Tag: news

Print is Dead session (WeMedia)

LIVEBLOG

Jeff Gomez, author of the book Print is Dead, and Roger Black, a design guru who I met briefly last night, are the featured speakers for this event. Dale Peskin is the moderator.

Gomez cited the outage yesterday as an example of why “print is dead.”

Black came on stage carrying his Amazon Kindle and asked the audience how many other people have it — about six hands went up.

The need for stories will continue, Gomez said, but people want to play a part in their stories, citing YouTube. He also cited Wikipedia as another example of the change.

9:20 a.m.

The speakers and audience members are discussing the younger generation’s interest in news such as the war in Iraq.

9:25 a.m.

“People are going to be telling stories in the most powerful medium with the lowest cost,” said one audience member, who also noted the worldwide literacy rate and it’s effect.

WeMedia returns to Miami this week

It may not be the most well-known conference, but WeMedia is certainly not an event to be missed for this student journalist.

Take a look at the schedule and a list of participants.

This will be my second WeMedia and, as with last year’s, I am able get in for free with a guest code from the School of Communication, one of the sponsors.

Compared to the regional (SPJ) and national (SPJ and ACP/CMA) conferences I’ve attended, which are great in their own respects, WeMedia is much more cutting-edge.

Let’s look at some highlights of WeMedia 2007:

And how many conferences use (effectively) video players, tags and widgets in their online presence? Have their own social networking site? WeMedia Community

Continuing with my recently established tradition, I plan to liveblog as many of the events I attend as possible.

Will you be there? Drop me line.

Wasserman: Can journalism live without ads?

Yes, I am few days behind in reading my journalism feeds in Google Reader, but here’s an interesting take from Ed Wasserman on the changing nature of journalism and advertising:

Can journalism live without ads? – Miami Herald

One interesting idea he mentions:

“Maybe the solution isn’t to escape the market, but to empower it. Modern computing offers unparalleled capacities to track and calculate. Imagine a vast menu of news and commentary offered to you ad-free for pennies per item, the charges micro-billed, added up and presented like a utility bill at month’s end. The money that journalism providers got would depend on their audience.”

It’s a reasonable idea and seems more palatable than other such concepts, but the general notion of charging for content online still raises questions in my mind.

Weigh in: What do you think about Wasserman’s ideas and what the future could hold for journalism’s financial support?

“News coverage of civil rights in Miami” panel (Comm Week)

I am taping this event and will be liveblogging. Here’s some background information.

From the Comm Week Web site:

News Coverage of Civil Rights in Miami

Panelists representing print and broadcast media will review the media’s coverage of civil rights issues from efforts to desegregate schools and public facilities to beach “wade-ins,” protests and riots that plagued the community on into the ’80s. How aggressive was the local media in covering the civil rights movement? What was it like for the first black reporters at Miami’s newspapers and television stations?

Panelists are:

C.T. Taylor, first black TV news reporter in Miami

Bea Hines, former reporter, The Miami Herald

Juanita Green, former reporter, The Miami Herald

Andrea Robinson, reporter, The Miami Herald

Garth Reeves, publisher emeritus, Miami Times

Bradford Brown, former president, Miami-Dade NAACP

Moderator, Beverly Counts Williams, former TV news reporter

LIVEBLOG

2:58 P.M.

Garth Reeves‘ father founded the Miami Times, but he didn’t want to go into the newspaper business.

“One day you’ll find out how valuable this newspaper really is,” his father told him.

After he took over the Times, the younger Reeves began to face tough issues regarding coverage, but the paper had to be restrained in what it published.

“You were practicing journalism with your hands tied behind your back,” he said. “Now we have more kickass journalism. … I’m happy now because you’re as a free as bird.”

3:00 P.M.

C.T. Taylor grew up observing what was going in the community, reading the Miami Times and seeing its impact.

“I always wanted to be in journalism. I always wanted to be a radio announcer.”

He sat with his father and listened to games on the radio. Despite the obstacles, his father said you he could do anything he wanted to do.

“The doors to the media were shut and bolted” at white stations, he said. “But I kept my hope and desire.”

So, he went to a black radio station and they hired him to be a cleaner. While he wasn’t on the air, he kept at it and it paid off. One night, an announcer was drunk and didn’t show up for work. Just like that, he was the radio.

Eventually he became known as C.T. “The undisputed soul of the new breed.”

But he wasn’t satisfied–he wanted to be a TV reporter.

His chance, though not in front of the camera, came when a TV station wanted to hire him as a cameraman.

“I managed to get my black hand in the shot. Then I got a black ear in a shot, then I got the back of my head into the shot.”

Channel 4 saw this and wanted to put him on the air.

——-

“It does not matter what your gender or what your race is,” he said. “The main thing is to be factual and truthful.”

You’re recording history, Taylor said, so you have to get it right.

3:11 P.M.

Bea Hines said that, while they may have hired Taylor to cover the riots, people accused her of starting the riots with her coverage while at The Miami Herald.

Her first day at The Herald was an interesting experience.

Hines went into the lunch room and everyone stopped eating. She went up to a Hispanic food worker who was impressed; he couldn’t believe she worked there.

3:20 P.M.

She was assigned to cover the riots in the early 80s because she knew the community. As she walked around, she ran into a man in a pool hall whose business was suffering as a result of the riots.

“My name is Iceberg Slim and I got hookers on the street,” he told her–and there was her first story–and it ran on the front page.

But her overall role was more difficult: “I had to change the way people saw us and the way people depicted Liberty City.”

3:26 P.M.

“They did what they had to do,” Brad Brown said of the journalists on the panel and their contemporaries. “They changed things.”

The NAACP in South Florida used to dissect stories in The Herald and gave TV stations lists of black doctors to have a variety of experts.

“It’s not just the truth, but the broader truth” that’s important.

NOTE: I stopped liveblogging to take some photos toward the end and unfortunately missed some great comments by The Herald’s Andrea Robinson. I will be sure to go back and add them to this post or include them in a video package.

New media workshop

New media reporting workshop

Ricardo Lopez, Miami Herald

Will Payne, Current TV

Brent McDonald, New York Times

We’re going to break into groups now. I’ll be back with an update later.

UPDATE, 12:11 P.M.: I was in Brent McDonald’s group. He showed us his camera (a $6,000 Panasonic HD) and related gear. He also talked about techniques and what to look out in terms of lighting, sound and settings.