Free Web-based production tools help students invigorate online news projects

May 8, 2007 by

What can online journalism students create with no budget and no programming skills?

That’s what I set out to find with my J309 class at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism this spring. The class is Annenberg’s “Introduction to Online Publishing,” a required capstone course in our undergraduate core curriculum and students’ first (and only) required course in online journalism.

This is the first year for the course and I wanted the students to leave the semester with an individual final project that showcased what they’d learned in both this course and the core curriculum. Along the way, I provided a brief history of Internet media and an overview of ethical and economic issues surrounding online publishing. The heart of the class was their individual blogs (linked in the blogroll), where I assigned weekly writing and reporting exercises.

Ultimately, I hoped that at least a few of the students would develop a love for online publishing, while the others would at least recognize how they
could create interactive and multimedia news projects with little technical effort.

To that end, I challenged students to find free online tools that would support such work. Below, I list the tools my students used this semester, followed by links to their final projects. (I did teach students basic HTML hardcoding skills, as well.)

Of course, online journalists can create far more engaging work with custom-programmed Flash movies, purpose-built content management systems and smart modification of a variety of open source development tools. But that is work for the advanced online journalism student. For these undergraduates, I did not want potentially intimidating development tools to squash what I hoped would be an emerging passion for working online.

And to further encourage that, I turned students loose to choose whatever topic they wished in reporting their final projects. Predictably, I got several food- and sports-related websites. But I don’t mind. Passion developed in personal web publishing projects can help inspire students to enliven more serious reporting projects in the future.

Tools

None of the following tools required programming skill to implement; all provided point-and-click user interfaces. And the price was right for a student budget, as all the following tools are free.

Blogger.com
Google’s blogging tool remains one of the Web’s more popular. Students used Blogger for their weekly class blogging assignments, and several used the tool to publish their final projects as well.

Google Maps
Google Maps weren’t on our radar until late in the semester, when Google introduced a customizing tool that allows users to create multipoint maps with user-supplied links and photos for each map point. Previously, one needed to use often-clunky third-part tools, or Google’s API to create such maps. With the new tool, however, tech novices can publish sophisticated custom maps with minimal effort. (Now, if only they could be embedded in a remote webpage….)

Google Pages
Google Pages allows users to publish flat webpages, using a selection of templates. Users can control the HTML within the template design, but do not have the flexibility that they would with hardcoding the page from scratch. As with many Google projects, Google Pages are in beta, and students encountered frequent connectivity problems when updating pages. Still, this proved to be a convenient alternative for students who were looking for Dreamweaver-like production environment, but who didn’t want to make the trek to a campus computer lab or buy their own software.

Jimdo.com
Lying somewhere between Google Pages and WordPress, Jimdo is another free, hosted webpage tool that allows users to create websites that break from the traditional blog format.

mixmonsta.com
Mixmonsta enables users to create embedded audio and video mash-ups through a relatively simple Web-based interface.

ProBoards
This is a handy, free, hosted online discussion board tool, which allowed one student to create a question-and-answer board for her project site, without having to install or manage a PHP or Perl application.

Slide.com
Slide’s been the go-to source for crafting Flash frat-party photo slideshows for MySpace pages. But there’s no reason why a journalism student couldn’t use the Slide tool for a news project. No, you don’t get the craftmanship of a custom Flash movie, but you can put these shows together in less than five minutes, and with zippo tech expertise needed.

Webshots.com
Webshots has long offered free photo hosting, but now also offers a Flash slideshow feature, like Slide.com. Some students preferred Webshot’s Flash app, saying that it looked more professional than Slide.com’s.

WordPress.com
WordPress seems like the king of blogging software at this point. But my students opted for the hosted WordPress.com platform, rather than take on the more technically challenging task of managing their own WordPress installation.

YouTube
There’s no easier way to put video on a blog than YouTube. All my students have used YouTube in the past, as viewers, and were pleasantly surprised to find how simply they could employ YouTube as publishers.

The Sites

ATLA Music
Helza Irizarry
Irizarry, and Atlanta resident, employed a variety of audio and video tools, along with WordPress, to create an online guide to the collision of Southern- and West Coast-flavored hip hop.

