Hey kids, gather round and let the Boston Globe tell you how they built an all-in-one website. This is a useful approach because, as you know, we are all approaching the Web in our own way, which means the experience is a little better different for you on your laptop than my on my iPhone or the next person on their pad.
Why is this important? Mobile consumption is about to surpass the tied-to-your-desk variety. The current watchdate is 2015.
The year 2015 is when Back to the Future II takes place, too. Just so you know.
What will people be doing online? A little bit of a lot of things, but mostly social media if current trends hold. A lot of news spreads via social networks at this point, so that’s not entirely a bad thing.
There’s also niche news sites, which are becoming a growing field.
Everyone’s friend Andy Carvin, on how he balances the job and his valuable role live-tweeting the Arab world. Sanity is a word that appears in the headline, so that’s something to keep in mind.
I write these for a blog for work, and just reproduce them here. Like everything else around here, it is an evolving project, evolving right before your eyes, even! They get a bit too long, so I’m breaking them up in both places. Here’s a chunk of them for today, though.
Of all of the great pages to see, this is my favorite. The infographic style is also an example of turning a now decade-old story into something contemporaneous. If you read nothing else, click that link and read the first lines and then the bottom right corner. Here’s the supporting story.
Seems the Guardian overreached in trying to do a realtime feed of Sept. 11. The article talks about the still developing boundaries of Twitter. I think it just as importantly speaks to the “We made this culture” culture of Twitter, which is still evolving, and being driven by the masses, not what a news outlet thinks. Also it gets to the importance of listening in a conversation. Guardian tried something, the audience didn’t like it, told them and the paper, to their credit, listened.
Condensed and reprinted, for the final time I think, from notes I wrote in 2003.
It was my first week working in a new newsroom Little Rock. The top local story of the day was the Little Rock Zoo regaining its accreditation. The anchors there could not pronounce “accreditation” correctly, but that was the big story for the day.
A phone call from our traffic reporter, just landed from his morning flight, started like this “You might want to tell the (people on air) to turn on a TV, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center and they are talking about the zoo.”
I made my way into the studio to announce that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.
As they got up to speed the second plane hit the opposite tower. Bryant Gumbel was interviewing an eye witness. A camera was pointed up into the sky. The eye witness broadcast the second plane crashing. It could no longer be an accident.
My producer later told me that I was so surprised, watching it happen in real time, that I just announced it out loud. He could hear me two rooms away.
I called for New York on one phone, dialing the NYC area codes and pushing random numbers hoping for a connection. Because so much communications equipment was tied into the Towers, seemingly the whole borough was down. I wanted to say “Stick your head outside and tell me what you see.”
In my other ear I was on a phone call with the Pentagon. They aren’t confirming it was a terrorist attack, but they are looking into it, a spokesman says. Moments later I tried to reach my Pentagon source again, but there was no answer. We find out a moment later that a plane has crashed there.
I learned about a year later that the office of the guy I was talking to was located not very far from the impact site at the Pentagon.
We started calling local officials to try and make a local angle on the story, it’s what you do on a huge story far removed from your location. There was a bomb threat called in to a prominent Little Rock building. An announcement was made that planes nationwide are being pulled out of the sky. They all land at the first airport that has an appropriate runway. This is unprecedented in the nation’s history of flight. (And a remarkable feat of logistics, looking back.)
I dashed across town to the airport. I’m to talk to people getting off planes. I get to ask these people “What have you heard? What did they tell you on the plane? How does it feel to know that, but for the grace of God, ‘there go I’?”
As I arrive at the airport, the first building collapsed on itself. ABC’s Peter Jennings, now being simulcast on radio, very somberly says, “Oh my God.”
The airport was packed. I’ve lived here for less than a week and have already been in the airport five times. Now there’s confusion. Tears. Cell phones and scrambling for rental cars and hotels. I talked to dozens of people. They all had stories.
Some were travelling across country, heading to the northeast. One flight was told they were having mechanical difficulties and had to land. It wasn’t until they could called their loved ones that they knew. One man wasn’t sure he could find Arkansas on a map. A Sikh was there alone. In his eyes, he knew. He seemed to already understand what had happened on a level the rest of us would come to grasp in the coming days. He was afraid. I still wonder about him.
We did great work for the next 10 hours, about 15 in total for the day. I was proud to be a part of that product. I finally made it home in time to watch the Congressional leadership and the still-stirring end to their press conference.
How did members of the college media covered the biggest story of their young career? From studentpressblogs.org:
(T)he Associated Collegiate Press is making available a PDF file of its book, “9-11: The College Press Responds.” The book was published in Spring 2002 and includes a wide range of examples of how college newspapers covered the story.
You can see it, terrific, terrible stuff, as a PDF.
I said last night, around 11 p.m. If I had known better I would have written it differently.
I would have written “It will be a long night.” The headline above this would have read “And by long night I meant …”
And the text would have simply said “5:30 a.m.”
Now, to be clear: I don’t mind. I’ve been tired all day, but that’s part of the job and I love the job. After a series of first-issue problems, trial and errors the new staff put to bed a nice first edition this morning. I wouldn’t have minded a few more hours of sleep before saying that, but that’s the price of education by experience some time.
So about two-and-a-half or three hours of sleep this morning. And then today was our high school journalism workshop.
We had two series of sessions this morning and then two more sets in the afternoon. More than 300 students from across the area joined us.
Southern Living’s Kim Cross discussed their commendable series, Lessons from the Storm as a study in the use of multimedia.
CBS-42 reporter and Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley talked about television packages:
The kids had a great day:
I had an afternoon session, where two of the staffers from The Samford Crimson joined me. You can tell by their reaction that I’d just made a profoundly important point:
Anyway. After the workshop was concluded I taught a class on leads. It is perhaps one of my better lectures, which works out well since it is the first thing you read and an important component of a news story. That’s the first thing the journalism professors read when their students have created another issue of the campus paper.
Speaking of the Crimson, this was a big day. Sure, it was the first issue of the year. And it was delayed because of the storms that caused a campus-wide power outage yesterday. But, the paper returned to a tab size this year.
And the issue looks nice, too.
Also, we re-launched a new version of the Crimson’s website, too. There’s a lot to come from this new design and the content management system behind it — we switched from College Publisher, which is somewhat limited, to WordPress.
Here’s a screen capture of the old version:
And here’s the new version:
In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication, a system I can teach to new students in under an hour and a very clean look.
