How to be a rock star at your next conference

July 27th, 2010

Conference season is already underway and this summer thousands of people will gather in dimly lit rooms to discuss any number of topics. Make sure you’re the star of the show and a power networker by following the tips below:

Tweet early and often

Before the conference gets underway, find out the official hashtag or if there isn’t one, make up your own and encourage others to follow suit. Hashtags give Twitter users a way to follow what’s going on in the sessions without actually being there or to share behind the scenes commentary or information on seminars in progress. You can use hashtags to share insight, tweetable quotes, or observations on sessions you attend. If you do, you will more than likely pick up new Twitter followers interested in what you have to say.

However, you should be careful not to overdo it. Remember, not all of your followers will be in attendance or even care about the conference, so if you overshare you may encourage some to reach for the unfollow button. Tweet in moderation and if you know in advance that you will overshare, consider creating a temporary Twitter account just for the conference.

Presenters: In addition to making your presentation available online, you should also conclude your session by providing your Twitter username (you do have one don’t you?). Once the presentation is over, send out a tweet with the link to the presentation and include the hashtag for the conference.

‘Bump’ it!

Have you ‘Bump’ed lately? Bump is a free iPhone app that allows users to share contact information, including email, Twitter, and LinkedIn info, just by bumping iPhones. Not everyone will have an iPhone, but considering many people do it is an easy way to network and share your information with others. Which brings us to our next point…

Bring business cards

Despite all the advances in technology, it is still important to have a business card. A conference attendee without a business card is like a rower without a paddle…going nowhere fast. Business cards are still the de facto way of exchanging information so you should be prepared. Your business card doesn’t even have to be a boring white rectangle. Check out this previous post for inventive and unique business cards.

Be ‘smart’ about it

If you work in a visual medium such as photography or design, you can instantly show your work to potential employers, clients, or colleagues by having it loaded on your smartphone, netbook, or mobile device. If you are a photographer or graphic designer, you can have a gallery available on your mobile to show others your work. If you are a web designer, you can have live examples on hand to share with others. If you work in video or radio you can show off some of your latest projects right on your handheld device. This is, of course, much better than simply giving someone a web address and hoping they check out your work later.

If you are a print journalist or work in another non-visual medium, all hope is not lost. When you attend a conference, have thumb drives containing your work on hand that you can distribute to selected attendees. Thumb drives are now almost as cheap as floppy disks (remember those?) and can be bought in bulk from your local office supply store. If you want to get really snazzy, you can get your logo imprinted right on the drive.

Drink up

Some of the most interesting conversations don’t happen at the workshops themselves, but at post-conference dinners and happy hours. While you don’t have to indulge in alcohol, you should stick around for the informal events to chat with your fellow conference goers. You never who you might meet!

Also on 10,000 Words:

• Why you should ditch your company business card
• How to turn online social networking into real-life relationships
• How to make the most of your journalism internship

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Should journalists learn programming skills?: A Flowchart

July 20th, 2010

With the current revolution in technology and journalism, many journalism pundits are blindly advocating non-technical journalists learn programming and web development skills. Programming, as opposed to coding HTML or CSS, takes a considerable time commitment to learn and may or may not come natural to the average journalist.

Use the flowchart below to determine whether or not learning programming/web development is the right choice for you.

(Click for larger version; feel free to share or distribute)

Also on 10,000 Words:

• Why journalists should learn to code (and why some shouldn’t bother)
• Essential multimedia tutorials and resources for do-it-yourself training
• Journalists: Change starts with you

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No resources? No problem: How a local Russian paper took on the New York Times

July 6th, 2010

A large number of the ambitious or innovative digital journalism stories featured on 10,000 Words are produced by larger newsrooms with more resources to devote to more elaborate projects. One in 8 Million, a multimedia look at some of New York City’s interesting residents, is one such project.

As part of a training workshop I recently conducted in the Russian city of Berdsk (view photos from the sessions here), I showcased interesting slideshows and online journalism, including the New York Times feature.

The staff of the local paper Курьер.Среда (Kurer-Sreda) were immediately intrigued by the project and set out to replicate it in what they called “Один из 97000″ or “One of the 97,000,” a nod to the Berdsk’s 97,000 residents. The number of staff was less than you can count on two hands, yet within hours they began reporting and capturing photos and audio, despite a considerably fewer resources than a major news organization like the Times.

Also unlike the New York Times, there are no Flash developers in the newsroom so the staff took a low-tech approach. They built photo slideshows with the free program Windows Movie Maker, uploaded them to YouTube and posted to the site. They also created photo stories accompanied by text. The slideshow below centers around an employee of a local tanning salon and her advice on getting a good tan.

