This podcast details the problems of Snell Hall on campus and the need for the MU Annex.
Written and produced by Makenna Bishop, Leslie Mason, Marshall Huffman, and Jennifer Kubus.
For more information on the Memorial Union Annex project, visit their website.
 If you want a job in online news, there is no better asset than to be a smart, critically thinking journalist.But in this time of multimedia storytelling, software skills matter, too.To get a sense of the skills in demand, I asked top online editors and Al Tompkins, Poynter’s broadcast/online group leader, what skills they would like these critical thinkers to have. “If I had to pick three,” said Chris Snider from DesMoinesRegister.com, “I would go with Flash, the ability to shoot and edit video and some proficiency in HTML.” The three skills he lists were the most common responses. Others included:
Media Editing Skills: Audio and Video Most people I spoke with put these abilities in the top three. However, no particular editing software was cited. “Right now there isn’t a ‘Photoshop equivalent’ for sound editing,” said Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor at NYTimes.com. “It can be as simple as Audacity or more advanced work with ProTools or Soundtrack Pro.” Beyond understanding the technical aspects of audio or video editing software, DeVigal said, it is crucial that potential employees know how to use the programs for effective storytelling. Jamie Hutt, design editor at StarTribune.com, agreed that there is no ultimate software in this area. It is important that potential hires be familiar with something, though. “I don’t care if someone used Final Cut Pro or some bit of free video editing junk that came with their PC,” he said. “I would expect the smart, critically thinking journalist to have been curious enough to have found, tried and be able to claim some level of comfort with editing different forms of media.” Tompkins added that online journalists should know how to post video online, too. Interactive packaging skills: Flash Flash is the hot program to know because — among other things — it allows for the creation of storytelling packages in which different types of media flow smoothly from one to the next. Flash is an essential skill for content editors, producers and creators. It is not as necessary for those seeking to be collectors of information. “Flash is used primarily when creating interactive multimedia packages that combine video, photography, audio and text, as well as for interactive informational graphics,” said Nelson Hsu, designer for washingtonpost.com “Potential employees do not have to be Flash experts, but should be very comfortable working in the program and especially with ActionScript.” Said DeVigal: “In most Web newsrooms, this will get you in the door.” Web site development skills: HTML, CSS Understanding basic HTML is an online journalism lifeline — especially in the day-to-day production of Web presentations. “They need the markup basics,” Hutt said. “Nothing too fancy, but they do need to know how to format text, define a headline and apply some color or size characteristics to a page element. They need to know how to construct an image tag and embed a video.” These skills make a potential employee useful in a wide range of online newsrooms. It is important to note that there is not an industry standard system for posting online content. All news organizations do not operate the same way. “Some operations are completely handmade,” he said. “Others, while more sophisticated, can still require a junior producer or copy editor to write a little markup.” Even now, DeVigal said, “There are a surprising number of folks in this Web-biz who don’t know the basic code on a Web page. “I’m not asking for mastery of CSS or AJAX, but putting together a simple table or styling of type is often necessary,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re confined to what the CMS can do, and that never gives you enough of the flexibility you want and need to tell your story.” More advanced knowledge will also help one’s prospects. DeVigal said he likes to see candidates who can work with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), especially if they can use these skills at the JavaScript and XHTML level. Interface design skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, creating user-oriented designs “We rely heavily on Illustrator and Photoshop to create everything from wireframes to final comprehensive layouts,” Hsu said. It’s also important for employees to understand how users access information online and how to make clear, straightforward interfaces, he said. Data skills: Excel, Access, PHP He said Excel serves two basic purposes:
“Excel is an excellent project management tool. We don’t simply write stories. We build them and often build them in teams,” he said. “The smart, critically thinking journalist I hire will ultimately play a big role in the production of a story or application. Knowledge of a tool like Excel will be very helpful. ‘Excel chops’ also imply a comfort with data and databases.” Enterprise and curiosity Employers value enterprise: the ability to find good, solid stories and discover new, innovative ways to present them. “What’s really important here isn’t that the candidate is fluent in one application or another,” Hutt said, “but has demonstrated the curiosity and fearlessness needed to eventually master complicated editing tools.” Tompkins also addressed the need for a new hire to have a curious nature. “You should have a basic knowledge of how to find stories, understand civics, research government records, interview, verify, write and report,” Tompkins said. “All journalism values enterprise.” Josh Hatch, a producer at USAToday.com, agreed. “I’m less concerned about someone already knowing a given piece of software — although it is important and definitely does help,” he said, “than I am about someone who is naturally curious and not intimidated by technology. I want someone who wants to play with technology.” |
Here are a few podcasts with some New Media related content (they’re all from the same site, though). First, here’s one with some thoughts on online communities, which begin at the 21:50 mark; they get into Second Life at around 29:00.
