Michael Baker’s Blog

Just finished editing my final video for the Maynard program. I’ve learned a lot, though I do think the video I did before this one was better.

Here’s the brief story behind it: I had to do something and originally wanted to go to the planetarium on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. But, when I called there wasn’t anybody there that would consent to an interview (STRIKE ONE).

I then headed to downtown Reno to watch and interpretive dance group, but its performance did start until 8 p.m. It was only 5 p.m. and about 98 degrees outside, so I wasn’t going to stick around (STRIKE TWO).

As I walked around I saw some teens (at least they looked like teens to me) smoking hookah pipes, but kept walking for a bit to see what else I could find. I found nothing, but when I turned around to find the hookah smokers they had left (STRIKE THREE).

I then looked across the Truckee River and saw a guy playing a banjo on the river bank. As I started to head over, a fellow fellow spotted me and started telling me about the great interview she got with a banjo player (STRIKE FOUR — yes I know I was out after strike three, but this isn’t baseball).

So I continued to walk and eventually entered the Truckee River Gallery. There I found a landscape photographer with a story.

Maybe I’m getting better at this video thing. I keep trying anyway.

Last night I edited my fifth video ever. As far as actually getting it done and published somewhere, I’m 4 for 5.

Over the weekend, I interviewed Henna artist Kim Allcock as she worked on my hand.

A bit better than the previous videos I’ve done. It took a some clicking in Movie Maker to figure out how to separate video clips and audio so that I could do the cut aways.

The end to me gets a little weak with some of those cuts. A big thanks to my roommate Dave Woods, who helped film while my right hand was being drawn on. It’s tough to hold the right hand still and film with the left.

OK, one final blog here to catch up on a Sunday. Did I mention that my blog was unavailable for a few days. Some how I got kicked off the list of Maynard fellow blogs.

I wanted to mention one more thing that I had fun doing last week. Playing with data.

In town last week was Dennis Joyce, an editor with the Data Circle at the The News Center, the converged newsroom of The Tampa Tribune, News Channel 8 and TBO.com.

Dennis was a good presenter and gave us many useful tips about story telling online. But I thought the sessions really excelled on the last day when he showed us some quick things to do with data. And Dennis is also a really good cook.

Here are some examples of things his team has put together for TBO.com:

Government employees salaries

Skyway suicides

And a guide to Tampa Bay strip clubs

He also showed us the Web site Manyeyes.

It was there that I did some fun things with a Wordle. I did this with the February 2009 State of the State Address of Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry.

Lots of fun. Thanks Dennis.

Mark Hiland, senior director of digital operations for the Arizona Republic, came to Reno to give some instructions to the fellows. It was a good day and a half of video and multimedia presentation

“Shooting video is a lot about anticipation,” he told us. He gave us a lot of tips about how to frame interviews using the rule of thirds and about how to shoot sequences — wide, medium, tight, tighter. We edited video.

I shot some video of people constructing sets for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, which begins July 11. The crew was doing the work at the University of Nevada, Reno. Along with fellow Henry Lopez, of the Santa Fe New Mexican, we put together the following video.

Wish I would have had some tips on shooting sequences before I went out and did that video. But, with Henry’s editing, it turned out OK.

Mark also gave us some really nice tips on managing online projects. He essentially gave us a step-by-step guide to developing a project. Something I’m definitely going to take home to The Oklahoman with me.

I leave you with these steps for online project management: 
1. Frame the idea
2. Create the project plan (an outline of what you want it to look like) and set deadlines for content, coding, advertising, copy editing and launching.
3. Code the pages
4. Soft launch
5. Revise
6. Hard launch
7. Keep evaluating and set a schedule for maintaining the site.

Pulitzer Prize winner Warren Lerude, a professor of media law at the University of Nevada, Reno, spoke to the group last week about libel law. Check out a slideshow of Lerude speaking about the First Amendment by clicking HERE.

Lerude’s presentation was a good refresher course. It’s always important that journalists understand the law behind their decisions. “A lot is about knowing your defenses,” Lerude told me after class.

Truth was established as a defense in seditious libel cases as a result of the John Peter Zenger trial in New York in 1735.
New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court case, established that for a public official to establish libel they would have to show actual malice. The case began with a March, 1960 advertisement placed by Alabama civil rights activists in the New York Times headlined “Heed their Rising Voices.” The advertisement described resistance to the civil rights movement in the South, but it had some minor inaccuracies. The police commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., Louis Sullivan, sued under the state’s libel law. After losing at the trial court and an Alabama appeals court, the New York Times petitioned the Supreme Court and the court heard. In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said for a public official to successfully sue for libel, he or she would have to prove actual malice — an organization new something was false, but printed it anyway. Set the standard for reckless disregard.

Other Supreme Court decisions have refined this since, such as a Saturday Evening Post case. The Post said a coach conspired to “fix” a game, but the Court determined the magazine had time to check facts and it should have got it right.

And there was AP v. Walker, which brought in the discourse about a public figure and set different standards for breaking news.

There’s a good breakdown of all these cases and others HERE at a Radford University professor’s site. I pulled a lot of my links from his notes. Thanks Professor Kovarik.

Lerude also spoke about the Internet. Important for journalists and news organizations is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act helps protects aspects of  free speech online. In short, if comments are posted online, a news organization can only be responsible for libel is they edit those comments.

I’ve gone on too long about libel. I find the subject very interesting. I just want to leave you with this video from The People v. Larry Flint, a good movie. I also was reminded of this from Kovarik’s notes.

It’s been way too long since I blogged. My apologies to my reader.