Instead of featuring all of the individual photo stories in one package, the paper’s staff decided to feature one or two a day on the front page of the site so as not to overwhelm readers. The result is a compelling series of multimedia stories that offer insight into the lives of the citizens of Berdsk. Best of all, the reporters had a fun time putting them together. All of the stories are in Russian and even if you don’t speak the language I’d encourage you to check them out here, here and here.

The lesson here is to be inspired by some of the large-scale projects produced by major news organizations but don’t be so intimidated that you don’t attempt to create them for your audience. Also, don’t just copy what other newsrooms are doing — make a project your own and create interesting multimedia stories that will appeal to your readers or viewers.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• 10 Inspirational New York Times multimedia and interactive features
• 5 Creative uses of Flash and interactive storytelling
• 8 Ways to save money on your next multimedia project

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The best advice I ever received…

June 30th, 2010

Every journalist has at one time received advice from a mentor or colleague that changed their life or how they viewed their career or work. You were asked via Twitter for the best advice you ever received. Here’s what you shared:

Best advice was actually criticism meted out by my old news reporting tutor at Cardiff Journalism School (UK) back in the 80s, on reading our pretentious efforts: “Boring Boring Boring!”

So best advice: don’t be boring.

- Jules Marshall

“Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why are your only honest friends.”

- submitted by Paul Wiggins

“Omit needless words.” – Strunk & White

“Everyone has a story to tell.” – late Elden R. Groves, Editor Emeritus, Farm and Dairy

- submitted by Susan Crowell

“Shake as many hands as possible. You never know who could be useful or helpful down the line.”

- submitted by Kase Wickman

“Never think you’re too good for PR”.

- submitted by Elizabeth Pears

The best advice I ever received is if you’re having trouble starting an assignment, just “get the paper dirty.” Once you start writing, the ideas will start to flow.

- Lauren Irwin

“Know your audience.”

These three words are key to communication and the best journalism is crap without communication. This isn’t merely what do audiences want to know (that part alone leads to gossip/entertainment news overload) but what they need to know and what you need to do to engage them to make message clear.

- Susan Kille

“Marry someone who understands journalism.”

- submitted by Jake Batsell, who was given the sage advice by veteran journalist Walter Cronkite when Jake was an undergrad at Arizona State. Jake will soon celebrate his seventh anniversary with Tracy Everbach, a fellow journalism professor and former reporter.

And here’s a few more from the web:

“Everything comes down to being able to write well. Before you write well, forget Facebook, Twitter, etc. And you learn to write well by reading lots of good stuff and write a lot yourself. And find a good editor!”

- Ben Hammersley, editor, Wired Magazine

“If you think the story is worth doing, fight for it.”

- Lester Graham, Great Lakes Radio Consortium

“Evolve.”

- Dave Lee

So what’s the best I received? Not advice really, but a warning from my former editor Kim Jace: “Those pants are too hip-hop for the newsroom.” The remark was made about some pants I wore that had patches on them and were indeed hip-hoppy, but the lesson I gleaned is that people trust those who look trustworthy, that I shouldn’t dress for the job I had (an internship at the time), but the job I wanted, and that I could be more than I was at the time.

You can find more advice for journalists at the Online Journalism Blog and the Journerdism post 32 of the best real world career and life tips for new journalism graduates entering the newspaper industry.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• How Twitter saved my career… and my life
• 25 Things I’ve Learned About Journalism
• 10 Things I wish they’d told me in J-School

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What is a treemap? 5 examples and how you can create one

June 22nd, 2010

Treemaps are a growing trend in online data visualization and you’ve likely spotted one or two around the web. But what are they?

Treemaps, sometimes written as “tree maps,” display hierarchical information in a series of clustered rectangles, which together represent a whole. The size of each box represents a quantity. Treemaps also can use color to represent any number of values, but it is often used to categorize the various boxes within the treemap.

Interactive and news designers are taking advantage of treemaps to represent a variety of information as in the examples below.

1. BBC News: SuperPower: Visualising the internet

To start you off, here is a simple treemap created by BBC News to visualize what types of web sites are most popular on the web. The “Search/Portal” block takes up the largest space because those sites are most popular. You can also hover over each block to see which sites within the categories are popular. For example, eBay and Amazon are the largest blocks in the larger “Retail” block because they are two of the most popular retail sites on the web.

2. The New York Times: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal

To visualize something as large and complex as the budget of the United States of America, the Times turned to a color-coded and easy-to-navigate treemap. The treemap is divided into sections, including national defense and social security, and the budgets within those divisions are represented by smaller blocks. You can hover over the smaller blocks to see the monetary amounts and read further descriptions. The colors of each block represent how much each allotment has changed since last year — red represents a decrease and green represents an increase.

3. CNN: South Africa 2010: Twitter Buzz

One of the most common ways designers are using treemaps is to track the social media response to a particular event. CNN uses a treemap to visualize the discussion of the World Cup among Twitter users. Instead of a single color, the blocks in the CNN treemap are represented by the flag of the country that is being discussed. In the example below, Argentina occupies the largest, leftmost block because it was, at the time, the most discussed World Cup team.

