The last week of the Maynard Multimedia Editing Program is finally here. Yes, I said finally.
I missed my home and my family and my dog and I am not ashamed at all.
I’ll miss the Maynard family too, though.
Shelly,
roomie Amy
Prescilla, Brooke….. You know, EVERYBODY. (I can’t type “a href=”http://maynard.blogs.mu/your_name” one more time, you dig?)
Yesterday, I was trotting up the hill from the apartment and I looked back to see a sliver of gold over the trees.
I stopped in my tracks and stood there for 10 minutes, watching the moon rise over purple-hazed mountains.
I thought, “I’ll never have this moment again.”
It’s been a learning experience, this fellowship. I grumbled more than my share, swore and drank and whined about homework. I know the glow my mind’s already casting over Reno is partly from endorphins after #maynardmedia labor is over.
I’m forgetting all the contractions and that I never got my epidural. All I remember is that I started learning html and how to Webify copy, made great friends (like Tiffany Arnold. I can’t get the link to be clickable so go look her up in the sidebar!

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The Fellows are all in some sort of employment back home. But we’d all be liars if we said we were perfectly sure our jobs were safe, or felt no itch to move up or out. 

Why am I not at The Oklahoman or Tulsa World, when I’ve proved I can handle the work, learn design and catch mistakes? 

Two words:

Hiring Freeze.

Hiring freezes also mean positions can be cut or not filled. This makes everybody in editing a little itchy, because we know how many mistakes we miss while fully staffed, you know?

It makes me shudder a little to think of large metropolitan newspapers with three-person copy desks. But it may happen, and I, as a lone copy editor, have no power to change that.

Click the Twitter “Fail Whale” photo for helpful information on failure in general. Side note: I just rediscovered the power of “align code” in HTML. Did I mention I love HTML? Not that journalism has failed. But it is on the brink, and acknowledging that means finding ways to stay in it and continue to pay the bills.

Paying on time’s another deal.

The session today dealt with self-marketing and survival plans for journalism careers.

Career path tips

Be as aggressive about getting your next job as you would be about investigating a story or tracking down accurate information for articles you edit.
Know the market value for your current or desired job.
You can use salary.com or The Newspaper Guild’s data to start learning how much your skills are worth.
Promote yourself through networking, such as getting employers to recommend you on LinkedIn, or noting your language skills and job training on your resume.
There will be more information coming. I need this as much as any of the Fellows.

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My (slightly profane) action movie quotes for the week: “Yeah, I’m not as smart as you guys with all this computer sh–. But hey, I’m still alive, ain’t I?”
(Live Free or Die Hard–Bruce Willis)

“When the dying starts, this little psychof— family of ours is going to rip itself apart.” (Riddick: Pitch Black–Vin Diesel)
Week 5 and tempers are short.
very short.
Me-without-high-heels kind of short.  So the ducks of insufficient practice time and overwhelming assignment loads are still pecking away.
Proof? I’ve been wanting to blog about Search Engine Optimization for days now. Days, I tell you.

Gil Asakawa, Manager of Audience Development for Media News Group, gave the Fellows advice on making content “search friendly.”

You know–Google juice.

They range from the obvious–use keywords—to the unexpected. 

SEO tips

Create new headlines for breaking news updates.

Avoid puns.

Front-load headlines.

Use famous names, not descriptions, but use descriptions with lesser known names (Michael Jackson, “Octomom”.)

Always get company names from stories in headlines.

Introduce columnists–they have built in name recognition and Google juice!

Include as many location references as possible on pages to get them indexed higher in search engine pages.

IMPORTANT: Hard news ledes beat featurey ones in the Webby Wars. 

Also important: disconnect briefs and post them as separate stories online.

Add meta keywords to section fronts. They’ll act like invisible tag words.

Be first.

Users don’t go to your site to find your stories. They search for things they care about, and if your site isn’t one of the first to pop up with words they searched for in the headline–hunny, they ain’t clickin’.

