Web skills workshop
Digital know-how for journalists
bit.ly/wbsklz15
Valuable online multimedia, data journalism, and business skills for in-demand news reporters
As news happens, it'll continue to need to be reported, but the way that reporting happens and by whom will continuously change. The question is, can you keep up with what's expected in the most cutting edge newsrooms? Or better yet, can you stay relevant by bringing cutting edge ideas to newsrooms?
Let's discuss how to:
- Use advanced web search features such as operators, booleans, quotes, punctuation and regular expressions to fine tune your query results for information and media.
- Interpret analytics, page views, traffic referrals, social media metrics; how SEO affects your work; also employ best practices when writing SEO-friendly headlines, subheads, captions, metadata, descriptions, keywords, titles, alt tags and file names.
- Use best techniques for capturing, composing and editing multimedia.
- Understand how news applications are programmed and the basics of web development.
- Acquire data, scrape data, clean data, query data, analyze data, visualize data, explain data.
- Exercise FOIA rights, and know when digital copyright laws apply regarding intellectual property, A/V recording, etc.
- Use content management systems, cloud storage and version control for editing.
Advanced Search
Go beyond your usual search techniques. Use methods that return results from deep beneath the surface.
How to Find Anything Online With Advanced Search Techniques
Web Analytics
Become well-versed in the ways that readers read your content vs. the ways that search engines do.
Using the "News Keywords" Tag for Google News
Headlines vs. Page Titles: The Best Way to Optimize Your Blog for Search
SEO Myths You Should Stop Thinking About
Online Multimedia
Get familiar with great free web tools for online multimedia.
Soundcite
Tiled Mosaic Galleries
News Applications
Interact with the full amount of information associated with news stories, events and people.
Compare Killed By Police to The Guardian's The Counted
Data Management
Experiment with tools that let you analyze and visualize the data behind your reporting.
CartoDB
Odyssey.js
Highcharts
spritesapp
Leaderboard
Open Refine
Narrative Science
Again, what could be changing in the news industry is who ultimately does the reporting. Narrative Science, created by programmers at Northwest University (a joint effort between researchers at its J-school, its CS program plus language experts), developed a very sophisticated reporter bot. What began as an artificial intelligence news reporting technology initially focused on baseball game summaries and routine financial reporting, stirred debate because this computer mind was reporting news copy that was pretty indistinguishable from what was typically written by a human reporter, yet in a matter of seconds, not minutes or hours. Now the company is aiming beyond the news industry by targeting its technology at various "big data" companies. A May 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review, written by Narrative Science CEO and a co-founder, Stuart Frankel, claims in its title that "Data Scientists Don't Scale." Frankel says:
Any organization where employees are spending valuable time on manual, repetitive tasks is a prime case for intelligent automated solutions.
and
We're at the beginning of the next phase of big data, a phase that will have very little to do with data capture and storage and everything to do with making data more useful, more understandable and more impactful.
Digital Legalese
Understand your rights as a reporter.
Content Management
Keep savvy, flexible and innovative regarding ways to get your work done.
WordPress and its competing web publishing platforms
professed professor