Tag: Journalism

SPJ region 3 conference update

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It’s day two here at the SPJ region 3 convention at the University of South Carolina.

Yesterday was great. New people, new ideas. I attended the following sessions:

  • New Media Challenges: I learned a lot more about managing online communities.
  • Preparing for Tomorrow’s Newsroom: A very original and insightful presentation by Joe Grimm.
  • Freelancing for the New Media Age: There was basically no mention of new media, but the freelancing tips were good.
  • Reception: Chatted with students and others while eating chicken and brownie and sipping sweet, sweet iced tea.

I was unable to liveblog the events yesterday afternoon because there is no guest access to USC’s wireless network. I took notes and post summaries of the events when time allows.

What’s on deck today:

  • One-man Banding
  • Mark of Excellence luncheon
  • Reporting by the Numbers
  • The Changing Political Landscape

Then we fly back to Miami tonight and it’s deadline tomorrow!

In my mind I’m going to Carolina

And so the music-themed posts continue tonight…

I’ll be traveling to Columbia, S.C. for the SPJ region three conference in a few hours. This will be my third regional conference in as many years, at which I represent the University of Miami campus chapter and The Miami Hurricane.

Region three includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Are you going? Let me know in a comment or via e-mail, greglinch[at]gmail.com.

Also, I’ll be at Duke next week for the Next Newsroom conference. Drop me a line if you’ll be there.

I love being a student and being able to travel to these conferences for free!

Stay tuned: I’ll have my laptop there to liveblog and post general thoughts during both conferences. I will also have my video and still cameras.

Also, be sure to look for my Twitter updates during the conference — and in general.

Weigh in: Would a tripod count against me as one of my two carry-on items? D’oh!

The CMSes they are a-changin’

Using a blogging platform for a Web site?

Yes.

After first planning to use Drupal, we’ve decided that it is no longer the best option for TheMiamiHurricane.com‘s new content management system.

So, (drumroll), we’ve decided to go with WordPress.

Why? In short, it is the better overall, long-term option. More reasons/details to come in a future post.

I’d like to thank Sean Blanda from Temple University. Sean’s insights and advice — via his blog, a session at the CMA conference in NYC that our news editor and adviser attended and an e-mail response to visuals editor Will Wooten — helped us feel more confident in our final decision.

Some background: I started reading Sean’s blog during spring break, particularly intrigued with the posts about the Temple News‘ experience with WordPress. Ironically, a day or two after reading some old posts, Will e-mailed me and brought up the idea of using WP after doing his own separate research.

Besides Temple, the Sagebrush at University of Nevada Reno also uses WordPress.

Journalism prof, former Herald counsel’s advice for new (or any) bloggers

Sam Terilli, a University of Miami journalism professor whose background is in law, spoke with my online journalism class Thursday about law and the Internet. He has practiced law for more than 24 years, including 12 as general counsel at The Miami Herald.

After his talk I asked him what advice he would give to a student wanting to start a blog. Check it out his answer, which is relevant to any blogger.

Job/internship panel to be livestreamed today at 12:30 p.m.

I’ll be moderating a panel today that will discuss what students need to know and do to prepare for journalism jobs and internships.

My money is on mindset and skillset, in addition to the fundamentals.

The event will begin at 12: 30 p.m. in Studio A of the School of Communication and is hosted by the UM student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (and organized by me!).

The speakers are:

The first part of the event will be a Q & A session with the panelists, each of which does recruiting work for his/her respective organization. After that, they will meet individually with students to provide personalized feedback, critique resumes, etc.

Inspiration for the livecast medium
After watching the livecast of a video strategy session (The Northern Short Course in Photojournalism) on ustream.tv, which Howard Owens teased on his blog, I thought it would be good to do the same with our session using that service.

And yesterday I saw Kyle Hansen’s post LIVE Video! announcing that The Spartan Daily at San Jose (Calif.) State would be using ustream as well to broadcast a session Monday with the university president: The live video worked!

I had originally thought to do our livestream through the School of Comm‘s Web channel, but they don’t have a player that I could use to embed the video.

Background
You may recall that this event was originally scheduled to take place during this year’s Communication Week on Feb. 19. Unfortunately, we had to cancel because Fidel Castro decided to announcement that he was stepping down as president of Cuba that day.

Ask a question: Feel free to comment on this post or use the video player’s built-in chat feature to submit a question, which requires registering with ustream.

Full disclosure: I interned at the Sentinel last summer and will be at The Herald this summer.