The next thing to do is buckle down to work on my training module on cutlines and edit video I shot yesterday. Over July the Fourth weekend, of course.

Lesigh.

F–ing video. I’m still not very good. But I have improved.  My video of “Eats and Sweets on the Truckee River” will be up on Monday. I’m sure you can’t wait.

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Cory Haik=coolness.
The director for digital content at the Seattle Times flippin’ microblogged during a 26.2 mile marathon. With her smartphone. It went up live on the Web site with a map plotting points of interest on her route. No editors touched the content before it went up–which is cool and frightening at the same time. It works the best and makes the most sense for breaking news.
We also met with Haik’s former coworker, Alex Oliver. They were at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Yeah.
That storm.
Hence the snazzy job titles and air of confidence in their own genius. Battle-tested digijournalists are probably the best equipped to carry print journalism into online-only or online-first.
I’m not battle tested. I’m just battling a cold…or something. My friend Michael Baker from The Oklahoman looked at me during our “local news: The unassailable asset” workshop and asked, “Eli? Are…are you OK?”
So I took my decidedly unappetizing self home. Sigh.
Haik and Oliver also spent time talking with the Fellows about mobile journalism. Breaking news and disaster coverage–maybe journalism in general, soon–depend on nimbleness and speed. Being able to cover things live and instantly is a great opportunity for journalists.  I’m trying to keep in mind, though, that just because it’s cool and you can, doesn’t mean you ought to. 

Audiences are getting more sophisticated, however, and are starting to expect things like live twitterfeeds and clickable google maps.  I’m also interested in the approach to breaking news they demonstrated that uses a blog as a content management system and allows you to Tweet, text or e-mail updates to publish live. I <3 content management systems. When I get back to Oklahoma (so soon now!) I’m planning to research grad school  for studying various CMS models.

The blog-as-breaking news-CMS idea gives me a great excuse to buy a smartphone and netbook and flipcam and….Oliver said we should guard against “gadget lust,” but I’m sure I have my addiction under control. But this?
This is hot.
Bow chicka bow bow..

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I am embarassingly bad. But I am also new at this. I won’t allow myself to be too depressed about it. But I plan to work my way to a nice little flip cam and laptop with Windows MovieMaker and practice for WEEKS editing and shooting before I ever upload my own video again. It’s so choppy and graceless, this movie. But I’ll skip more whining about it. I’m the only one who expects my first try to be perfect. With video, I mean. Copy editing is another game entirely.

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I’m learning how to make news better with data now. Dennis Joyce, our data deity from tbo.com showed us (again with the ducks) many data products news organizations can use for data as storytelling.

Data from Steve Doig, the professor who gets Cronk with computer assisted reporting. I put it into manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com and made it a bar chart from the excel file. Pretty little thing.

I promised I would talk a little about my Reno Gazette Journal shift. I got to do a variety of things. I edited two stories (which were held because they needed space for handling Michael Jackson’s death. Good reason.) One headline made it in the paper, which is still exciting for me to see.

“Fans can take a swing at buying autographed Babe Ruth baseball.”

Read the story here.
I made lots of changes to the story that never made it to print. I’m hoping I’ll get some feedback about it this week. I watched one of the reporters post a story to the site using their Saxotech content management system and change the photos for the top stories of the day. I noticed they don’t attempt to change headlines for SEO or try to webize the story and make it tighter and “chunkier” with subheads.
I proofed a few pages and caught some mistakes…I went to dinner at a nice Mexican place I plan to come back to when I’m not on the clock and can try their margaritas, and I watched the designer layout A1. It was interesting, but except for the few minutes I spent observing their Web procedure, I’m not sure I learned that much. I worked at a big newspaper after graduating from Oklahoma State University last year. I’ve totally figured out the general structure of a newsroom and I’ve edited on deadline before. I wanted to work on copy and I didn’t get to do that much, just a couple of small related stories.Sigh.

