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.
Here is a list of links to the other student blogs from my CNJ 442 Online Journalism class:
dontcountyourchickensbef
establishthis.blogspot
Update, Jan. 31 at 10:08 P.M.: Per a suggestion by Anna Haynes in a comment, here is a Google Reader public page for the class.
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?
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.