SPJ region 3 conference update

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- It's day two here at the SPJ region 3 convention at the University of South Carolina.

Yesterday was great. New people, new ideas. I attended the following sessions:

• New Media Challenges: I learned a lot more about managing online communities.
  
• Preparing for Tomorrow's Newsroom: A very original and insightful presentation by Joe Grimm.
  
• Freelancing for the New Media Age: There was basically no mention of new media, but the freelancing tips were good.
  
• Reception: Chatted with students and others while eating chicken and brownie and sipping sweet, sweet iced tea.
  

I was unable to liveblog the events yesterday afternoon because there is no guest access to USC's wireless network. I took notes and post summaries of the events when time allows.

What's on deck today:

• One-man Banding
• Mark of Excellence luncheon
• Reporting by the Numbers
• The Changing Political Landscape

Then we fly back to Miami tonight and it's deadline tomorrow!

In my mind I'm going to Carolina

And so the music-themed posts continue tonight...

I'll be traveling to Columbia, S.C. for the SPJ region three conference in a few hours. This will be my third regional conference in as many years, at which I represent the University of Miami campus chapter and The Miami Hurricane.

Region three includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Are you going? Let me know in a comment or via e-mail, greglinch[at]gmail.com.

Also, I'll be at Duke next week for the Next Newsroom conference. Drop me a line if you'll be there.

I love being a student and being able to travel to these conferences for free!

Stay tuned: I'll have my laptop there to liveblog and post general thoughts during both conferences. I will also have my video and still cameras.

Also, be sure to look for my Twitter updates during the conference -- and in general.

Weigh in: Would a tripod count against me as one of my two carry-on items? D'oh!

The CMSes they are a-changin'

Using a blogging platform for a Web site?

Yes.

After first planning to use Drupal, we've decided that it is no longer the best option for TheMiamiHurricane.com's new content management system.

So, (drumroll), we've decided to go with WordPress.

Why? In short, it is the better overall, long-term option. More reasons/details to come in a future post.

I'd like to thank Sean Blanda from Temple University. Sean's insights and advice -- via his blog, a session at the CMA conference in NYC that our news editor and adviser attended and an e-mail response to visuals editor Will Wooten -- helped us feel more confident in our final decision.

Some background: I started reading Sean's blog during spring break, particularly intrigued with the posts about the Temple News' experience with WordPress. Ironically, a day or two after reading some old posts, Will e-mailed me and brought up the idea of using WP after doing his own separate research.

Besides Temple, the Sagebrush at University of Nevada Reno also uses WordPress.

Advice for bloggers, part one: Reader stats

I started blogging in November to discuss online journalism, journalism education and other related topics.

Since mid-January, I've also been using the blog to fulfill an online journalism class requirement because everyone in class is required to maintain a blog.

Professor Sam Terilli, who spoke to my class Thursday about law and the Internet (see related video), brought up a point that one of my classmates, Josh Newman, mentioned on his blog Friday:

"[Terilli asked] the question that, I think, made most of my classmates (including myself, excluding Greg Linch) squirm a little. 'How many people read your blogs?' ...Silence."

Josh goes on to mention Google Analytics. This is a great service, but it's only one way to measure how many readers you have.

I subscribe to all of my classmates' blogs via Google Reader and would recommend that they utilize FeedBurner, an earlier suggestion (How to...use FeedBurner) that the class has been using, to keep track of their subscribers.

FeedBurner is great for adding an e-mail subscription widget, something our professor required, but that should only be a preliminary step.

Explore the different tabs in FeedBurner, specifically "Publicize" and "Analyze" -- the latter of which shows you how many RSS subscribers you have. The number of subscribers is also available on the "My Feeds" page.

There's a lot that can be said about the question of increasing blog traffic and readers, so I decided to divide my thoughts into shorter posts.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE, March 23: I clarified above that not all journalism students are required to blog -- only the ones in the CNJ 442 Online Journalism class.

Other School of Communication students have their on personal blogs and may blog through the SoC's Web site.

Also, I should have mentioned SiteMeter as another option for blog/site analytics.

Journalism prof, former Herald counsel's advice for new (or any) bloggers

Sam Terilli, a University of Miami journalism professor whose background is in law, spoke with my online journalism class Thursday about law and the Internet. He has practiced law for more than 24 years, including 12 as general counsel at The Miami Herald.

After his talk I asked him what advice he would give to a student wanting to start a blog. Check it out his answer, which is relevant to any blogger.

First map mashup for TheMiamiHurricane.com

It's not a technological marvel by any means, but it's an important first step to having interactive maps on TheMiamiHurricane.com - and later on the future site (expect an update post on that Thursday night, most likely).

As you can see, I used Google Maps.


View Larger Map

Why now to start?
As we were sending the paper to the printer, I was copyediting and came across a story in news about the Red Road Commons. I was disappointed to see there was no map requested (we need to do more print maps as well), so I felt inspired to just make a map for online.

Looking forward
We will definitely include more maps in the future. I also plan to expand this map by adding all of the on-campus dormitories and eventually popular off-campus.

