Online Journalism Workshops - Blogging, Photos for the Web and Audio

Three workshops, aimed at graduating students, to get you up to speed on "online journalism." These are FREE!

The official blurb:

Grady College presents a series of workshops to sharpen your online skills. Three free sessions will be taught by Mark Johnson, Grady lecturer in journalism. Space is limited; register for any or all sessions.

Register with Sophie Barnes in the Journalism Building, Room 233. Or email your name, major, expected grad date and desired sessions to sophieb@uga.edu.

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ONLINE WORKSHOPS SCHEDULE

Session I: Blogging for Beginners
Saturday, March 31
9:30-11:30 a.m. or 12:30-2:30 p.m.

Online writing and linking, brevity, sources, headlines, HTML tags, tagging, content management systems. An active Gmail account is required to attend this session.

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Session II: Photos for the Web
Saturday, April 7
9:30-11:30 a.m.

Photo content, composition, quality, sourcing, editing in Photoshop, photo blogs.

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Session III: Audio for "Print" Journalists
Saturday, April 21
9:30-11:30 a.m.

Recording in the field, downloading, editing, layering.

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Please note: If you're registered, you need to be at the first floor entrance nearest the Tate Student Center building 15 minutes prior to the session starting. Grady College is locked up tight on the weekends, we'll let you in.

Harper's, Peter Turnley invasion of privacy suit dismissed

Photojournalist Peter Turnley, on assignment photographing the funeral of the first Oklahoma National Guard soldier to die in combat since the Korean War, was sued by the soldier's family for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The US Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision in the case when it rejected all of the family's claims.

Krystal on Campus

Krystal (a southern burger chain) came to Athens this week to shoot students for possible use in their TV and print ads. The Red & Black put together a short audio slide show and posted it this morning. (Scroll down, it's at the end of the story.)

Oddly, there was an Arby's flier loaded with coupons stuck in the printed version of the paper this morning.

Broadcast Journalism/Video workshop at UGA - This Saturday!

The Telecomm department here at Grady College is running a day-long workshop called the Broadcast News Bluejeans Workshop this Saturday, March 31. Segments on reporting, photojournalism, digital news gathering and video tape editing will be repeated throughout the day.

Video is becoming increasingly important in the "print" world, this is a great chance to get your feet wet. (Well, for those not coming to our blogging workshop on Saturday.)

Why money is good

Okay, so that's kind of a vague headline, but John Harrington - one of the best proponents of sensible business practices for photographers - has a very good post about why it's important to charge reasonable rates (not cheap rates) to clients. Too many times we low-ball clients in hopes of getting a job and end up hurting ourselves, both short-term and long-term.

Bill what it costs plus a profit.

New Eyetrack Study from the Poynter Institute

Eyetrack III is out - and it has some surprises. Readers are going deeper with online stories than print, something that is surprising. Go check it out, though the video isn't working as of noon on Wednesday ... grrr ...

James Nachtwey in the NY Times

The New York Times has a review of a new James Nachtwey show, hosted at two locations in NYC - one of which is the United Nations building.

UGA Student Work

The University of Georgia's student news paper, the Red & Black, has posted two new multimedia slideshows.

First up is a look at African Night 2007 through a dance program. B. Wuagneux, who shot and edited the piece, is in her second photojournalism class here. (There was an audio-assist by Tamara Best credited, too.)

Next up is a look at Kate Seader's half-marathon run on Sunday. Seader has type II neurofibromatosis that took her hearing by the time she was 20. The photos and audio were done by Juanita Cousins, who is in, ahem, her first photojournalism class here.

Sad news - Life magazine to fold. Again.

Time, Inc., has decided to shut down the weekly newspaper supplement, marking the third time Life magazine has folded. It ran as a stand alone weekly magazine from 1936-1972, then as a monthly publication from 1978-2000. The current iteration, begun in 2004, will end with the April 20 edition.

Chris Hondros talks about his award winning photo

Getty Images' Chris Hondros has done nine trips to Iraq since the way started and the most memorable image came in January 2005 when troops shot into a civilian car. In an interview with National Public Radio's Renee Montagne, he talks about the sequence of events and the iconic photo of a child crying out at the feet of a US soldier.

An expert interviewer and a stunning set of photos - another good example of how multimedia can work.

Day 1 - UGA Photojournalism Weekend Workshop

One day down at the 2007 UGA Photojournalism Weekend Workshop. Students - and editors - finished up with a slide show of the days best work at about 9:45 p.m. Images available for your perusal over on Flickr. More to follow after Day 2.