Oh! Mark Hiland from azcentral.com taught about video and online project management. I’m a horrible videographer, but I hope that with practice I can become an OK editor. I can pull together something in Moviemaker with a modicum of swearing.
his module on project management will probably be the most valuable for me. I want to be able to concieve an idea and work with Web, print and advertising to make it a great multiplatform product.

So here are the ways to do that

:
Get the project leaders from the various offices in on planning from almost the beginnning.
Set deadlines and coordinate those deadlines across platforms. Create storyboards and wireframes to visualize the end Web and print products and see where your reporters will need to gather data or plan for alternative story forms.
When the reporting, designing and programming are done and the marketing for the project has been approved, soft launch it on an internal server so your lovely, underpaid, hardworking and brill copy editors can point out all the stuff you did wrong before anyone else sees it.
Then hard launch it-ON TIME-and evaulate its success using a Web analytics program and user feedback along with staff’s ideas on how the process went.
Then you can go get a margarita and wait for the next big idea to hit you.

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The ducks are winning. I won’t be able to do a full blog today–I’m too busy. Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll blog about the million things I’ll want to remember when I’m finally home again. I’m succumbing to homesick crankiness, though. I’m having Renal failure.

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These numbers are the magic code to reader snagging. I learned that today in a great session taught by the Tampa Tribune’s Dennis Joyce, who works in the paper’s Data Center. It’s a converged newsroom with Web , print and TV housed together.
So let’s delve in to the wonderful world of Web heds, shall we?
11–A few studies have found Web readers read only the first two words of a headline. 11 characters. This makes keywords–as my mom would say–hella important.
110–the length of your usual news tweet on Twitter. Twitter accepts text up to 140 characters, but if you’re tweeting about a story, you want to save room for the link.
60–Web heads at the New York Times and Tampa paper are generally this many characters. That gives you about 5 long words. I will never gripe about tight counts again…
140—the length of a tweet, and a good tight lede of an article. I really like this rule. I’ve found many ledes dragged on FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR in a story and I wasn’t always sure what the right cut point was. Now I know!

Pecked to death by ducks

I know this is bratty. Maybe it’s the altitude. But I feel nibbled at by a million fowl all the time in Reno. I want to study so many things I learned the first week, but I’m learning so many interesting things every day that I almost feel guilty about wanting to concentrate. Gahh.
The things I need-desperately–to focus on this week? Studying AP style for my editing shift tomorrow at The Reno Gazette-Journal. Studying HTML. Starting work on the training module I’m doing on writing better cutlines. Michael Roberts from the Arizona Republic (I have a crush on this organization for sure) is training the Fellows in –training. Next post will probably be about that–if I can escape the ducks.

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I saw Saturday how engagement–bringing news into the world of your readers–varies from place to place. Oklahoma’s pretty country, oui?
Purt dang countray.
But in a bigger city like Tulsa where I live now, a rodeo would not be cause for a parade.
Reno Rodeo=big news, kids. They’re already selling tickets for 2010. They paint horses! I never dreamed you could hot roll a horse’s tail and put a bow on it.
The little cheerleaders changed my view on life. They had to navigate piles of horse ….waste…..without breaking formation. I guess if you grow up in Reno and backflip through dung at least once a year in front of friends, family and camera-toting tourists, nothing will faze you ever again.

“Boy, when I was your age, I did cartwheels for three blocks in the Reno Rodeo Parade right after a passel of Clydesdales with the runs. Uphill. Blindfolded. Don’t whine to me.”

So my point is, learn what matters to the people around you. Knowing what matters to you is a good start. But Reno citizens feel about rodeos the way I feel about shiny high-heeled shoes. I would never have known without going out and getting involved. The bike race was also a big deal. The excitement was infectious.

my favorite part of the parade was the little girl in traditional American Indian dress. She was so small and proud and, well, adorable.

Reno cheerleaders deserve hazard pay. Why? Cartwheels through horse crap. Wow.

Tiffany, Brooke and I went to downtown Reno and walked into the bike race.

Amazingly, Paddington (my point and shoot) took some pretty cool shots of the bike race.