Now I’m refreshed and feeling better, so let’s play some catch up.

Last week, there were some tremendous sessions — beginning with a J. Ford Huffman, an editor, writer, designer and artist who advised the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, the weekly Ellsworth (Maine) American and Morris Communication in Savannah, Ga., during the past year. He also was the head designer of USA Today.

Huffman took the Maynard group on a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art (no photographs allowed inside, of course. It’s a museum after all). The purpose was to get the group out of it’s comfort zone and begin thinking about design from a different perspective.

They also had some really cool sculptures out front that you could take pictures of, such as

A horse sculpture made of drift wood.

A sculpture by Kate Raudenbush called Guardian of Eden

A reflection of me: A photo taken from underneath Guardian of Eden.

A day later, Huffman then spoke with the group about newspaper design for a day. His presentation and critique of newspapers gave the class a new way of thinking about how our newspapers were designed — from the order of headlines to how color schemes worked.

Then today, Monday, we began thinking about training modules that we can take back to our newsrooms. Mine is “How to write for the Web so that your stories will be seen.” Wish me luck. I have a lot of research to do.

A new week at the Maynard Institute fellowship began in fantastic fashion with a Web 2.0 presentation by Amy Eisman, the director of writing programs in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.

Eisman has a plethora of experience in teaching workshops and with 17 years as an editor with Gannett.

She began by telling us what are some expectation of a Web site:

• More visual, more video, more presentation.
• Search is key: Readers often come into a Web site sideways, or not from the homepage.
• Aggregation is expected.
• Social networking. It’s not a fad.
• User generated content. She says is still shaking out, but interacting with reader comments is one way to do this.
• Niche scratches itch. The individual journalist is branding themselves.
• Frequent updates.
• Mobility.
• Usability.
• Experimentation and entrepreneurism.
• Blog formats and language.
• Metrics
• Data-driven information.
• Transparency.
• Text still counts.

Now Web sites should be:

• Deeper.
• Have breaking news blogs.
• Twitter and search engine optimization.
• Video strategy.
• Mash-ups.
• News and information.
• Data-driven story telling.
• Engaging to readers.
• Self branding.
• Matrix that works.

She also showed the class some real neat twitter aggregating Web sites:

• twazzup: pulls from twitter and other resources.
• tweetgrid: a search of different twitter streams.

My paper should link to twazzup when they have a topic that is getting some traffic, such as the latest on Jessica Alba and her run in with the Oklahoma City law. Check out the story on NewsOK.com by clicking HERE. If you want to look at what twazzup did with it try HERE.

Check out my next blog for a trip to the Nevada Museum of Art with J. Ford Huffman, an editor, writer, designer and artist who advised the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, the weekly Ellsworth (Maine) American and Morris Communication in Savannah, Ga., during the past year.

Huffman also spoke to the Maynard fellows on Monday.

On Friday, I learned some basics of the Final Cut Express video editing program. Before I had used Movie Maker and put together some simple videos, so I wanted to move beyond.

Henry Lopez, a fellow Maynardite and all-around nice guy, led my session. Henry is the Web editor for The Santa Fe New Mexican.

In Final Cut, it appears you can make a project as complicated as you want.

During the all-day session, I tried to put together a video on a story I found at the University of Nevada, Reno.

As I walked through the Fine Arts building, I heard a power saw. Following the sound, I poked my head into a large studio where several people where building arches and doors. Turns out, the group was building sets for the Shakespeare Festival in Lake Tahoe. The festival will begin July 11, a day after I’m set to depart the area and return home. Too bad for me.

I was going to say “Click HERE for my video story, but I can’t get the link to work. Maybe, one of my fellow Maynardites can help me out with this, please.

Flash…..AHA! Click here for my first attempt at an animation. Pretty basic stuff, but fun for me.

I also did a credit page. Click here to check it out.

Both those are very basic things that anybody can do. Other than teaching me some concepts, I couldn’t do much more.

For more complicated projects, there are templates…. Thank you, Knight Digital Media Center.

We began the day at the Reno Gazette Journal offices. They took the Maynard group on a tour of the offices. It’s a bit smaller than my paper, but an impressive operation.

During the lunch break, I took some video of people building the sets for an upcoming Shakespeare festival at Lake Tahoe. Tomorrow, we begin learning some advanced video editing techniques. I may need to shot some more video to edit for my project, but won’t get a chance to shoot a rehearsal. Too bad, because I think with that I could make a pretty decent package.

Another full day here at the Maynard Institute’s multimedia editing program. I’ve been exposed to several new things. Arrived about 7:15 a.m. to take some pictures of campus and collect some information of what I was looking at. I’ll share them below in one of my first Soundslides projects.

We started the day with audio. I struggled a bit through the program. We used Amadeus Pro. I hear it’s a lot more complicated than Audacity, which I had a bit of training on. Our instructor, Michelle Johnson, provided the audio for us to piece together a quick clip. She called it an NPR-style radio clip. It might have been in the right hands. I’m not so sure NPR would play mine.

Click here for my first audio attempt.

We then moved on to Soundslides, which were a lot of fun.

My first Soundslides attempt is below. We used some photos and music provided by Michelle to put it together.

Pretty cool, huh.

I then put together an audio slideshow using the photos I took this morning. It’s a two-minute-plus tour of the University of Nevada, Reno. Check it out below.

I took all the photos and wrote the bad captions.

During the day, I also learned how to upload my projects to a server, otherwise they wouldn’t be viewable here as they took up too much memory.

Tomorrow, I’m exposed to Flash. I’m terrified.