Tag: online journalism

New Miami Hurricane site begins public beta Aug. 1

After months of discussing the new Miami Hurricane site on this blog and Twitter, from our consideration of Drupal to our ultimate selection of WordPress, the public beta version will launch this Friday, Aug. 1.

It’s a pretty sweet site and it’s even better than we expected. I’m tempted to drop the link now, but I will show restraint.

Hurricane webmaster Brian Schlansky has been toiling on the technical side since installing on our old file server Ubuntu in mid-April and WordPress in late April. He’s been manipulating PHP, editing CSS, adding/tweaking plug-ins and doing what ever need to be to prepare us for the beta launch.

We started with this theme and have come quite a long way.

One of biggest hurdles, which Brian cleared with surprising ease, was transferring the Hurricane’s College Publisher archives to the MySQL database for WordPress.

He and I have been in touch almost daily, corresponding for countless hours via instant message and Skype. Incoming editor in chief and longtime blogmaster Matt Bunch has contributed throughout the process, as has returning business manager Nick Maslow.

All four of us spoke on Skype Monday night to make sure we’re ready for Friday’s beta launch.

I will write another post when we launch the beta, giving a general overview. Everything in the site is pretty straightforward, which was part of one of our big goals: ease of use.

Stay tuned…

Two more Herald videos: Parkinson’s patients boxing and an unemployed couple

My video adventures continue at The Miami Herald. I really like the most recent one, “Seniors fight Parkinson’s with boxing.”


See this video on MiamiHerald.com

A week earlier, the following video ran with Cindy Goodman‘s business column about how unemployment affects families.


See this video on MiamiHerald.com

I shot some stills along with the video (it’s always good to carry an SLR around). My photo of the Victor and Damaris Guzman not only ran in print on 2B but was also the main display online the morning the story ran (see left).

Looking forward, I shot video and stills for a feature about a local restaurant on Friday. As always, I will post that video here.

Another intern, Ely Portillo, is writing the feature and asked me to join him for the multimedia. We previously worked together on the Parkinson’s story and I think we make a pretty nifty reporting duo.

Ely’s Parkinson story was great. We got a lot of good feedback on both, even being complimented in the morning news meeting after the story and video ran. We weren’t in on the meeting, but about heard it from someone who was.

I’m still writing breaking news, daily news and feature stories for print and online for my internship, but I’m devoting more and more time to multimedia work and a long-term story project.

A final note on video: I’ve been invited to join a new Miami Herald video task force, an offer I enthusiastically embraced. Giddy may not be the right word, but I’m pretty excited.

Second Miami Herald video: Campers cook with the pros

My second video for The Miami Herald went online yesterday with a story I wrote. The piece is about a camp group that learned to cook ice cream and spring rolls from chefs at a Fort Lauderdale restaurant.

Read the story here — the video is below, as well as embedded in the story page.


View the video on The Herald’s site.

I’m still producing a steady mix of news and feature stories for the Broward metro section, plus working on a couple longer term projects for my internship.

One of those projects will likely take a few more weeks. For another project, I went out today with Cindy Goodman (see her blog) to shoot a video to go with her business column on Wednesday. I’ll be sure to post a link to her column and embed the video here.

I also took some photos, so hopefully one will run. That would be my second published photo of the summer (I had a bunch of photos published in 2005 when I freelanced for Broward Neighbors, which is like community news).

Looking to tomorrow: Happy Fourth of July!

First video for The Miami Herald: Volunteers build new playround

My internship at The Miami Herald — now in its fifth week — continues to offer more great journalism experiences. Recently, I jumped at an opportunity to shoot and edit a video with one of my stories, which ran Saturday.

Volunteers return to finish work on Plantation park

Here is the video:


Click here to view the video on The Miami Herald’s site.

I currently have to travel to downtown Miami to edit, which I don’t mind, but Miami traffic is a huge pain. I’ll (hopefully) be able to edit on my own computer in the coming weeks. I’ve been saving for a MacBook Pro and plan to buy soon since I’m driving myself bonkers waiting for a new model.

Check out some other recent articles I’ve written:

As you can see, I’m keeping pretty busy — writing almost every day.

Internship: First day, first story at The Miami Herald

It was a great first day.

Tuesday marked the beginning of my summer internship at The Miami Herald. I began by driving to the main office in downtown Miami for the usual first-day procedures before heading back to Broward, where I’d be working as a local general assignment reporter based out of the Herald’s Pines office.

It didn’t take long before I had a story on my plate. I first wrote a brief for the Web and, a few hours later, I had the full story online:

Rescuers fend off sharks at sea – MiamiHerald.com

For local residents: Look out for the article in print as well.

UPDATE: The story appeared below the fold on 1B Wednesday morning.