.

The class project will eventually result in audio slideshows and text stories about various National Park Service employees for the agency’s diversity recruitment program Web site, the link to which I’ll post when our piece for the site is posted. The site was designed by another class, CVJ 341, last semester.

Additional student groups will visit other parks during the course of this semester for the site.

Cover It Live

I was catching up with Alfred Hermida’s Reportr.net blog and came across this great app for sites and blogs: COVERITLIVE.COM

The concept is brilliantly simple. Instant messaging, which this is very similar to, has been around for a long time. Of course, this is not instant messaging, it’s a perfect blogging tool.

Look out for a test when I get a chance to liveblog…

Wait, why would I say that, check it out:

UPDATE, Jan. 19 at 10:13 P.M.: I had a question earlier today, “Is the text in the window searchable?” It turns out that it is. I Googled a line from my liveblog and got this result. Success!…somewhat.

Poynter site redesign process: A good model

I really like how Poynter is approaching their site redesign, it provides a good model for how TheMiamiHurricane.com, and others, should go about it.

Here’s a video from Poynter’s YouTube channel:

For more information about their redesign, check out the Poynter Online – Poynterevolution page.

Troubling (but not surprising) news about teen readers finding online news ‘troubling’

From Romanesko:

THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2008
Teenagers say reading online news is a stressful experience

Romenesko Misc. | Northwestern Media Management Center
While the 14- to 18-year-old participants in a Northwestern-sponsored study [PDF] describe time spent on YouTube or social networking and music downloading sites as a treat or time-out, they describe their online news experiences as stressful or a reminder of the world’s dangers. “We found teens are unlikely to follow serious news online, but that they will click on news stories that appeal to them when they find them on other sites,” says Michael P. Smith, executive director of Northwestern’s Media Management Center.
> News organizations’ websites are not a prime destination for teens (RI)

Posted at 5:30:24 PM

This isn’t very surprising, but it should make us stop and think about teens and their news consuming habits. That’s not to say, “Well, we better just post all Britney, all the time.”

No. News organizations need to find a way to remain relevant to younger audiences without compromising the quality of their coverage. Do I have the answer? Unfortunately, I do not. If I did – as the line goes – I’d be out there trying to make money off it.

Weigh in: For my peers, how would you characterize your online news reading habits?

Other news:
Also from Romanesko, an interesting CJR article that discusses bloggers organizing and being paid for their work: Blogonomics. As you likely know, most news organization don’t pay their staffers to blog.

Maybe I should have called this post “Romanesko Round-up.” Nah.

Definitely add Romanesko to your RSS reader.

Followup to Chinese blogger death post

I posted this last week about a Chinese blogger who was beaten to death. Here is an update on the case from David Barboza, a New York Times business reporter based out of Shanghai:

Bloggers Push China to Prosecute Beating Death

It’s encouraging to learn that “[c]ity officials in Tianmen in Hubei Province in central China are being punished and investigated for their role in the killing of the man, Wei Wenhua, the general manager of a construction company, and the beatings of five villagers during a dispute on Jan. 7, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported.”

As a side note, I had the pleasure of meeting David when I was in China last summer on a UM study abroad trip. Here is a story I wrote about him.