Soundslides 3: Rights for Gender Identification & Expression in Gainesville November 29, 2007

My Soundslides 3 project, which will be part of my final project for the class, is about the issues, concerns and rights of transgendered people in Gainesville. The City of Gainesville is in the process of adding gender identity as a protected class(such as race, religion, sexual orientation) under the city’s antidiscrimination code.  This will prohibit discrimination in the areas of employment, public accommodations, and housing.  I chose to approach this issue by using one individual’s story to reflect the broader issue.  My main character is Jeremy who is very brave for his role in helping the city’s Equal Opportunity Committee bring the issue to the commission (and for allowing me to interview him on this personal and sensitve topic). 

One weakness of my project is to reflect others’ opinions on the issue.  I remembered we talked in class about whether or not journalists should always include both sides of an issue in their stories.  Since this story was so personal, I felt that I didn’t need any outside opinions on the topic.   I attempted to just raise issues by using one person’s point of view. I think considering the time requirements for the project, I couldn’t have done the story justice by adding mutiple interviews.  I did however interview Jeremy’s friends and Commissioner Craig Lowe for some background information and to complete captions. 

Covering an issue is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  There can be so many aspects and points of view a journalist can consider reporting.  This was one of the hardest assignments for me because I had to think so much about what I should include and what things had to go. It was also different thinking about what photos I should include because issue stories often contain a lot of ideas and cognitive images that are hard to photograph. Covering issues takes a great deal of news judgement and many times sensitivity.  When covering personal issues, I think journalists really have to take a lot of time to get to know the people they interview if they want to get the real story and not just surface details.  You have to be great listener and have the ability to make people feel comfortable with you.  I wish I would have had more time to take better photos and include other interesting aspects of the issue.

Better Blogging November 26, 2007

   Many people blog to share their ideas and points of view on a variety of topics.  Since the first week of class we have been learning that blogging should be like developing online relationships and loyalty to the blogs you visit the most.  We talked about how bloggers can’t expect people to read and make comments on their blog if they don’t read and comment on other blogs.  This shows how blogging is really social and interactive. 

   In week 12 of our class we learned about “better blogging” and  added some enhancements to our blog.  Since publishing a blog is publishing a feed that can be searched or subscribed to online, we “burned” an RSS feed for our blog using FeedBurner.  This enhancement helps you accomplish the purpose of your blog by publicizing your content, optimizing your content making it accessible and shareable to users, and analyzing who and where your traffic is coming from.  We used the “Get Started Now” section, which has QuickStart guides for specific blogging services, like wordpress.

   Next we registered our blogs with Site Meter, a counter and statistics tracker.  The basic function of this enhancement helps bloggers understand who visits their site and what parts of the site are most popular.  Google Analytics does a similar function and is like the “Big Brother “surveillance for: visits-letting you know who searched and when, for searches-letting you know what they were looking for, and content-letting you know what pages they found.

   Finally we added Technorati, where people can create their own “Top 10″ blogs.  It’s a blog aggregator which helps bloggers collect, gather and keep track of their favorite blogs. This week’s class was about taking blogging to the next level especially for journalists who are active bloggers and are staying abreast what’s going on in the field of journalism. 

Final Projects: Basic HTML and CSS November 26, 2007

    In week 12 of class Mindy went over some of the things we will be using to create our final project where we plan, design and produce a three-page story about an issue for the web.  For this package students in our class will need to use the skills and information we’ve been  learning  most of the semester about story telling, photo composition, and gathering audio in addition to using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). 

    First we went over the basics of using Windows Notepad and HTML CSS Tutorials. And Stuff.   Although we will be using a zip file or content management system, which means we won’t have to write the raw html code ourselves, Mindy said in the working world today it’s important for journalists to know how html code works  for simple tasks like updating a web site or posting a story on a newspaper or magazine’s web site.  We had a discussion about how journalists shouldn’t necessarily be expected to be web designers, but should have some knowledge about html.

   On the HTML Dog web site we went to HTML Beginner and then the Getting Started tutorial.  We worked our way through the step-by-step instructions on how to create a simple html file with a text editor like Notepad and use a webrowser like Firefox or Internet Explorer to look at the changes we make to the html file.  One of the most important things I learned in today’s class was how html tags “wrap up text and tell that text what it is.”  For  example, adding spaces in a text editor to signal a paragraph doesn’t translate to a paragraph in the web browser unless you have “wrapped” the text in tags that signal a paragraph. This is the same with the headlines, headings, images and titles because html decides the structure of the the document and not the style.

   Next we went to CSS Beginner and the Applying CSS tutorial to learn how to make the text “pretty.”   We learned that a basic In-line style declaration can be pasted inside a tag to make the text different, for example changing the color of that text.  We also learned how Internal styles can be used to dictate the style of the whole page and External styles can be used for consistency, making a 3-page or 1,000-page document the same stylistically. We also learned how <div> tags  in CSS are like containers that wrap up an entire project and can be used to add style, color, fonts or a border.  It creates a large container on the page and can also be used to make inner boxes that makes the style of a page look more professional.

Soundslides 2: The Jones’ Eastside November 8, 2007

For my second Soundslides project I attempt to tell the story of The Jones Eastside, a cafe and alternative bakery and restaurant.  I chose this place because it has personality, and I think the owners were interesting people.  Some of the challenges I had in telling this story reminded me of my first Soundslides project.  For example, I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be capturing and reporting on the experience of the place and avoide getting side tracked by the personal stories of the people I interviewed.  Although this time lighting was not an issue in my photos,  it was challenging to take photos in a busy restaurant.  People were constantly moving and the backgrounds could be distracting as well. 

This time I tried to concentrate more on making sure I had the components or building blocks of a story.  After watching Ira Glass on Storytelling, I realized just organizing facts along with photos does not make a project an actual story. In his first video, Glass talks about how anecdotes and having a sequence of events will draw an audience and make the story have suspense and momentum. Glass said a sequence of actions are necessary for good stories and that, ”You can feel like you’re on a train that has a destination.” When I went to report and conduct my interviews I tried to collect anecdotes that would make the story interesting and reflect what it’s like to dine in the restaurant. The challenge here was deciding which anecdotes to keep because of the two-minute time limit for the project. Hopefully this time I am coming closer to including more elments of true storytelling.