Sep/100
I’m a smartass
Don’t you hate people that keep saying “I saw that one coming” or “I told you so”? I hate even more when I see people saying stuff i said before, and better than I did. But it’s comforting to know that sometimes a crazy idea is not that crazy at all.
In one of Google Reader items I saw the presentation of a new video tool:
Interactive video transcription and captioning service 3Play Media has an answer with a video clipping feature it announced today that “allows users to quickly create and share specific portions of a video simply by highlighting the spoken words in the transcript.”
Rather than introducing a video by asking your friends to use somewhat inaccurate controls to skip ahead, the service helps take them directly to the part of the video you intend, right down to the specific word. The service creates a link that includes start- and stop-time information. When you click on the link, you’re taken to a page that shows not only the video, but a word for word transcription alongside it.
This reminded me of one of those crazy ideas I sometimes have. In January this year I wrote:
I hate to transcribe every single word from an audio recording, and I’m also really slow taking notes. So, what about some voice recognition magic, that would get every little word out to text format, while recording the audio, and the timeline for editing that audio would be words themselves. Not getting it? You’d edit the statements like a Word doc, but if you chose a paragraph you’d have the audio associated to that specific bit ready to export. And send it immediately for publishing.
Not exactly the same idea, but pretty much the same principle. If 3Play Media tweaked the code a bit I think they could do what I proposed.
Jun/102
MA Online Journalism – The Paranoia Timeline
One of the assignments i did for my Online Journalism module was a timeline depicting some of the major events that caused social stir across the world in the last 20 years. Some were real, some were just, well, paranoid behavior, hence The Paranoia Timeline. This is a description of the project – that stayed incomplete, still in a conceptual phase - and the steps and views i have on it.
I would like to hear from you, about what can be done with archive journalism, with different narratives, and if you want to help me develop the timeline (it’s filled with mock content, and it’s maybe in the 5% of its full potential) let me know. I wanted this to be a collaborative project, with different people contributing with ideas, videos, text, pictures, graphs, opinions, so any help is more than welcome.
So you can have an idea of what is the spirit of The Paranoia Timeline, here’s a small video i edited as a promo.
“Paranoia is a thought process heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion.” Wikipedia
The Project
In an attempt to explore new ways to report stories, I decided for this project to use a timeline as a platform to report on some events that had social impact in the last 20 years. The kind of aftermath these events had is not constrained to geographical levels, and they altered our everyday lives, and in some cases, our world views and personal experience. Some of these events caused social hysteria or global discussion and forced governments to act in ways that affected the common citizen.
The Paranoia Timeline[i] is based in a type of journalism that I believe to be quite ignored by mainstream media, which is archive journalism. This type of reporting works with – as the name implies – with archive information and preexistent content, and my idea was to use available data and information to create a retrospective view on a few events that fulfilled the parameters presented before. Being the Internet the world’s largest archive, it was logical to work exclusively with online content, and reuse it to make something new, using computer assisted reporting and mashups.
Though the current result falls short of my initial goals, it is a prototype for a more involving experience, and I consider it to be a work in construction. What I’ll be defending here is a concept with a few examples using interactive tools, but I realize this is just a small sample of what it can really be: an immersive, ongoing project, with more interactive features, providing a journalistic approach to issues highly debated and prone to partisanship, many of them used by religious and political groups to spin their own ideologies to the general audience. The purpose is to create context.
Research
First of all, I had to look for the most reliable and customizable timeline creating tool available for free[ii]. After pondering a few options, I chose Dipity[iii], mostly because of its reliability and ease of use, but I must admit I preferred something even more powerful: Dipity still has some glitches.
The first question was how to pinpoint in importance and time the events for this timeline. At first I used my own memory and experience and then used other people’s to limit it to the most important and visible ones. Wikipedia is a great resource when it comes to sum up the most important events in a decade, so I looked up the decade entries, in this case the 90’s and the 00’s. It was a good starting point to find the candidates for this timeline, and, simultaneously, to have more links for my research.
But when it came to limit those events in time I had a problem: how could I limit the span of the importance of the events in public opinion? The best way I found was to use Google and their timeline tool.
By searching for peaks in the timeline created by Google, I could define exactly the period when the subject was widely discussed. Since Google also has the Google News Archive, with copies of pre-Internet newspapers, I also had a long run perspective for the subject at hand that could be used for historical context.
Other valuable resource was Archive.org. This website has an immense collection of media under public domain that can be used to illustrate some of these stories. I made a pastiche video using almost exclusively footage available there, with the exception of some stock footage available for free at a specialized website. The video works as a promo for the website, and it should have included two interviews, but I wasn’t able to do any of them. Still, my idea was to create an audiovisual narrative for each subject of the timeline, like a mini documentary series, using both archive footage and actual interviews with experts. I also tried to use Google’s Newstimeline[iv], but it wasn’t embeddable I had to give up the idea of having a scrolling timeline with newspapers about the specific subject.
