Using the Web to supercharge concert reviews

I really enjoyed Kat Cameron's review of Dada Life on theorion.com this morning, but it made me think about how much better concert reviews can be when they're published on the Web.

The review itself does what it needs to do: lets readers know what the concert was like, how the crowd reacted, what songs were played, etc. Kat did a nice job of putting the reader inside the Senator during the concert.

Here are some ways a Web version could have been a better experience for readers:

• Include a sound clip from Dada Life's website by adding a link to the review.

The rowdy crowd sang along and danced in unison to hits like “Rolling Stones T-Shirt,” “Do the Dada” and the duo’s remix of Duck Sauce’s “Big Bad Wolf.”

• Explain some of the music terms for readers unfamiliar with them (like me).

Dubstep and drum and bass producer 12th Planet performed an hour-long set to warm up the crowd before Dada Life. The Los Angeles producer played a variety of genres in his set, from trap to electro, dubstyle to DnB. His set was anything but ordinary.

• Add a photo (or a video, if you can get permission from the promoter)  that shows what the review describes:

A LED wall the length of the stage played videos of cartoons dancing to the music and occasionally displayed lyrics for a sing-a-long vibe.

• Do interviews with an iPhone or portable video camera on the sidewalk after the show asking  concertgoers for 10-15 second reviews. Post the best five or six to theorion.com via YouTube.

• Post a concert photo on The Orion Facebook page during the show asking for mini-reviews from those attending: "Did you go to tonight's Dada Life concert at The Senator? What did you think?"

• Post the full review hours (instead of days) after the concert is over. Refer readers to the snapshot video reviews and the Facebook comments. Enable comments.

This is all a lot more work, but it's also a lot more fun for the writer. Pushing interactivity will boost the audience for both the review and the website, and readers will start looking for reviews on theorion.com once they know how much extra effort is going into the reviews.

Digital-first coverage of the governor's visit

 The Orion's coverage of Gov. Jerry Brown's appearance on campus yesterday was textbook digital-first journalism, and I'm guessing the effort will continue with tomorrow's print edition of the paper.

Remember the news diamond I wrote about last week? The Orion staff followed it to a T. Here's what happened...

Alert
On Thursday, Editor-in Chief Kacey Gardner tweeted that a visit was in the wind and invited readers to follow theorion_news on Twitter.
The next day, theorion_news confirmed time and place: Monday outside the Student Services Center.
As the event got under way, Paul Smeltzer, Quinn Western, Pedro Quintana, Lauren Beaven and Jake Martin (some of them doing an assignment for their Internet Newspapers and Magazine class) started posting details.
The coverage included descriptions of the preliminaries and Brown surrogates, quotations from the governor's speech and photos from the event, all posted in real time.

Draft
Within an hour after Brown packed his speech and left the podium, Quinn Western posted a story on theorion.com that was accompanied by a Frank Rebelo photo. 

Article/Package
This morning's webcast included a vo/sot of the governor's appearance with a clip from the speech itself.
It's a good guess that a story about the speech, with a fuller explanation of what Prop 30 will or won't do for student pocketbooks, will appear in Wednesday's paper.

Analysis/Reflection
If the opinion staff stays true to form, an opinion piece written off news of the visit will grace the opinion pages on Wednesday.

More to come?
I'll be interested to see if readers respond to the coverage. Students have a lot at stake with Prop 30, potentially including money back on tuition, but the campus get-out-the-vote effort and campaigning for the ballot measure have been sparse. We'll have to see if increased visibility because of coverage in The Orion generates some heat.

The paper, to this point at least, did a great job covering the governor's campaign visit.

Stanford Daily: No more email interviews

"Effective immediately, The Stanford Daily will no longer conduct news interviews via email."

We talked about this briefly a few Wednesdays ago. Here's a link to the Daily editor's explanation for the new policy:
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/10/26/letter-from-the-editor-an-end-to-email-interviews/

Definitely worth reading...and discussing.

Sorting out platforms: The Orion App

The Orion will have one more way to deliver news, information and advertising to its readers a little later this semester. The paper has contracted with iCampusTimes to provide a mobile platform, the version of the paper and website that phone and tablet users will see.

The biggest difference between the new version and the old Orion app will be possibilities for ad revenue (advertisers will be able to put coupons on an Offers page that students will redeem by taking their phones into the business), but the app will also provide opportunities for reporting the news.

From left: The Offers page, what an Offer page looks like, the home page for news, a single story page and a section page with a list of current stories. (iCampusTimes screenshot).

The app interface can accept both RSS feeds and html links, so just about any content the news department can dream up, the app can deliver to readers' Apple and Android phones. The interface emphasizes editorial art, so it should be more attractive than the old Orion interface. ------------>

Kelsy Jehle, the paper's business manager, has suggested a beefed-up calendar should be a top priority for the app. That would be a great idea. A page for what's happening today on campus would be another good use for one of the 12 app home-page buttons.

I'd also nominate the daily webscast as a button, along with four existing sections of theorion.com: news, sports, features and opinion. I'd add a fifth: entertainment. A multimedia button might help the staff pick up the pace on providing more videos and narrated slideshows. And at some point, news and sports reporters could even use an application like Qik to stream live video from events to user's phones.

Some college papers using iCampusTimes have buttons for their Facebook and Twitter feeds, which is worth considering. I also like the idea of other services: Chico and campus maps, bus schedules, etc. I just learned about a new virtual community bulletin board service, mimiboard, that could generate more involvement from users, especially campus clubs and other groups.

