Toluu : Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media

Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media

It's about the journalism

Digital News Initiative UC Berkeley from richard hernandez on Vimeo.

Richard Koci Hernandez shows all the visual creativity we have come to associate him with in explaining what he’s been up to since leaving the San Jose Mercury News. Sounds like an amazing j-program.

I first saw this, posted by Chuck Fadely, at the Newspaper Video site.

Sunday squibsToday

A few links discovered over the past couple of days, not all of them related to journalism.

New Game requires New Mindset. One of several recent very smart posts about what newspapers need to do to ensure their futures, from Chuck Peters, the CEO of The Gazette Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Related: A 2009 Checklist for Newspaper Publishers, another smart post based on a reality check from a long-time newspaperman.
Treading water. Zac Echola doesn’t post often, but when he does, his thoughts on media are worth reading. A nice tale here, which starts with ice farming.
Interview with Jon Ortiz about ‘blog backs’. Blog backs, which help build community by further enhancing the value of comments, is an intriguing idea that seems ripe for more widespread adoption. More proof that there are an awful lot of smart people out there.
My next assignment: covering online journalism. Former LA Times reporter Eric Ulken has given himself a new gig: “Beginning in January, my plan is to spend six months or so writing about trends and best practices in the fiel

Further to the Sun’s new website (update)Yesterday

UPDATE: Dave, in the comments, says RSS is coming in a few days.

A couple of further notes on the redone Vancouver Sun website:

1. The handful of readers who have so far commented are pretty much split. Some like it, others don’t. That’s pretty typical for any redesign, either of a newspaper or its website.

2. Inexplicably, there are no RSS feeds. The old feeds are broken and I can’t find anything at the site that points to the new feeds. There is a listing for sitemap / RSS in the bottom-of-the-page index list, but there’s nothing about RSS at the end of that link. (I’m not the only one who has noticed this: it’s been pointed out by several of the people I follow on Twitter. So far no reaction from any of the Sun staffers.)

I suspect the latter isn’t a big deal for most of those who use the Sun’s website. But for those of us who rely on RSS as our primary news delivery system, the lack of feeds basically takes the Sun out of the equation.

Getting closeYesterday

Two more shots from the G10 today, testing the camera’s macro ability and the spot-metering. Both were shot at 200 ISO.

I spotted these little lovelies about a block from my place. I didn’t measure how close I got, but basically, I was right on top of them when I shot in the G-10’s macro mode. I applied a touch of the recovery filter in Aperture to bring down the highlights and there’s a bit of edge sharpening (mainly because I wanted to try the edge sharpening tool). The photo was exported as a JPEG with a quality setting of six. That seems to have taken a little off the intensity of the reddish-brown centres of the fungi, but only a little.

Another shot taken through the window of a coffee shop. (What can I say? It’s rainy here in Vancouver.) The goal here was to test the spot meter: I took the reading from the driver’s face. I needed both the Recovery and Highlights filters in Aperture to tone down the highlights on the cars, which were basically blown out. I probably should have bumped the saturation down a little. It’s not a shot that will win any awards, but the spot meter (which is easily and quickly accessible with the touc

What the local daily did (update)November 29

UPDATE: This is sweet. The new Sun video player is huge (at least by web standards).

The Vancouver Sun, the local quality daily, has gone live with a remake of its web site. I haven’t had a chance to dig too deeply into yet, but it’s nicely done. The site is about 20 per cent wider, photos are bigger and there’s still lots of content on the front but it’s much better organized.

For comparison, heres a screenshot of the old site, snapped just before 3 p.m. The improvement is vast.

Some of the changes I’ve so far noticed: the site finally has its own URL (before it was a subdirectory of the canada.com site), the top navigation bar is two-deep and that makes finding info much quicker, multimedia is much easier to find (some of the my j-students didn’t even know the Sun does multimedia), blogs are prominently featured, extended photo coverage and videos that accompany stories are included in tabbed windows with the stories (other newspapers take note) and some articles are accompanied by sidebars with related stories from other CanWest newspapers and other media sources.

There’s an awf