One thing I need to play with and figure out: how to make smaller the windows that appear when you click the placemarkers.

SPJ job/internship panel

Change of plan for the streaming, please use this link to watch:

http://umtv.miami.edu/site/live.php

Job/internship panel to be livestreamed today at 12:30 p.m.

I'll be moderating a panel today that will discuss what students need to know and do to prepare for journalism jobs and internships.

My money is on mindset and skillset, in addition to the fundamentals.

The event will begin at 12: 30 p.m. in Studio A of the School of Communication and is hosted by the UM student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (and organized by me!).

The speakers are:

• Rick Hirsch, managing editor for multimedia at The Miami Herald
• Michelle Morgante, assistant Florida bureau chief with the Associated Press
• Kathy Pellegrino, recruitment editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The first part of the event will be a Q & A session with the panelists, each of which does recruiting work for his/her respective organization. After that, they will meet individually with students to provide personalized feedback, critique resumes, etc.

Inspiration for the livecast medium
After watching the livecast of a video strategy session (The Northern Short Course in Photojournalism) on ustream.tv, which Howard Owens teased on his blog, I thought it would be good to do the same with our session using that service.

And yesterday I saw Kyle Hansen's post LIVE Video! announcing that The Spartan Daily at San Jose (Calif.) State would be using ustream as well to broadcast a session Monday with the university president: The live video worked!

I had originally thought to do our livestream through the School of Comm's Web channel, but they don't have a player that I could use to embed the video.

Background
You may recall that this event was originally scheduled to take place during this year's Communication Week on Feb. 19. Unfortunately, we had to cancel because Fidel Castro decided to announcement that he was stepping down as president of Cuba that day.

Ask a question: Feel free to comment on this post or use the video player's built-in chat feature to submit a question, which requires registering with ustream.

Full disclosure: I interned at the Sentinel last summer and will be at The Herald this summer.

The discussion gets more interesting: Blogging about blogging, part deux

No, this is not a repeat post; this is "The Empire Strikes Back" version (sort of) to my last post, Blogging about blogging.

In that previous entry I linked to a March 12 post -- and a great follow-up -- by Howard Owens of GateHouse Media. With the first post, Owens responded to Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban's explanation (March 10) of why he banned bloggers in the Mavs locker room.

Here are some of Cuban's comments from a March 13 post that came a day after Owens' remarks, most likely aimed at the general response to his March 10 announcement:

• "...newspapers having 'bloggers' is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years."
• "Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business." [My reaction: really?]
  
• "A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog."
  
• "if I were marketing for them [The New York Times], I would be doing everything I could to send the message that 'The NY Times does not have blogs, we have Real Time Reports from the most qualified reporters in the world.' "
  

I comprehend his point regarding the Real Time Reports title, but this idea still seems contradictory to his "a blog is a blog is a blog" statement.

The Times' Saul Hansell responded earlier this evening with What I’ve Learned as a Blogger for The New York Times. Here are some of his points:

• "I’d say that blog is the name of a format for information and opinion that is roughly analogous to 'column' or 'newsletter.' The format itself doesn’t tell you whether the content is pedestrian or inflammatory, impressionistic or deeply researched."
• "...blogs are part of a conversation"
• "...blogs can be a great extension to articles reported initially for the newspaper"
• "One of the traditions of this place is an aversion to euphemisms. So call it whatever you want, but if it links like a blog, and is open like a blog, and interacts like a blog, then it is a blog."

These are all right on the mark, as is one of Owens' concluding remarks, which came before Cuba's more recent post: "So Cuban sells bloggers short, sadly."

Weigh in: What do you think of all these opinions? With whom do you agree?

Blogging about blogging

Several interesting blog posts about blogging have appeared in my Google Reader recently. Here are a few that I would recommend:

• 10 blogs your newspaper needs to rip off » Invisible Inkling
• Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond repuporsed print news | Howard Owens
  
• Mark Cuban hits nothing but air in his stance on blog media | Howard Owens
• The Journalism Iconoclast » A blog for bloggers

Security, namely regarding WordPress, has also been a hot topic after MultimediaShooter.com was hacked and put out of business. See two of Pat Thornton's posts here (about the hacking) and here (discussing WordPress and security) for a taste of the discussion.

As a side note, if you're interested in online journalism, blogging, etc., you should subscribe to each of these bloggers -- they always provide great insight.

See who else I read by scrolling down to "Journalism Blogs" on the right side of the page.

Weigh in: What's you favorite blog?

Tips on doing Web video from Ricardo Lopez

Listen below to excerpts of advice Miami Herald visual journalist Ricardo Lopez (left) gave my online journalism class on Feb. 28.

I captured the audio with my Olympus DS-30 using a lav. The photo is from the new media panel during Comm Week. Will Payne, from Current TV, is on the right.

More good advice from Mindy McAdams

A great post from Mindy McAdams:

What every journalism student needs to know (now)

It's a good summary of the fundamentals and skills student journalists/journalism students should know. The most important thing, as Mindy notes, is storytelling -- something that my online journalism professor, Chris Delboni, also emphasizes.