Suzanne Levinson, director of site operations at The Miami Herald, visited my online journalism class Thursday evening.
She discussed the Herald’s Web site, online journalism and what students need to know to get into the field. The webmaster, visuals editor and I took the opportunity to get her thoughts on the The Miami Hurricane‘s redesign plans, showing her two drafts wireframes.
Planning is in full swing for Communication Week 2008, which will take place Feb. 16-23. One of the events is a panel of Pulitzer Prize winners that almost boggles the mind.
The following people are planned to participate (from Bob Radziewicz, who has been on four Pulitzer-winning teams himself):
Madeleine Blais: won for feature writing at The Miami Herald in 1980;
Mirta Ojito: won as part of The New York Times‘ race in America series in 2000;
Michael Sallah: investigations editor at The Herald who won for investigative reporting at the Toledo Blade in 2004 and who directed Debbie Cenziper on last year’s local news winner on the “House of Lies” series;
Joe Oglesby: editorial page editor from The Herald who wrote most of the editorials about the detention of Haitian boat people that won in 1982;
Jim Morin: Herald cartoonist who won in 1996 for editorial cartoons.
The organizers are also trying to bring a photography winner and hope to have political and governmental reporter Michael Putney, from Miami’s ABC affiliate WPLG, act as emcee. (see update below on emcee)
Job and internship panel
I have organized a panel on jobs and internships, which will take place Feb. 19 at 12:30 p.m. in Studio A.
The event will feature Rick Hirsch (managing editor for multimedia at The Miami Herald), Michelle Morgante (assistant Forida bureau chief at the AP) and Kathy Pellegrino (recruitment editor at the Sun-Sentinel).
Each participant, who does internship recruiting for his/her respective organization, will meet one-on-one with students after the discussion.
UPDATE, Feb. 8: The emcee for the Pulitzer panel will be Miami Herald executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal.
UPDATE, Feb. 12: AP photographer Al Diaz has been confirmed as the sixth panel member.
Dave is back and running again! He had been on the sidelines for a little while, covering the New Hampshire primaries and doing a presidential Q&A online, but now he’s in the thick of it for real.
Check out the campaign video and be sure stop over at Dave’s blog.
Dave Barry ’08
“It’s Time We Demanded Less”
UPDATE: Another video related to Dave’s run:
Drupal is looking more and more attractive as a replacement content management system for The Miami Hurricane‘s Web site. Our webmaster, Brian Schlansky, recently downloaded it and set it up on a virtual server on his laptop.
Here are some Drupal-related links:
College newspapers with Druapal (Media sites using Drupal):
I’m going discuss Drupal’s settings and modules in greater depth with Brian and post my thoughts. Stay tuned.
Background: Drupal is a free, open-source CMS and used by other newspaper for their site management, so it definitely seems like a viable option. We currently use College Publisher, which doesn’t give us the freedom we would like and has been very frustrating recently.
Other CMS options I looked at:
Weigh in: What CMS does your newspaper site use? Why is it good or bad?
Online article comments are being talked about more and more, most recently in Miami Herald ombudsperson Edward Schumacher-Matos’ column in today’s Herald.
The topic was also discussed at the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors conference I attended a two weekends ago. Two of the sessions I attended focused part of their discourse on this issue: A writing for the Web session with The Herald‘s Martin Merzer and a session on ethics by Kelly McBride from Poynter.
Here are some articles to check out:
When comments cross the line by Steve Meyers
Looking for ways to tame poisonous words on Web by Edward Schumacher-Matos