NBC created a similar “Tweet Tracker” to visualize the discussion around the 2010 Winter Olympics. MTV and Stamen Design used interactive treemaps to visualize the MTV Movie Awards and Video Music Awards (VMAs).

4. Nike: Post-Season Twitter Playoffs

Nike’s Twitter treemap, also created by visualization powerhouse Stamen Design, uses proportionate blocks to represent which NBA teams are most discussed on the social network. The Los Angeles Lakers, 2010 NBA champs, are the most discussed team and therefore occupy the largest block.

5. Newsmap

Finally, an oldie but goodie — you can’t talk about treemaps with mentioning the Newsmap, an interactive treemap that categorizes the news aggregated by Google News. The various colors represent different sections such as business or politics. The older a news story is, the darker the box becomes. The size of the boxes represents how many similar stories also appear in Google News.

You can produce a tree map a number of ways, including using Illustrator or Photoshop to draw proportionate rectangles or by using the visualization tool Many Eyes. You can also use advanced tools like Google’s Visualization API.

In order for treemaps to be easily understood by the viewer, they must be clearly labeled and, for the most part, uncluttered. A treemap can contain any number of boxes, but space restrictions limit how many boxes can be included without it looking like a big mess.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• Be inspired! 12 ways to find the best in data visualization
• 8 Ways of visualizing the news
• 5 Ways to find, mix and mash your data
• 7 Amazing Twitter visualizations

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The 5 most underrated fictional journalists

June 18th, 2010

If you ask a journalist to list their favorite fictional reporters from movies or television, you’ll probably hear the names Clark Kent, Lois Lane, or even Ron Burgundy. This post is a tribute to the great, unsung heroes of journalism, those fictional journalists that even real deal reporters should take notes from:

Angela Vidal and Scott Percival, Quarantine

What happens when you’re out shooting a puff piece and a zombie attack breaks out? You kick some zombie ass that’s what. Reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and cameraman Scott Percival (Steve Harris) keep the camera rolling, even as everyone around them turns into flesh-eating monsters. At one point, Scott uses the presumably very expensive camera as a weapon, knocking out zombies with the blunt end of the camera. He then wipes the blood off the lens and keeps rolling. Now that’s bad ass.

Polly Perkins, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Before the age of digital cameras and instant previewing, journalists were saddled with cameras that required the film to be developed before it could be viewed. Bad news for reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) who witnesses amazing adventures and spectacles along with ace pilot Joe Sullivan (Jude Law). The problem is she only has a few clicks left on her one and only camera. It is up to Polly to use her news judgment to decide which of the fantastic things she witnesses are worth capturing on film. She does a great job of it, saving her last few photos to document the awesome things around her. In the end, she saves her last image to photograph her true love Joe…a stirring idea until she realizes she left the lens cap on.

Colleen Lipman, Bring it on Again

Anyone who has ever worked at a college newspaper or broadcast outlet knows how challenging it can be to produce news with a short staff or limited resources. Student reporter Colleen Lipman (Katherine Bailess) makes the most of the situation, doing energetic standups from around the California State College campus and tossing live to…herself.

Edward Cunningham, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao

Small-town newspaperman Edward Cunningham (John Ericson) is a grizzled reporter who is singularly focused and will stop at nothing to expose the corruption of the town’s wealthy land-grabber Clinton Stark (Arthur O’Connell). That is until Dr. Lao (Tony Randall) and his crazy bananas circus comes to town. Edward must then pursue the two biggest stories ever to hit the town at the same time. He asks question, refuses to back down, and makes lots of stern, frowny-faces along the way.

Amber Atkins, Drop Dead Gorgeous

Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), an aspiring journalist and contestant in the fictional Sarah Rose American Teen Princess Pageant, gets her shot when a television reporter is hit by a stray bullet during a live broadcast. She calmly picks up the microphone and begins recounting the events in true TV reporter style. For her grace under pressure, Amber is given a job as an evening news anchor at a local television station. Pretty impressive and one heck of a way to land a job.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• Great (or greatly amusing) fictional journalists
• DVD design: Great menus are great inspiration (Part I)
• How to use a video trailer to share your work with the world

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NPR CEO Vivian Schiller on collaboration, innovation, and more

June 14th, 2010

At last week’s IRE conference, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller gave a stirring keynote speech to the more than 800 journalists in attendance about how their jobs and the industry had shifted. In her remarks, she commended investigative journalists and new non-profit models, and touted the need for innovation. Highlights from the speech are below and you can read the full speech here.

“Partnership does not come easily to most news operations. When I got to NPR I heard ‘we don’t partner well.’ It was said with a little bit of apology…and a healthy dose of pride. And that has certainly been the case at most news organizations. But to increase our impact we at NPR have had to learn to get over ourselves, and to approach collaborations in a new way.”