Reuters has a photo blog, and there's a Very Cool Story on it

Reuters has set up a blog for it's photojournalists to talk about their work. One of the very cool stories now posted is about a 68-year-old woman in Australia who runs, by herself, a, ahem, 6,000 acre farm ... the photos are very nicely done - absolutely stunning light - and the story behind them (shot for International Women's Day) is pretty cool, too.

UGA Photojournalism Weekend Workshop

This weekend marks the second annual UGA Photojournalism Weekend Workshop - three days of shooting, editing and learning. All of our Documentary Photography students, a group of industrious Introduction to Photojournalism students and lots of alumni are headed out to Walton County to shoot the town. Six professionals are joining us, as well, to help critique the students' work.

The Monroe Art Guild has offered up their building for the weekend, so we'll be hunkered down there looking at photos. Lots of photos. Tens of thousands of photos.

In 2006, we headed out to Morgan County, and HQ'd at the Madison-Morgan County Chamber of Commerce. There's still a collection of photos from last year available on Grady College's web site, worth poking through. We'll have some updates and photos over the next few days.

(We also did a motorsports workshop last fall, spending the day at Road Atlanta for the Petit Le Mans sports car race.)

Here in Athens ...

Two events coming up that you should attend, one sponsored by the university and one by Grady College.

On Wednesday, March 28, at 4:00 p.m., Terence Monmaney, Executive Editor of Smithsonian Magazine will be on the University of Georgia campus. He'll be speaking as part of the Mingledorf-Lorimer Lecture in Print Media series in the Student Learning Center, room 171.

And, for you photo people, this is the must attend event of the semester: On Monday, April 9, Grady College in conjunction with the Georgia Center is bringing David Burnett to campus. His show, "Measures in Time," will be on display at the Georgia Center starting April 3 and running through the end of the month. Burnett, a founder of Contact Press Images, has been one of the leading photojournalists working internationally over the last four decades. He has worked for Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic. (In fact, his latest story on Orlando is in the current issue of NG.)

Don't Miss This.

New York Times Select - FOR FREE!

The New York Times has decided to allow academics and students free access to Times Select. This allows you to read all of the columns and special material, as well as search the archives online. FOR FREE.

(Thanks to everyone who shared this with me. You know who you are.)

Southern Short Course in News Photography - April 13-15

The 2007 edition of the Southern Short Course in News Photography is skedded for April 13-15 in Chattannooga, Tenn. There are a lot of sessions on multimedia storytelling this year, along with sessions on portfolio building and critiques, sports photography, career advancement and building respect. And on top of that, the speakers will include Lisa Krantz, Region 8 Photographer of the Year (and a BRILLIANT visionary and storyteller) and Chris Ranier from National Geographic.

Short courses like this are great opportunities to network, get fired up, show your work (and have it shredded - which is a GOOD thing) and learn a lot in a short time span. If you are at all serious abour a career in photojournalism, you must go.

Here's YOUR CHANCE to contribute to this blog!

So, Time magazine decided to illustrate their most recent story about "How the Right Went Wrong" with a cover photo of Ronald Reagan - with an oversized tear running down his cheek. There's been a bit of buzz on the `net about whether this is ethical or not and the illustrator who did the work was interviewed about it at PopPhoto.com.

So, what do you think? How far can a "news" magazine go with a cover illustration?

Wrestling - with GREAT natural sounds

The Cherry Hill (N.J.) Courier-Post's Marcin Szczepanski has put together a four-part (three audio slide shows, one video) look at Camden Catholic High School's wrestling team. The audio in the second slide show ("Sweat and Sacrifice") is really well done.

Now ... when you go to the individual slide shows (done in SoundSlides), they are not embedded in the sites normal templates. It is Very Good that newspapers are doing these things, but in order to monetize it, they need to keep these presentations within the advertising laced template, don't you think?

Another recorder option

Mindy McAdams posted my suggestions on cheap audio equipment over on her blog (which you SHOULD BE READING), but another new recorder is out there you may be interested in. Word is the Roanoke, Va., newspaper has been using the Samson H4 Handy Recorder with some success. Has XLR jacks for microphones, which is a big plus, and it stores info to SD memory cards.

Reuters on Photoshop Usage

After the events last year with altered images moving on the Reuters wire, David Schlesinger, Editor in Chief for Reuters, posted the company's rules for using Photoshop. Well worth a read as it offers up a good set of guidelines for what is and what is not acceptable. Also gives some insight into how Reuters wants digital images handled from a workflow perspective.

