Playing the News

Can a videogame do journalism? The game and documentary Playing the News raise important questions that deserve more attention from journalists and educators.

Good conversation

Smart Cities has a really good set of interviews about the relationship between emerging digital media, youth culture, and learning.

Here is a post with an image

Here is some text and now I will add an image.

Here is the first post.

This is a test post to show how blogging works. I can:

• make a bullet point
• and another.

Alternatively I can:

1. Make a numbered list.
   
2. Or italic
   

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Future History of the Media?

There is an interesting flash movie that envisions mergers between corporate behemoths capable of combining sophisticated search engines, recommender systems, video on demand personal publishing systems, email and mammoth databases into a news delivery system that will destroy “mainstream media” once and for all. (Or perhaps we should use Jay Rosen’s preferred term, “legacy media, although that term acquires a new poignance in this scenario. The transcript for the video is here

I tend to agree with one of my colleagues on the Journalism History discussion list that the doomsday scenario for the legacy media is premature, for the most part. (It does seem that the outlook for radio news is bleak, but that’s a different discussion.) Rather than forcing legacy media out of business, I think that the real lesson of such applications as weblogs and Google news lies in the ways in which journalist use them as proxies for the public square.

A news reporter can substitute a casual survey of weblogs for the old man-in-the-street interview, and Google News can become the dataset from which samplings of press coverage and opinions are derived. Granted, the Google news database is more comprehensive that what an individual news organization can filter through alone. Is this a good thing? I suppose we will find out.

The Power and limits of lifelogging

In the classroom, I encourage students to use weblogs primarily as a knowledge management tool, and secondarily as a tool for reflection. This Frank Nack article on a collection of innovative tools for “lifelogging,” as well as his reflections on the potential and limits of multimedia blogging technology for recording and sharing thoughts and experiences raises some good questions. Does the information captured through blogging lose value when being decontextualized and recontextualized? I think there may be gains as well as losses, but it’s part of my purpose in experimenting with them.

Project resources for Interactive Storytelling

Information on Northern Liberties

• Northern Liberties.org: guide to shops and local attractions.
• Some notes on the history of the neighborhood.
• Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association
• Philadelphia History
• Neighborhood discussion board
• Sample real estate
• Sugar Refinery, 1844
• Water Works
• Profile of a prominent developer

Why learning HTML still matters

Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review makes the case for insisting that journalism students learn to code HTML by hand, and I think he is right. Our students are exposed to basic html coding in our introduction to professional writing class, and they have the opportunity to learn more by participating in our online magazine, or by taking courses in Interactive Multimedia. Beyond the points that Niles makes, I think it’s important for reporters and writers to be able to hand code so that you are not at the mercy of the WYSIWYG software manufacturers, and so that you can better communicate with the media designers and programmers with whom you might be working.

Management by blogging around

Back in the 80s, management gurus such as Tom Peters and Peter Drucker talked abotu the need to get closer to customers, to manage by walking around. Now exectives do it virtually with weblogs such as this one by GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.