“While I’m as despondent as you are at this newsroom carnage, I’m feeling very hopeful and even excited about what the diaspora of immensely talented journalists has given rise to… dozens (soon to be hundreds!) of new news orgs. Many of them are turning to a new way, the nonprofit way and in doing so are inventing something completely different — a hybrid of past and future, of old media and new.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that journalism pundit Alan Mutter jokingly lamented the short-sightedness of the newspapers who fired so many reporters ‘turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.’

Well here we are… alive and very well, thank you.”

“We need to harness the power digital technology to create open platforms for our work. We need to create a true NETWORK. Not in the TV network way — there is no single entity that pulls the strings, but rather we need to come together as a network of reporters, data miners, and analysts via open platform technology where all types of media can be searched, combined, sorted. And made accessible to publishers, educators and especially motivated software developers who will invent ways to elevate our work beyond our wildest imagination.”

“We must employ digital media in both gathering and distributing the news. And we must adhere to a seriousness of purpose — we’re aiming high and not just for high ratings.”

Read the full speech here

Also on 10,000 Words:

• Wise words from a wise man: Albert Einstein
• How Alfred Hitchcock can make you a better storyteller

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8 Totally awesome time-lapse videos

June 10th, 2010

Time-lapse video is possibly one of the most underused technologies in digital journalism. Considering its many different uses and how relatively easy they are to create, it’s a shame more videographers and online media aren’t using them. Time-lapse videos have been covered before on this blog, but if you need more reasons to create one, check out the examples below:

1. Eyjafjallajökull

2. NASA: Time Lapse Video of BP’s Gulf Oil Disaster

3. Time-Lapse: A Day at a Walmart Store

4. Baseball game, fireworks time-lapse

More baseball-themed time lapse videos at Ewen Media

5. Tokyo time lapse

6. Southwest: Building a plane from start to finish

7. Go For Launch! Space Shuttle Movie

8. Le tour du monde en 80 secondes (Around the world in 80 seconds)

There are many different ways to create time-lapse videos. Start with Photojojo’s Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography or check out how to make a time-lapse with your DSLR. You can also stitch photos together to create one or check out iTimeLapse to create time-lapse videos with your iPhone.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• 12 Creative uses of time-lapse photography (and 4 ways to create it)
• Composite photography: A new twist to an old medium
• Creative and innovative uses of online video

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Why you should ditch your company business card

June 8th, 2010

Most company-issued business cards are bleak, soulless things that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd if they had legs and a 5-foot ladder. If the new era of journalism is all about branding and self-promotion, then you’ll need a business card that won’t get lost in the pack. Considering the inexpensive cost of getting business cards printed, there are very few reasons you shouldn’t create something a little more snazzy.

You have two options when creating a business card: either create one that incorporates your company logo or insignia (hi-res versions of which you can grab from a staff web producer) or create one that just has your name, occupation and personal info. This way you can have both your company business card and something more personal/informal you can also hand out to potential connections.

If you don’t have the design chops to create your own business card, you can either use an interesting template or ask a designer friend to help you out (though you should pay them something fair…no designer wants to work for free). If you need inspiration, you can check out one of the many posts on the web that showcase unique or interesting business cards, including this one, this one, and this one. You can also check out my business card here.

Once you have your design, you can use an online retailer like VistaPrint (which I personally recommend) or support local businesses and visit your local print shop. Just to give you some ideas, here are business cards from 10,000 Words readers:

Some say that paper business cards are dead, but this is far from true. Most professionals are expected to have a business card on hand to distribute, even if it only lists your online/social media presence. If you insist on ditching the cards and saving a tree, check out the app Bump for iPhone and Android which allows you to share your contact info with another person by simply bumping your phones together.

Also on 10,000 Words:

• 15 Journalists’ outstanding personal portfolios
• Pump up your portfolio via mobile or video
• 20 Photojournalists’ fantastic portfolios

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10,000 Words, 10,000 Followers. Time to celebrate!

June 4th, 2010

As a thank you to everyone for following this blog and to commemorate an upcoming 10,000 followers on Twitter, 10,000 Words is going to give away lots of goodies via Twitter!

The big giveaway will happen all day Tuesday, June 8th, provided the 10,000 Words Twitter feed has reached the appropriate number of followers by then. If not, check back on this blog post to see when the giveaways will happen.

Want to get in on the action early? Just send a tweet with a link to your favorite 10,000 Words post and include “@10000Words” in the tweet. 10 entrants will be randomly selected and each will win a $10 Amazon gift certificate!

The only way you can participate is to follow @10000Words on Twitter. If you aren’t a Twitter member, join now, tell your friends, and we can get this party started! And, of course, a big thank you to everyone for following 10,000 Words!

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