If you have other ideas about how to use the new app, share them here or talk with Editor-in-Chief Kacey Gardner. And be sure to download the app when it's ready!

Webcast rough edges

I've noticed some rough edges on the webcast lately that might be growing pains or just experimentation. In any case, some suggestions:

• The deployment of dual anchors doesn't seem to be working very well. The framing is difficult because the camera's wide angle isn't wide enough to make it possible to fill the frame, so the resulting shot has too much air up top.
• There actually aren't enough words for two anchors, so it feels as if they're competing for the few lines of script that are available. The back-and-forth between anchors we see on professional TV isn't as easy as it looks and takes a lot of practice to sound natural.
• The framing for two anchors seems to require that the camera be pulled back far enough so the table in front of the anchors is visible. That makes for an unconventional and unprofessional look, especially when the anchors are leaning on their hands and elbows, raising their shoulders up around their necks. 

• The two-shot to one-shot transitions in the two-anchor set aren't smooth. The camera should actually move to reframe the one-shot at a different angle (if you're going to stay with dual anchors). The framing needs to be adjusted so the change doesn't feel like a jump-cut.

• The new temperature ranges in the weather segment are too much information for a graphic. I'd suggest going back to single highs and lows for each day.

• It sounds as if the producer or editor has stopped equalizing the sound between clips (listen to the anchor pitching to Jon on Thursday). That's an important step that shouldn't be skipped.
• A truncated version of the Thursday webcast was put up instead of the completed broadcast (this was fixed later). And it looks like a whole webcast was missed this week, as well. Someone should be watching each webcast from front to back and making sure the correct file is uploaded to YouTube.

The staff has been doing a great job of covering breaking news the past couple of weeks and keeping theorion.com home page fresh. I hope they'll keep working on the technical stuff while staying strong on the reporting work.

Trouble with FERPA and HIPAA?

In a recent response to a question on one of the listservs I follow, Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank LoMonte made it perfectly clear that student journalists are not restricted by these two federal laws. Further, he wrote, university officials in California who attempt to stop student reporters in our state from reporting by citing one of these laws is likely breaking the law themselves.

The original question concerned the rights of a photographer who was yelled at for taking a photo of a student athlete being put on a stretcher outside her college's health center.

Here's LoMonte's reply:

It is flat-out impossible for a student media organization to violate either FERPA or HIPAA, period, end of story. 

HIPAA applies only to two people: (1) your health care provider and (2) your health insurance provider. And HIPAA applies only to information that you gather in that capacity — information that is shared with you in confidence because you are a health care provider or an insurer. Unless the photographer also does appendectomies on the side, that person is not covered by HIPAA at all, and can freely share any health information that they learn through news-gathering, e.g., being in a public place when a person is put into an ambulance. What you look like lying on a stretcher is not a piece of confidential medial information — it's a publicly observable fact. So that one is just frivolous. 

FERPA applies only to information that comes out of a confidential student record that is maintained in university files. Again, what you look like lying on a stretcher is not confidential information gleaned from files maintained by your university. Anything that is public observable, or that you obtain with the student's consent, or that you gather through your own reporting, is your information to use as you see fit and is not FERPA information, ever.  

Any college that tries to restrain the publication of information by student media under HIPAA or FERPA is acting in bad faith and is in violation of the California Education Code, which protects both the public-university and private-university media. At a public institution, restraining what a student news outlet publishes would also be a violation of the First Amendment. If anyone is being given the FERPA excuse or the HIPAA excuse, SPLC wants to hear about it, so please let us know.

Frank D. LoMonte, Esq.
Executive Director - Student Press Law Center
(703) 807-1904, ext. 121
director@splc.orgwww.splc.org

Sorting out platforms: News - Part 2

Where today's digital-first news comes together is sometimes called a converged newsroom. News organizations have reorganized themselves to make sure reporters, photographers, artists and videographers are producing content tailor-made for their websites, newscasts, newspapers and social media and that it arrives there in a timely way.

I've seen two approaches to convergence that I like a lot.

The Corsair at Pensacola State in Florida has been organized into five teams:
Enterprise Projects - in-depth, multi-source projects on issues mostly for the print paper
Community Conversation - blogs, editorials, social media, letters to the editor
Student Life - entertainment and lifestyle reporting
Multimedia - video, photo, graphics
Continuous News - breaking news for the web and the print paper

The continuous news team has assigned shifts, so there's always someone available to write a breaking story for the eCorsair, the paper's website. Those stories can also be rewritten as briefs for the weekly newspaper or become story ideas for other teams. Sports coverage and the calendar are both assigned to this team.

This structure's strength is making the eCorsair the primary focus of three teams (continuous news, community conversation and multimedia), which generate fresh content daily for the website and helps the paper continue that coverage into its newspaper. It requires a strong editor who can direct coverage and make good decisions about how to deploy the paper's resources.

The BBC newsroom takes a little different approach. There, all the stories from traditional reporters land on a central desk where editors direct them into live reporting and social media before they're aired on traditional TV and radio platforms.. All reporters, for example, are required to file something short and suitable for the Web whenever they file any sort of story, which keeps the BBC website constantly updated with breaking stories.

The BBC's central desk editors need to be more nimble than directive, recognizing what's important to the digital platforms and pushing news there but not really dictating traditional coverage. So the BBC scoops itself all the time and sees benefit to its traditional broadcasts from the immediate exposure online and on social media.

Either of these approaches could work for The Orion as it refocuses itself to be a digital-first newsroom.