There’s also one featuring a conversation with two self-published artists who use new media outlets to get their work to the public, and it has some comparisons with old media, etc. Pretty interesting; that part’s at 11:57.
And knowing how much Pam hates hearing people lump mediated news into “The Media”…the hosts do just that in this podcast at the 51:00 mark.
There’s a ton of other podcasts on the site, most of which I haven’t listened to yet, but with titles that sound interesting and/or relevant. I’d suggest checking them out.
Fan Fiction. Fiction written by fan of a particular TV show, comic, game, or other entertainment property, which is set within the world of that property. Predates the Internet by years, but has taken off with the advent of online communities.
Marshall Huffman, OSU ‘08
“A contraction of ‘user network,’ [it] is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post public messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
One notable difference from a BBS or web forum is that there is no central server, nor central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh.[clarify] Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.”
Note: Wikipedia article does not cite any sources.
“In computer gaming, a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain or Dimension) is a multi-player computer game that combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash style computer games and social chat rooms. Typically running on an Internet server or bulletin board system, the game is usually text-driven, where players read descriptions of rooms, objects, events, other characters, and computer-controlled creatures or non-player characters (NPCs) in a virtual world. Players usually interact with each other and the surroundings by typing commands that resemble a natural language, usually English. Arguably modern graphics-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft as well as social avatar virtual worlds such as Second Life could be considered MUD variants.
Traditional MUDs implement a fantasy world populated by elves, goblins, dwarves, halflings and other mythical or fantasy-based races, with players being able to take on any number of classes, including warriors, mages, priests, thieves, druids, etc., in order to gain specific skills or powers. The object of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a rich fantasy world, to complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and/or advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.
Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others are set in a science fiction–based universe or themed on popular books, movies, animations, history, and so on. Not all MUDs are games; some, more typically those referred to as MOOs, are used in distance education or for virtual conferences. MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, including communications, sociology, law, and synthetic economies.
Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to players; some may accept donations or allow players to “purchase” in-game items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee.” See also: MOO, MUCK.
“TinyMUCK or, more broadly, a MUCK, is a type of user-extendible online text-based role playing game, designed for role playing and social interaction. The backronym “Multi-User Created (or Character, or Carnal) Kingdom” is sometimes cited, but is not the actual origin of the term; “muck” is simply a play on the word “mud” in TinyMUD.” See also: MUD, MOO.
“A MOO (MUD object oriented) is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.
The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to those programs descended from the original MOO server, and the other is to refer to any MUD that uses object oriented techniques to organize its database of objects, particularly if it does so in a similar fashion to the original MOO or its derivatives. Most of this article refers to the original MOO and its direct descendants, but see Non-Descendant MOOs for a list of MOO-like systems.
The original MOO server was authored by Stephen White, based on his experience from creating the programmable TinyMUCK system. There was additional later development and maintenance from LambdaMOO administrator, and former Xerox PARC employee, Pavel Curtis.
One of the most distinguishing features of a MOO is that its users can perform object oriented programming within the server, ultimately expanding and changing how the server behaves to everyone. Examples of such changes include authoring new rooms and objects, creating new generic objects for others to use, and changing the way the MOO interface operates. The programming language used for extension is the MOO programming language, and many MOOs feature convenient libraries of verbs that can be used by programmers in their coding known as Utilities. The MOO programming language is a domain-specific programming language.” See also: MUD, MUCK.
“Short for “Role-Playing Game”; a game in which the player takes on the persona of a fictional character and has adventures with other characters in a world created by the Game-master, a sort of referee. Can be played with other people (“Face-to-Face” or “table-top”; also called “Pen-and-Paper” ), or over the Internet (“Play-by-E-mail&quo t; or “Play-by-Post” games; this category also includes games played on IRC or via a chat site)
Not to be confused with computer RPGs, which are a different kettle of fish altogether.”
