Rob Curly

Well last blog I said that Mark Potts of BackFence.com was the best speaker we have had in class to this point. It seams as though it just keeps getting better and better because Rob Curley on Tuesday was truly impressive.

I found myself not taking notes or asking questions, but instead just listening with amazement. He owned the floor, kept the classes attention and he is obviously very talented at what he does.

He spoke about the following topics as they relate to news web-sites:

• Owning local breaking news
• Hyper - local content
• Database - driven coverage
• Multimedia overkill
• Evergreen content
• Embrace platform independent delivery
• Dialogue

These are just some of the topics he spoke about on Tuesday as he impressed the class with his knowledge of how involved one web-site can be. The amount of work he puts into a web-site that serves only 50,000 people is unbelievable. He is an example of someone who loves his job.

Rob Curley is a firm believer that people should be able to get information any-way they want it. By the end of his presentation I not only agreed with him but was astonished at the variety of ways people can get their information. New media is amazing!

To check out some of Mr. Curley's work, check out the Kansas University athletic site or Naples online. They are some of the most well respected sites in the world!

Great class!

AUDACITY!

I thought today's tutorial on pod-casting and Audacity was pretty awesome. I have taken a lot of video classes here at Mason and I have seen wave form monitors and other audio programs before, but non as simple to use as Audacity.

I'm sure I will get a lot of experience with it in the future and I hope I find some use for it in my multimedia story linked off of my web-site.

It's amazing that programs that can do so much are available for FREE these days.

Tomorrow I will be working on my homepage a lot. I have discovered that many of the pictures and links need to be shrunk down to a smaller size. If the viewers monitor is large enough it appears fine, but if the viewer has a smaller monitor it is messing up the page. I'm stopping by the star-lab tomorrow to fix that and also upload my stories and create an e-mail link. Should be fun!

As for the internship. It is keeping me busy, but things are going well. I like it and I'm learning more and more everyday. This weekend I have to bring in some sort of bake good for the entire news time. It's an intern hazing ritual. GOOD TIMES!

See Ya!

Talking Over The Back Fence

Hey everyone! Yesterday was a great class. We had Mark Potts from BackFence.com as a guest speaker. Mark is the co-founder of The Washington Post online website and he is the CEO of BackFence.

Of all our guest speakers we have had this semester so far, I enjoyed Mr. Potts the most, and that's saying something because we have had some very good and well known speakers in this class.

I think the idea of a company starting a website in different cities around the country in which the users are the people who have control of that site is genius. I think it gives people the opportunity to publish what they think is important in their town and see it online right away, instead of having to call a newspaper company and beg for them to cover their child's soccer game. The person can now do it themselves. It's amazing where have come and where we are headed in just a few years.

Obviously, the major problem people have with this idea, is that it is not real journalism and you cannot trust it, just like you have to be wary of wikipedia. However, I love the response Mr. Potts used to tackle that complaint. He pointed out, that actually this new form of media the world is experiencing right now is more self corrected than mainstream media, such as printed newspapers.

Mark Potts is a former professional Washington Post journalists and he even admitted that it is nearly impossible to correct an error in the Post. Not only is it difficult to get through to the company that made the error, but if you do get through, the journalist is more likely to be offended and defend his article to the death before admitting a mistake and correcting it.

In this new form of online journalism created by the users, you can respond immediately in any length that you want and challenge the validity of articles. As Mr. Potts said, "Sure you can publish a bunch of BS if you want, but as soon as you do, someone is going to call you on that BS right away."

It's NOT that this new form of journalism is better than mainstream by any means. It is just different and it deserves a shot.

Journalism is changing and the world is having trouble adjusting to it in my opinion. I think new forms of media are inevitable with technology changing as rapidly as it is. As Mark Potts said, "The best story journalists have right now is the story happening to them."

What an awesome time to be in the media industry!

Fun Day at the Internship

Let me start this blog by saying that I thought our third video conferencing session of the semester with Mack McLarty was great. It is too bad are class was not able to get in more questions with him, but that is not always a bad thing.

He is very thorough in his answers and provides a lot of detailed information that was very interesting. My story on the video conference with him should be up soon.

On another note, I had a great day at my internship at CBS Sports earlier this week. The Washington Wizards had a home game at the Verizon Center and for the first time they sent yours truly to conduct the post game interviews.

I got to interview Eddie Jordan and All-Star Gilbert Arenas. I was very exciting and I know WUSA9 is going to provide me with a lot more opportunities like this before the semester is over.

Again, if you have not taken the Communication 450 internship class with Mike Dickerson, I would defiantly recommend it! Mason provides a lot of great experiences, but you have to take advantage of them.

See ya next post!

Last Class

The Presentation by Rosemary Chase from the copyright office here at Mason was great on Tuesday. She really got up there and showed that she was knowledgeable on the topic, offered help, and gave a very informative presentation.

There are so many copyright rules and violations that a person can accidentally commit that it can be a little overwhelming at times, especially when creating a multimedia project. I think the best thing to do is to use common sense and the moment you find yourself wondering if what you are about to do will be a copyright violation, consult an expert like Rosemary Chase.

I am looking forward to next class. We will be attending another great video conferencing session with Mack McLarty, former White House Chief of Staff. That story will be up in a week or so and Helen Thomas's story is completed and will be posted this week.

I'll keep everyone updated!

Yesterday's class

Yesterday was a great class. If you have not taken Online Journalism and you are reading this blog for whatever reason, take it! You learn a lot and have great guest speakers. Yesterday's tutorial on writing for the online medium was very interesting. I walked away with a clear understanding of the differences between writing for print and writing for the online medium.

It is important to write like a 9th grader is reading your story. This means shorter sentences, an easy vocabulary to understand, pictures, hyperlinks, be brief and concise, and so on. The next few years of website creation, gaming, podcasts and the online medium all together is going to be incredible. Technology is advancing so fast it is hard to keep up. That's why I have two more workshops scheduled for this week for UNIX and DREAMWEAVER II. I'll let everyone know how they went.

I'll be back!

The Weekend Workshops

Well, this weekend was a busy one, but a good one as well. I took my first two workshops on Friday. One was in Flash I and the other was in Dreamweaver I. They both lasted about 2 hours and they were very informative. I had know clue what Flash was when I walked into the lab. It was awesome! For those of you who do not know, Flash is a program that allows you to animate your website. Just about every professionally made or corporate site you go to, such as abc.com or espn.com has Flash. People who know that program are making big bucks out there and it was awesome to be introduced to it for the first time.

Dreamweaver was great to. It was basically a repeat of what our class did last week during the tutorial session, but I needed a repeat. The mentors were great by the way. They were very helpful. Even if we did not get extra credit, I would still take additional workshops, because they are that helpful.

As for everything else, the internship is taking up all of my time but it is still going very well. I'm learning a lot and having fun. The Rick Barton story should be up in a couple of days. Time for class.
See ya!

First Time Blogger

Well, here it is! This is my first post ever on a blog. It will be one of many. In this post I'd just like to say, hi! My name is Chris and my profile on the right side of this page tells you a little bit about me.

Today I am going to try and weave my way through a crowd of Mason students at a Sen. Obama rally on campus and eventually get to the computer lab where I will be taking my first computer software workshop of the semester. The workshop will be in Flash. Flash is a program I am not at all familiar with. I'm told it is a program used to create computer games. I will be sure to let everyone know how the workshop went in my next post.

Today I will also be writing a story on a video conferencing session my class had with Rick Barton, a member of the Iraq study group. This story and all of my stories on video conferencing sessions held through my Online Journalism class, will be posted on my website eventually.

Talk to ya next time!