Brooke Ruth’s Blog

I took this photo during our tour of the Reno/Tahoe area. Our tour guide took us to this spot because you can see both the old and new Reno. The foreground of the photo shows old Reno, with its ranches, and the background of the photo shows some of the high rise casinos in the new Reno.

This is a photo I took at Lake Tahoe. The water in the lake is extremely blue. The different tones of blue show how cold or warm the water is. I did not brave going in the water during the tour because it was a cold day, but recently we went back on a weekend and I braved the chilly temperatures. Locals have told us that many people don’t go in the water until August or September to give it more of a chance to warm-up.

This is a photo of a mural of Rosie from the Jetsons at a local Reno restaurant called “Squeeze In.” I love the Jetsons!

I saw this sign at the local farmer’s market when I went to take video for a project. No one ever told me you had to designate a space for free speech…

What do you think of these? What works? What doesn’t? 

You can see more front pages from the day on the Newseum site. Share your favorites with me.

About 80 percent of internet user sessions begin at search engines and about 40 percent of traffic to news sites comes from search engines, according to Gil Asakawa’s presentation on search engine optimization.  Headlines are one of the major factors that search engines look at in responding to users search terms, which is why they are so important. 

Here are some tips on writing web headlines that I have compiled from Amy Eisman’s sessions on reading and writing for the web, Dennis Joyce’s session on display type and Gil Asakawa’s session on search engine optimization:

•  Read the entire package before deciding on a headline.
• Think through the visuals within the package before writing a headline.
• Land on keywords and ideas that show up in the story and try to incorporate them within your headline.
• Front load headlines. The first two words or 11 characters are the most important to search engines.
• Use relevant numbers within the headline.
• Use superlatives and rankings in headlines when you have them.
• If you are giving lists or advice within the article say so within the headline. For example, if the article is giving advice about saving money the headline could be “10 tips to save money,” or however many tips there are.
• Use the second person in headlines. For example, “How you can save money.”
• Tease to outcomes or facts unknown to the reader within headlines. For example, “The guide to saving money,” or “Secrets to saving money.”
• Ask questions within web headlines.
• Imagine what internet users would search for if wanting information on the topic of the article (aka think like the audience).
• Include places, and names and company names within headlines if applicable. For example, instead of “Mayor says financing plan a good idea,” you should put “Brawley Mayor Steve Vasquez says financing plan a good idea.”
• A good length for headlines on the web is 60 characters.

No time to blog today because I was editing this short video:

For some reason this one minute long video took me an hour and a half from uploading raw video to posting it on here.

In a session led by a fellow program participant we went over analytics. One of the most valuable resources I learned about was a Web site ran by Quantcast. On this Web site it tells you demographics of those that visit your site, what other sites they visit, and allows you to compare your statistics with other Web sites. It does this for every site but if you embed their code on your site the numbers will be more accurate.

What are your thoughts about embedding the code? It would be able to be seen by others if they know of the site but they can see our rough statistics already and it would lead to it being more accurate.

So below I compared our Web site visits to both KYMA and KXO. We could possibly use this to show advertisers the benefit of advertising with us. This may be something that Nielsen can do that I didn’t know about, if so let me know.

I was also surprised to see that in May we had an above average amount of viewers between the ages of 12 and 17. This may have been because of our graduation photos being online, I am not sure. What do you think? (Victor — how were/are our stats on the graduation galleries/how are graduation photo sales?)

You can also see other sites that those visiting our site are visiting (see below.) This could be used to gauge our competition or possibly show what our viewers are looking for as consumers and aid in advertising.

One thing that this Web site does not show (to my knowledge) is when our peak traffic times are. I know they are in the morning, but what time in the morning? Also, are there other peak times? I don’t have the username and password with me for Nielsen so I can’t check from here. I think this is something we need to pay more attention to, in terms of having any cops updates from the previous night online by then and making sure everything is up and correct by that time. 

Analytics is a topic that easily leads to the subject of search engine optimization. One thing mentioned that can help this is by having the story headline in the url. Is this something that we could do? I know that currently our stories our saved as news01, news02, etc. A fellow participant said his publication did this to increase SEO and it was successful.

Up next: Writing for the Web (including writing headlines for the Web)

How is everything going in the newsroom? Did you get my postcard?

One of the things I was probably most excited about learning was how to use a more advanced video editing software. I was secretly hoping we would learn Final Cut Express because I already have that installed on my work computer and have been trying to learn it for a while. And on Friday, we did indeed learn Final Cut Express.

I learned a few key things on Friday that I had previously been unable to figure out. One such thing was moving where you wanted to cut a video precisely. The answer was as simple as using the arrow keys on my keyboard, but had I not had my “classmates” there to help me it would have taken me much longer to figure out the simple solution. 

Here is my first video edited using Final Cut Express:

Now that I know how to use a more advanced software, which would allow us to insert a title “slide” with graphics (I want to come up with this title “slide” and standards for such things as fonts used, so that our videos have a general format) and improve our overall editing capabilities, we need to focus on improving our raw video.

In a previous blog I listed a few simple tips that can greatly improve our video. Another couple tips that I didn’t mention: use a tripod if at all possible (eliminating shakiness takes part of the home video feel out of it,) and try shooting from different angles. For example, try shooting a shot from down low, by sitting the camera on a table and from up high. 

Also, I think we have to remember we are still trying to tell a story when we take video — it is just in another form. Just like an article would have a beginning, middle and end, so would a video. An article must also flow and so should a video.

