On Point with Maira!

Chapter 1

We Are All Web Workers Now

Who wants to sit around and wait a day for the newspaper to be dropped off at your door the next day, when an RSS feed on your Mac book is constantly updating you on just the topics you are interested in.

Briggs says “As a journalist you are a merchant of information.” Could anyone in the world say it better? I don’t think so. Web tools available to us today enable us to use advanced techniques to get news and to report it quick.

Some of these basic tools include:

RSS Feeds

Consistently delivers content of your choice.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Allows you to move being files an email can’t handle.

HTML (Code that creates basic Web Pages)

Code that tells a web server how to display text.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

This basically “makes websites look cool,” says Briggs.

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

This compliments HTML and uses tags to describe what data is.

Briggs outlines each of these and how to incorporate them into your careers as a journalist of today. Some of these techniques were really helpful because although I knew about the existence of these tools, I did not know all the ways they could be used in.

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Chapter 9

Data-Driven Journalism and DigitizingYour Life

The crazy digital world of today is known to cause information overload. However, Mark Briggs believes that its just a matter of not being able to filter information. Here’s a few strategies he mentioned to filter information in a way that, only information pertaining to your needs is displayed to you.

1. Organize your email

This helped me keep track of my personal/work/ school emails. Gmail is awesome!

2. Find the Right personal productivity tools

Keeping multiple copies of your data is absolutely necessary. I learned that the hard way.

Data-Driven Journalism

It is crucial for today’s journalism world to keep up with the databases and know how to use them. Stories are indeed, data.  Journalists need to know how to make use of databases.

Map Mashups

Quick reporting requires visuals. Using these maps with information regarding stories can help news get around much faster.

The transformation of the Journalism world has made it extremely important for aspiring journalists to keep up with and use technological strategies, to tell their stories.

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Chapter 2

Advanced Blogging

The new era of journalism requires that ever aspiring journalist use a blog as their first step into their journalistic careers.  Here’s an overview of what Briggs mentions in Journalism Next.

A good blog is a continuing conversation

Seriously, who wants to sit there and read what you think about the world all day long? Make it intriguing and make it open ended.

Blogs are not Magic

Do you really think that just creating a  blog is enough to market you as a serious journalist? Well, think again.

Blog Basics

Briggs explains very clearly that blogs are important in this era of technology. He covers everything from change in web publishing to change in journalism due to blogs. I loved the detailed analysis. Haven’t read something about that in a long time. Another thing I really agreed with was the fact that you really do have to read blogs and keep up with the blogging world before you become a blogger yourself.

Make a Plan, Create a Blog

I am telling you, Briggs knows what he is talking about. Choose a system that you comprehend and is easy to use OR your work load will double.  Use cool gadgets to incorporate visuals with your text.

Building an Audience

Every journalist needs to know how to build an audience.

• READERS FIRST , READERS FIRST, READERS FIRST
• Be direct and have an organized thought process (if you’re all over the place, it can cause loss of credibility)
• BE YOURSELF, BE YOURSELF, BE YOURSELF

Blogs are the beginning of your career as new journalists. Get started.

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Chapter 4

Microblogging: Write Small, Think Big

Every time a professor asks in class “Who has a twitter account?” or “who tweets?”

More than 90% of the class screams  “ME! ME!”

Microblogging: keeping it short.

Nobody has time to read unnecessary information.

Great tool for quick reporting.

Love, Learn and Live Twitter.

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Chapter 5

Going Mobile

The new hot way of reading the news? Through your cellphones, of course!

Who actually goes and buys a newspaper anymore? No one I know. I mean who needs to? Just log on to Facebook through your iPhone or pull up the CNN app on your Blackberry, and you’re good to go!

I think this chapter covers everything that one needs to know about mobile reporting and mobile news.

As modern journalists, we must adapt to the changing rules and mediums of media.

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Chapter 6

Visual Storytelling with Photographs

A picture is definitely worth a thousand words.

How many of us flip through magazines, newspapers, or scroll down websites just browsing through the pictures and reading headlines? Everyone does that.

Writing stories without any pictures means that your story is incomplete.

Digital Pictures allow you to edit and recreate images to fit your story. However, remember distortion or misuse is never okay.

Pictures are personal property and thus fair use and copyright rules apply to them as well. Don’t be stealing pictures off someone’s Facebook account to use for your story. Its Plagiarism!!!

This chapter basically briefs on everything a journalist needs to know about photography!

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Chapter 3

Crowd-Powered Collaboration

New ways of reporting are becoming more and more popular.

Briggs mentions a few of them in this chapter:

Crowdsourcing (distributed reporting)

This one is for all you Wikipedia users.

Open-source Reporting

Attention readers, barriers have been removed. Now you and journalism can connect directly.

Pro-am Journalism

iReporters, this is you!

Believe it or not, this style is the new face of journalism.

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Chapter 10

Managing News as a Conversation

It’s hard to display news in a manner of conversation and not make it seem like it’s a lecture. Journalists must draw the line between the two and balance it.

This has made news a people oriented medium. Examples of conversational news would be iReporters, Social Media Networks, Twitter e-t-c.

Allowing viewers to comment on news articles and videos online is also another great way of conversational news making.

Allow your audience to collaborate and get involved with the news by sending pictures and so on. However, journalists must be in control of the news, the image of their media and the information that is being exchanged.

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Chapter 11

Building a Digital Audience for News

Don’t just write stories and expect to be served an audience on a silver platter. Writing stories is just 50% of the news process, the other 50 % is getting an audience and keeping them.

In order to keep a consistent number of audience interested in your work, you must:

• Keep track of what you published.
• Keep track of who is ready what you published.
• Build an audience through search engines and social media networks.

Basically, know that just writing a story aint gonna cut it.