Crisis in Darfur Expands - WashingtonPost.com video

Backpack journalist Travis Fox has posted a new series of videos and panoramic images from Darfur. Well worth spending some time with. I like the interface and the image quality is very high. Al Tompkins at the Poynter Institute has posted a brief interview about how the stories were shot, as well.

Pictures of the Year International winners

Judging has wrapped up on the 64th annual POYi competition and there are links to winners on their site. You have to poke around a bit to find the multimedia winners, but if you go to Complete Winners List, then scroll down to category 39 you'll see the links.

(POYi is one of the two big photojournalism competitions in the U.S. The other is the National Press Photographers Associations' Best of Photojournalism. Judging for the print side of BOP starts March 18.)

NPPA Multimedia Contest

The National Press Photographers Association began a monthly multimedia competition last fall, run in the same manner as the newspaper clip contests. They are posting the winners on the web each month, a good place to go look at what the state of the art is. (Links along the left rail.)

Deal on National Geographic membership

National Geographic is running a membership/subscription special - $15 for a year of the yellow-boxed magazine. That's, what, three cups of coffee? (I don't know, I still don't drink coffee. Working on that.) The magazine is still one of the preeminent photojournalism publications, and you get all kinds of cool maps, too.

Why haven't you clicked over there yet?

Inside ... well, not baseball

I spent the last couple of days in February at a Poynter Institute seminar on Convergence for College Educators. So, this is really for them - a small collection of photos from the seminar and around the area. Nothing fancy, as this photojournalist wrote and thought more than he shot.

And, no, my brain hasn't slowed down yet. More info will leak out about what we learned over the next few weeks.

RSS - Three letters that are (sort of) changing everything

There is a lot of information out there and still just 24 hours in a day, so how do you keep track of it all? One of the more productive features of the Internet is a new-ish technology called RSS.

RSS stands for “really simple syndication” (and a few other things, but let’s keep this simple). It allows you to subscribe to a web site and have that web site tell you when it’s been updated. So, instead of having to check all of the sites you like every day, you can have them notify you of updates.

Almost every blog and news site now has some sort of RSS feed for it. If you’re using Safari or Firefox as your web browser, you may see a little RSS icon in the URL window - clicking on that will set up your subscription. If you don’t see that, look around the page and you’ll probably see a button for it.

Once you’ve found a site you want to subscribe to, you need a way to keep track of it. Safari and Firefox each have built-in RSS readers. In Safari, for instance, if you click on an RSS link, it’ll add it to your Bookmarks. Anytime there’s an update to the feed, you’ll see a number appear in paranthesis next to the name of the bookmark - that number tells you how many unread items there are. (As a tip, create a folder for RSS feeds, then put that in the Bookmark Bar - the space between the URL window and the site content window. With a quick look, you can see if you have unread items.)

Firefox works in a similar manner. The latest version of Internet Explorer (finally) supports RSS, as well.

The next option is to find a dedicated RSS reader program, something that works outside of your browser. As a Mac guy, I used NetNewsWire Lite for the last year or so and was pretty happy with it. It was simple, has a clean interface, and allows me to easily group different categories of RSS feeds together. For instance, in a folder named “News” were the mainstream news sites I checked often - The New York Times, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, the Boston Globe, etc. In another folder named “Photo - Tech” were feeds from sites that had good technology news related to photography.

You can leave everything in one lump, but breaking it down into folders worked better for me. And there are lots of RSS readers out there, for Mac and Windows, so you may play with one and decide it’s not quite right and try another. Some are free (one of my favorite parts about NetNewsWire Lite), others may have a small fee associated with them.

Using your browser or a dedicated reader is fine if you’re always on one computer. But I wander around - I have two machines at home (although, admittedly, I only really use one), another in my office and then I spend a decent chunk of time in my photojournalism lab. I could plug the RSS feeds in to all of those machines, but then adding one feed means going to four or more machines. There has to be a better way.

At a recent conference at the Poynter Institute, Andrew DeVigal of the New York Times told me about NetVibes.com - one of several online RSS readers. Think about this - you aggregate all of your feeds into a web page and you can check your feeds from anywhere you have Internet access.

NetVibes.com isn’t the only online reader, of course - Bloglines.com has been around for a while and is very popular and Google has their own reader, too. Andrew seemed like a pretty smart guy, so I went with his recommendation and have been very happy.

After creating an account (so only you can see your stuff), NetVibes.com allows you to start adding feeds and modules. I have a Gmail account, and I can set NetVibes to show me the subject headings of new emails as they come in. Clicking on the headlines lets me read them there on the page. You can do the same with Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and some other email programs, too.