The BBQ Fanatic’s Guide to Texas-Style Ribs in L.A.
Megan Seely
Food blogs proved popular among my students, who embraced the chance to take care of meals and homework at the same time. Seely tried several cuisines before settling on her online homage to L.A.’s best B-rated BBQ dives.

Best Jazz in L.A.
Elsa Bertet
Bertet used still and video photography in her attempt to capture the viewing experience at a selection of clubs popular with USC students.

The Conquest of South Central
Carley Dryden
Dryden set out to investigate Conquest Housing, the largest private landlord for USC students living off-campus. She recorded many students’ horror stories with Conquest, the talked with university and real estate experts to provide perspective.

Down with Downtown
Kyle Cabodi
More USC students are living in downtown L.A., a mile or so up the road from USC’s campus. That, along with new commercial and entertainment development, are helping support revive residential development in the city’s historic core. Cabodi shot several photo galleries of downtown development and conducted interviews with developers and residents for his project.

L.A. Dinner and a Movie
Lindsey Kaiser
This project blended a smart mash-up of Blogger with custom Google Maps to provide a venue-based guide to good restaurants located near popular Los Angeles movie theaters.

The O.C. Source
Cindy Santos
Santos, an Orange County resident, said she wanted to create for Orange County what LAObserved publisher Kevin Roderick has done for Los Angeles.

Ride Hard
Sandra Altamirano
Altamirano documented her and her friends’ obsession with motorcycling on this blog, which used first-person accounts, interviews and, rather graphic, photo galleries.

Rotting Off the Vine
Geoff Rynex
Chicago Cubs fan Rynex used Jimdo and Blogger to reflect on his favorite baseball team, from 2,000 miles away, while providing links to other virtual gathering places for away-from-the-friendly-confines Cubs fans.

Ventura County Burger Shacks
Leland Ornelaz
Ornelaz ate is way across L.A. County’s northwest neighbor, eschewing chains for historic hamburger stands, which he photographed and reviewed for this blog.

Wine 101
Calli Fisher
Fisher turned 21 during the semester and celebrated by creating a site where students like her could learn to become knowledgeable wine drinkers.

Students and instructors from other universities are welcomed to describe their online journalism projects on OJR. E-mail editor Robert Niles — rniles [at] usc.edu — for more information.

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How to put the community college press online

May 1, 2007 by

In a recently completed survey of California community college journalism programs, faculty advisers said that the biggest change in their programs over the past year was that their student publications went online for the first time.

Just five years ago only a handful of California community college student publications were online. Today 80 percent of the schools with publications have started online versions with many of the remaining 20 percent in the process of getting online. Many of those with the third-party vendor College Publisher, which provides a free content management system designed for college publications and represents more than 500 schools across the country.

California’s huge community college system boasts 109 campuses located from near the Oregon border to within site of the Mexican border. In any given year, about 65-70 of those schools publish a student newspaper or have a regular journalism program. Fifty-six of them now sport online publications –two-thirds of them through College Publisher.

Of course, getting online is only the start for student publications. To prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce, journalism program must revamp the thinking of students who are used to publishing a print edition only every other week, or less often. With online publications, students have the ability to treat breaking news with the urgency it requires. And students can learn new multi-media ways to tell stories. Not all are going to run across the problems the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech had in the opening hours of the shooting tragedy it faced a few weeks ago — the site got so many hits it crashed — but every college publication can have the ability to compete with the mainstream press with the insightful coverage Times students provided once it got back online.

It will take a mindset change, though, from thinking about print deadlines and learning to post first, print later.

There are several stages college publication staffs have to go through to get online publications to the stage where students are getting effective training for the future.

Stage One

Get online. Start a site and get used to updating it on a regular basis. Content management sites, even if their output resembles blog output, are the easiest and most efficient ways to do this. Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media has prepared a great discussion of how to get online tools for colleges. Among the most affordable for low-budget college programs is College Publisher’s CMS.

