Author: Ryan Thornburg

Why Do We Need a CMS?

A bit of career advice for anyone in an online news organization: Never get roped in to leading the creation of your site’s new content management system. Yes, you may realize that the business rules that underly the CMS will determine who has the power to make decisions in your newsroom, but CMS projects are like storming the beach at Normandy — even if it’s successful, many involved in the operation will not survive.

With that optimistic image fresh in your mind, let’s look at what CMSs do and why your news organization needs one.

Continue reading “Why Do We Need a CMS?”

Why Journalists Need to Know HTML

I’ve written in a previous post that journalism students should be taught HTML as a way of helping them understand the concept of separating content from formatting. But I ran in to another perfect example today of why even journalists who are working in a CMS and working primarily with text need to know some basic HTML.

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Viral News: The Distributed Watercooler

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, journalists are loath to do anything they think would make them “seem like a pimp.” The problem with their hesitancy is that it too often means that important news stories get buried beneath entertaining ones and the public discourse is diminished.

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IT Fluency for Journalists

Dan Gillmor’s recent blog post about the future of journalism education — particularly collegiate schools of journalism — is highlighting once again what is perhaps the most popular debate in our field. The question revolves basically around this: How much technology do journalists need to know? Continue reading “IT Fluency for Journalists”

Budget Cuts Begin to Hurt

After extolling the virtues in post after post of UNC’s computer based training as a wonderful resource that’s free to every student, the University announced today that it would be shutting the site down on Feb. 28.

The move was done “in order to achieve the level of budget cuts currently mandated.”

The full announcement and address to send letters after the jump.

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How to Report for New Media

Reporting for New Media in Six Easy Steps!https://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=reportingforonlinespring2009-1233605909423729-3&stripped_title=reporting-for-new-media-in-six-easy-steps

Links Referenced in This Lecture:

MP3 Audio of the Lecture

Lecture: Reporting for online media

Online Exercise: Write an FAQ

FAQs are a good way to introduce students to online news writing and editing for three reasons.

The key to good FAQs — of course — is to formulate a good set of questions. A good question is at the start of all good reporting. And to formulate a good set of questions, the FAQ writer needs to have a very good sense of his or her audience. There are a few questions to consider when thinking about writing an FAQ.

  • Who is the audience?
  • What would they already need to know to get value out of this FAQ?
  • What search terms would they use to find this FAQ?
  • How would they use the information they find on the FAQ

Consider those questions and see if you can answer them for each of these examples of online FAQs that employ different styles. Continue reading “Online Exercise: Write an FAQ”

How to Plan an Online News Project

If I had to pick only one difference between the mindset of print and online journalists, it’s the way they plan. Online journalists are more likely to have to collaborate with a large group, they are often working on longer time horizons on products that has longer shelf-lives. They are dealing with lots of smaller moving pieces and have to try to get management approval using static words and images to represent a project that will have a lot of animation and user-driven customization.

So, if you want to work online doing something other than breaking news you have to learn how to plan. In my experience, any online project — from an election returns database to a deadline explainer on the capture of Saddam Hussein — needs six things:

  1. A product concept
  2. A storyboard
  3. Asset management
  4. A clear workflow
  5. A financial budget
  6. A testing and quality assurance procedure

Continue reading “How to Plan an Online News Project”

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