I think planning before going out to shoot will have a great effect on the quality of our raw footage and I would like to work with the reporters on this.

Now to the process that I went through in making my short video. I decided to take video at the opening day of the local farmers market. While there I came across a couple ideas for a video. One was to focus on local farmers and why many of the farmers were from out of the area. My second idea was to focus on this old school house that attendees were touring. Once I decided on my subject I thought about what kind of shots and information I needed to tell a story about this old school house. I knew I needed an interview with whomever maintained the building and shots of the outside and inside of the school house. So, I went about getting these shots and because I had a plan was able to get the necessary elements of the video.

Of course there are a lot of things I would do differently if I shot this again. I would have got shots of the people touring the school house and what they thought about it. I would have tried setting my camera on a table or something else in order to steady it a little more. I would have also tried to get shots from varying degrees of closeness (wide, medium, tight) and different angles.

But with all things practice makes perfect and the more I take video and critique it after the better I will get. Same goes for everyone else taking video in the newsroom.

Any thoughts about how we can improve the quality of our video?

I am thrilled to introduce to you a program called Soundslides. It was created by a journalist for journalists and allow them to make audio slideshows. It is simple to use and turns out a great product. The best part is that even the professional version runs around $70.

I would love for us to get this program, a digital recorder and a microphone. I am asking around about good quality recorders and microphones and the best deals on them. I think this will greatly increase multimedia on our site.

Here is what I created with some of the photos I have taken thus far on my trip and copyright free music (you can also have something like a voiceover, as long as you convert it to a mp3.

 Today when we had our crash course on Photoshop some of the lessons I learned in my high school graphic design class and from our former head photographer, Todd Krainin, came back to me. I was able to make the graphic on the left using Photoshop (which is an extremely simple graphic, but for someone who is relatively new to the program I think it works.) I also learned how to resize photos, which I have been trying to learn for quite a while so that I can post photos to the Imperial Valley Press’ MySpace page. I also now know how to crop photos, take out red eye, fix underexposed or overexposed photos, correct blemishes and save photos for the web. Basically I now have a general understanding of the program and a foundation to build on. 

We also covered Web 2.0 tools such as ning, which you can use to make your own social networking sites, and cover it live, which helps news organizations cover events in real time. I am definitely going to experiment with cover it live tonight and I am sure there are a multitude of events that readers would like to watch live. Ning is also interesting, because it mainly uses user generated content and is relatively easy to use, but I am not sure if people in our area want to sign up for yet another social networking site. What do you think? I guess if we had the right topic it could work. What do you think that topic would be?

One of the participants in my program helped his newspaper set up ning sites for both food and cooking and pets and said these sites have been pretty successful. The paper pays $30 a month for each and are able to put its ads on the site. If you do not pay the monthly fee google text ads appear on the site. But, I don’t necessarily see a problem with that at the beginning. We could see if it has a following and potential advertisers and if it does pay the fee and get it back in ad sales. But, I think an essential aspect to these sites is promotion. To promote the pet site the paper runs house ads in print, advertises over the radio and gives out flyers at local veterinarian’s offices and the local dog park.

A New World

Michelle Johnson, who previously worked for the Boston Globe and is now in academia, is walking us through the world of HTML. Our assignment for the day is to post a blog using HTML. So, I hand coded the links you saw above, and so much more. For example, to make this bold and italicized I had to enter the code. 

After today’s lesson I am definitely not an expert in HTML, but I do have a basic grasp of it and have resources to learn more. Michelle Johnson provided us with a handout of common HTML tags and told us about a site that offers HTML tutorials. This blog post also provides more resources.

This is how my post looked in HTML:

P.S. I had to remove my bulleted list from my post because Word Press was not reading the code properly.

It has been almost a year exactly since I graduated from UCLA and thus almost a year since I have had homework. But, I will not make it to a year because I have been assigned a weekend project.

This weekend we have been tasked with taking video that we will later edit in class. I have yet to decide on a topic for this video story, but I have received tips from my classmates about taking better video. Here are the suggestions that I think will help us in our newsroom:

1. Make sure the light is behind you when you are taking video.

2. If there is wind make sure it is hitting your back and not going across the microphone, so that the microphone won’t pick up the noise.

3. If you feel like you are too close to a person, take a step closer (to make sure you get good audio.)

4. Do pre-interviews so you know what you want to get from a subject on video.

5. After a subject seems to finish answering your question wait five seconds before asking a follow-up question so that they will be prompted to keep talking.

6. Do not respond to the subject’s answers by saying any of the following during their answer  or you may ruin your clip: “um,” “I see,” “interesting.” Pretty much, don’t say anything — just nod.

7. When holding a camera hold it with both hands and hold your elbows close to your body so that you will steady the camera better. You are the tripod (see photo below.)

8. Hold every shot for about 15 seconds.

9. Avoid zooming and panning. Instead of zooming just get close to your subject, so you get better audio, or zoom before you actually record. The more you zoom,the more visible movement of the camera is.

10. My epiphany for the day is that you can increase the audio on the settings of the camera (see photo below.)

I honestly can’t wait to see if we can do this on our cameras. If anyone wants to be a doll, you can check the settings for me and I won’t have to wait five weeks. Let me know if anyone does this.

 So, there will be more to come on thinking out your video story before leaving the newsroom to take a video (I think this will help us tremendously.)

I will be updating you on the process of my video project from start to finish.

Any comments or questions on any of the tips?