Stage Two

Shovel content from the print edition to the online edition. Most California community colleges are stuck at this stage. They create print edition and then move the content wholesale (often minus photos) over to the print edition. Any online exclusive content that might appear on the site is content that was created for the print edition but did not fit into the space.

Murley suggests that there needs to be an intermediate stage here where student journalists — shoot, all journalism publications! — need to start adding live links to their stories or posting links to original source documents. Not a bad idea.

He argues throughout his ICM site that publications have to be willing to let their readers stray away from the publication home sites from time to time to let readers have access to the most important information. Trust them and give them a good product and they’ll come back.

These links might include something as simple as a link in a movie review to the official movie web site.

Stage Three

The online becomes important. At this stage students are comfortable enough to consider design of the web site important.

(Actually, some schools have a parallel Stage One where they bring in an HTML techie who wants to wow the world with a complex design — remember the old IBM commercials where the techie asks whether the client wants a spinning logo or a flaming logo? Journalism/content takes a back seat. Programs that have faced this parallel step like their product initially, but find it too difficult to maintain once the techie moves on.)

Design is important, but content rules. At Stage Three students start to experiment with some true web-exclusive content. They may start with breaking stories or see the value of different story forms, such as video, podcast or slideshows (with sound).

At some point, possibly here in the evolution of Stage Three, Murley argues, publications need to start thinking about community and involving their readers in the process. The publication of tomorrow will not be one where the journalist decides what stories to tell, the readers will. Witness the success of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Student publications will become irrelevant if they don’t invite their readers to become a part of the process.

Stage Four

The online is fully integrated into the process. Stories routinely are told in forms designed for online, including blogging, podcasting, videos and more. Updates, exclusives, etc., are common.

Stage Five

Who knows? At this stage the online prevails. Some suggest that it will replace the print edition. Clearly the online publication dominates the thought process in storytelling. Print becomes a convenient way to reach other audiences instead of being the main audience. Your readers are engaged with the online publication and provide content and comments. They hold you accountable with access to instant participation.

While most California community colleges are still stuck in Stage Two — not a surprising result given the number of schools that have gone online in just the last year or two — some are stepping into Stage Three. According to that recent survey of programs, only 14 percent said they tend to post stories first and consider print later. But three-fourths reported that they regularly have online exclusives on their sites. Three-fourths of them contain interactive polls — a built-in feature on the College Publisher sites. And while only a quarter of the publications reported including podcasts, videos or blogs, 51 percent of them said they regularly contain slideshows.

A simple tool they are using to create those slide shows is SoundSlides, a shareware program that easily combines graphics and audio into attractive slideshows.

While advertising is important to the financial health of any student publication, few California community colleges have tapped into the online advertising market. Those who sign through College Publisher forfeit national advertising to the company; that’s the price of the otherwise free tool. And few, 21 percent, have developed strategies for attracting local online ad sales. But it is early in the process; two years ago that number would have been closer to zero.

For more…

Related blog sites that talk about online student publications:

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Easy Web publishing utilities for journalists

October 20, 2006 by

Great online journalism is increasingly expected to combine writing, audio, video, images and graphics, with each part of a story told in the medium best suited to the information being presented. This sounds great in theory, but if you are like most journalists, you are not a software guru or a multimedia specialist and you probably have relatively little experience creating video or graphics, let alone getting them on the internet and strategically placing them in a story.

Journalists should be excited by the Internet. On the Web, words, pictures, video and audio can be woven together in ways that tell stories more effectively than is possible with any of these mediums alone. But in order to weave exceptional, rich, carefully planned online stories, you have to become proficient at a lot of techniques, skills and technologies, many of which you probably thought you were avoiding when you chose journalism as a career.

To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting and your storytelling. All of these applications are low-cost. Most are free, though some ask you to pay to access advanced functionality. All are free of spyware and adware, as far as we know (though it is always good to do an Internet search on anything you download and install to be sure). And each should make the work of creating great journalism online at least a little easier.

Our list of easy online publishing tools is a wiki, so please feel free to add links to tools that you’ve used, which fit our criteria, and that are likely to be of great use to other online journalists as well.

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