Multimediality

First of all I'd like to open this blog with a bit of anger at the New York Times website. I don't approve or appreciate the fact that you have to pay to use the site. I was halfway through watching one of their editorial videos when it stopped me, and told me I had reached my limit for the month. Super not-cool NYtimes.  /endrant

But I will get over it, I suppose. This week we are talking about multimedia editorials and news stories. It may help to first talk about the differences between the two. An editorial is an opinion-based piece, whereas news stories strive to keep opinion out.

Now, how does multimedia enhance these two stories? Or does it enhance it? In my opinion a multimedia story is much more interesting. Take this video about "One Day without Shoes" for example. This video is super short-only 20 seconds long, but it gives life to the news story about this event. Plus, it's one thing seeing a picture of barefoot people (Strangely enough, mostly women...hmm) but it's another to watch them walking down the stairs barefoot, I can relate to them better. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a well-written news piece, but I'm a video junkie (Well...my most visited site is Youtube) so I think there's definitely merits to the quick video story.

The Huffington Post takes the story about "One Day without Shoes" and  multimediaficates even further. They have a short video (36 seconds), they have pictures, plus they add in some words. So there are plenty of ways to enjoy the same story. If you don't want to read, watch the video. If you don't like videos, look at the pretty interesting pictures. Or, if you really care...do all three!

Now, I struggled to find a multimedia editorial...well I found one on the NYtimes website but as I mentioned earlier I'm a little ragey at them right now, so I had to look elsewhere. I don't know why it was so hard for me to find one that really spoke to me. I guess it's because it's hard to tell exactly when someone is editorializing, unless the story is specifically under the category of "editorial" and on most sites, those weren't very multimedia-rich. But then I saw the Herald's political cartoons, and I realized that I was looking for the wrong thing. I was looking for an opinionated news story with pictures or a video. But that's not necessary.

Political Cartoons are wonderful. It's a whole story in a single drawing, and it clearly conveys the artist's feeling about the particular subject. It doesn't get easier than that. Plus, some of them are absolutely hilarious :)

Made up words: Multimediality, ragey, mulitmediaficates

Sealideshow

 This audio slide show about Seals in the Bering Sea is a good example of a news slideshow that doubles as a story.
The audio used, the natural water noises of the sea and the barking noises of the seals. The man's narration matched up with the pictures shown in the slideshow.
I enjoyed it so much, that I watched it twice, that seal pup is just adorable.





Made up words: Sealideshow

Logophiliality

I love words. I especially love strange ones like conglomeration (which is what caused this blog post, it has come up at least three times in my homework). I don't know what it is about words that cause me to get so amused when I hear some of them, but the amusement is definitely there.
Not only do I love hearing and laughing at the "conglomeration"s or the "brouhaha"s I like to look up the meanings of words in the dictionary, just to see what the "proper" definition is. I also quite enjoy making up words...I haven't come across a proper title for the love of strange words or the love of making up words, so logophilia will have to do for now as a description for me.

Anyway, I'm really just using this blog post as a clever procrastional tool. So I better end this and do my homework.


Made up words this time: Logophiliality and procrastinational

Twittiquette and other social media courtesies

As the world evolves around us so do the rules of decorum that we must follow to be socially acceptable. Journalists, especially, must be privy to the "new rules" or they risk credibility loss. But with Tweets, Facebook posts, tags and texts how can we possibly keep up?

Thanks to Twitter, journalists can be on scene, get word of a story, and send out a 140-character blurb to the world (Well, those of us on Twitter) or they can send out updates of stories, people on trial for example. And with hashtags, and @-tags, it's very easy for your Tweets to get read. This being the case, care and precision is key.
Like all journalism, knowing the facts is a must. Do not tweet speculation. Tweeting a story is the same as publishing in a newspaper, readers are judging you. It would be terrible to lose credibility over a false tweet.
Even though tweets are short, grammar is necessary. Do not use chatspeak (yes this means spell out "you" and "are"), and punctuate for goodness sake. It's annoying to read an improperly punctuated tweet, especially if you're looking to get news out of it.
Another twit-tip, don't clutter the tweet with twitter jargon. Readers don't want to sort through a mess of hashtags (although they can be useful) or links. Keep it simple, guys.

These simple tips can be applied to almost any source of social medium, although of course, you don't have to worry about character count and hashtags in anything other than twitter, but you still need to keep your posts short and interesting. People have short attention spans and we have to accommodate that.


My made up words for this post: Twittiquette (Chatspeak and hashtags are made up words too, but not mine.)

Blogtastic!

Hi, I'm Ashley, and I like to make up words like blogtastic and journalistically.