You can add weather and stock info, just about anything you want. But the cool part about NetVibes.com, for me, is the ability to set up tabs for different categories. Just like I broke up my feeds in NetNewsWire Lite by category, NetVibes.com lets me do the same thing. So, across the top of the page when I load it are buttons for Home (where I have my Gmail and weather sections), Photojournalism, Photo - Tech, News, etc. Into each of these areas I drop relevant feeds that I want to track. And, as with the browser-based readers, I get a number next to each tab that tells me how many unread feeds there are.

The interface is pretty slick, too. Mine is set up with three columns into which I can move the different feed “blocks” around. The more important ones (to me) I move to the top and the lesser ones I slide down the page. And all of that can be done on the fly.

Start playing - there’s a lot of info out there, and RSS feeds are a quick way to keep track of it all.

Geek alert - Sigma DP-1 announced

There has been some clamoring for a fixed lens, large sensor digital camera and Sigma has just formally announced their DP-1 camera. There is no indication of a price on this, but if it's priced right, it could be a great camera for street photography or just for knocking around town with.

Adobe, Canon working to detect pixel fraud

Wired.com has a short piece about how Adobe is working on software to authenticate images - essentially, to prove if they've been manipulated or not. Given some of the instances over the last few years, this may not be a bad idea, though the article does mention the possibility of "false positives."

No Freedom Fries in France

Remember when the French got picked on a few years ago and everyone stopped ordering "french fries" and went to "freedom fries?" Turns out there really may be a difference. The French government has banned citizens from filming acts of violence. There is an exemption for "professional journalists," but I wonder how they plan to define a professional. (If the French already have a way of labeling, then ... well ... then that's another entry.)

This is an attempt at stopping something called "happy slapping" - when gangs assault or provoke violence solely for the purpose of taping and displaying it. But what happens when there's an assault outside your window and you try to record it to assist the police? What happens to all of the bank security cameras - technically, they're not journalists so if they record a robbery, would that be in violation?

And while I guess I could still be labeled as a "professional journalist" here in America (not that we label, anyway), what happens if I'm on vacation in France and shoot something? Am I going to get arrested?

Sun-Sentinel package on AIDS Orhpans

Broken down into several parts, the Sun-Sentinel has a package on orphans with AIDS. The multimedia packages are pretty good, though the audio levels are inconsistent and I found myself adjusting the volume several times. The longest piece is narrated by the photographer, Joe Amon, who documented the life of an 18-year-old girl with AIDS. (Last segment, "A Florida Story.")

Thanks to the folks at MultimediaShooter.com for posting a link.

NT Times piece on Henry Wessel

The Times has an interesting review of a new show at the Museum of Modern Art on Henry Wessel, who has spent his time making some quirky photos of America (and Americana). Not as vicious as Robert Frank's work, but cutting none-the-less.

Brumby's Keeper, F.L.Y. Jazz Dance Class

Katie Monroe, a staffer up the hill at The Red & Black, UGA's independent student newspaper, has put together an audio slide show about Thelma Latimer, a 41-year veteran of the university's womens dormitory. At just under two minutes in length, it features a little narration and Latimer talking about her time in Brumby Hall.

Also now online, Daniela Lee's package on the F.L.Y. Jazz Dance class on campus.

Mardi Gras in Athens

Well, while I was thinking about learning more about multimedia shows, some of the students were off doing it - assembling and posting a short feature on a Mardi Gras celebration.

The folks up the hill at The Red & Black have been posting to their own multimedia and photo blog since the fall, though, to be honest, it never seems to be promoted as well as it could be.

Photo business

This will join the permanent links over in that column, but you really need to pay attention to John Harrington's Photo Business blog. Harrington has been an out-spoken supporter of photographers business acumen, speaking at every conference that will have him.

He speaks eloquently about why our images have value and how to collect on that value. Pay attention - he'll help keep you solvent if you go the freelance route.

Apple does washingtonpost.com ad

Okay, not really a full ad, but it's a promotional piece that shows washingtonpost.com staffers using a lot of Apple gear. There are some ethical questions here ... should a news organization be doing hardware ads? Or any sort of PR?

Voices of Rochester

The photojournalism guy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Doug Rea, showed some of the work his students had done for a series called the Voices of Rochester at a recent Poynter Institute seminar. Simple audio slide shows of the people of Rochester (and the Flash shell is pretty slick, something a student put together and showed him how to update).

Sports, low angle style

Over on Sportsshooter.com, there's a good article on how Sports Illustrated's Peter Read Miller has been making dramatic football photos from a low angle. While it's geared towards football, there's a good lesson in there about trying different angles to affect the mood of your images.