Data
I chose two subjects to investigate using data: the recent swine flu and the credit crunch. Both of them are rich in statistical information so I decided to do a death map for the flu[v], and a graph showing loan evolution in the United States since 2003, using Tableau.
The swine flu data came from Wolfram-Alpha[vi] that generated a rather reliable (after cross checking with other official websites) amount of data, with the number of cases and deaths per country. I had to make an option about which would be highlighted, but discrepancies in the logical amount of cases between countries made me go just for the death numbers. The conclusion that I got from the map is that swine flu was either more serious or reported in the developed countries. Traditionally considered Third World countries do not have many reports, which reflect the lack of structures to deal with the problem or how overhyped it was in the Western world. But France on its own had almost 3 million cases reported against 57 thousand in the United States, which led me to verify closely other sources. It seems Wolfram Alpha had the number wrong, there were only about 5000 reports, which proves that outliers in data are either new stories or just input errors.
For the credit crunch[vii], I researched the FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation[viii] database. They have a considerable amount of statistical data available for download. My idea was to chart the evolution of loans in the United States in the last years, and the main idea was that overall loans slowed down since 2009 but individual credits rose, meaning an increase in personal debt to cope with overall difficulties caused by the crunch.I selected the items that seemed more relevant and went for a simple line chart. My purpose was served.
Production
The timeline had to be embedded in a website, so I used WordPress as a platform. The timeline would provide links to the posts about each topic, and each post would have developed content besides the one already present in the timeline items.
I tried to crowdsource some of the work, using Google Wave and my own network of contacts, but it didn’t work. I also tried to use HARO[ix] network, but they don’t call themselves HASO for a reason (they don’t help students out). Taking all the responsibility for the reporting made me narrow down the content for this assignment to just a few events. I asked permission to use some works already created by other users, like the chart in the 2012 post and some pictures from Flickr. An issue stood out immediately: my idea was not to aggregate content, but to create new content from what I had found. But eventually I realized there are many works out there that fit the needs for contextualization that are so much better than what I could try to create.
So I focused more on the concept, and that’s why I have so many empty posts, like I said, it is a prototype that needs further development. That’s also why I didn’t use social networks, although their importance would be paramount in the future, to engage users into debating the subjects of the timeline.
Copyright and ethics
Using Public Domain material is not an issue, but we always need to read the small print in some of the Creative Commons available content. Not all allow transforming the original, so I had to make some options. Overall, it was quite easy to find audio and visual content to work with, and I have a long list of links to videos to assess. I asked for permission to use some visual elements, namely the 2012 chart, which was what I was looking for, kindly granted by its author.
The disclosure of the Paranoia Timeline as a non-conspiracy theory website also allows me to avoid one sided views and the usual partisanship that we find in other websites that address these subjects.
Innovation
What makes me look at my project as an innovative narrative for journalism is my idea that retrospective journalism should be made, especially now that we have easy access to so much archived content. The perennial quality of web content makes it easily available and thanks to the efforts of Google, even non digital content – old newspapers – is available, which makes it, in my perspective, an interesting and valuable journalistic narrative. Context is the keyword here, and I believe this is the most important objective of new narratives in a world of fragmented torrents of information. This could be also a premium feature for news companies.
This is yet far from finished, but I’ll be working on the project in the near future, and hopefully not as a one man band.
[i] TPT website http://www.theparanoiatimeline.com/
[ii] My blog post about timeline tools http://tinyurl.com/28erszn
[iii] Dipity timeline http://tinyurl.com/38zk5ug
[iv] http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
[v] Swine flu post http://tinyurl.com/39c282w
[vi] Wolfram-Alpha swine flu data http://tinyurl.com/39urc6d
[vii] Credit Crunch post http://tinyurl.com/24xb7ok
[viii] FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation http://www2.fdic.gov/SDI/SOB/
[ix] Help A Reporter Out – http://www.helpareporter.com/
May/105
Portuguese deputy doesn’t like the questions and takes reporter’s recorders
click on image to see the video
Ricardo Rodrigues, a Portuguese parliament deputy, was being interviewed by two journalists from Sábado magazine, and after being questioned about its connection (or lack of) to a pedophilia case in Azores and a financial scam – his name was involved in rumours, but was never charged – he decided enough was enough and got up and left the room, taking the journalist’s audio recorders on its way out. Fortunately he forgot about the camera.
The journalists filed a complaint for theft and menace to freedom of press, while the deputy asked for a court order, based on the argument that he was under “unbearable psychological violence” caused by the “harassment and false assumptions” on the part of the journalists. In a press conference he admitted that his actions were “rash”.
Rodrigues is a deputy for the majority party (Portuguese Socialist Party) and was an attorney, being also one of the party’s voices in Justice issues. This is just another in a string of incidents involving the majority party and the press. The Prime Minister has been accused of meddling in the management of a private station, a matter that is currently under investigation by a hearing commission.
Portuguese public television report
Apr/100
Adam Westbrook on video and soundslides
video editing 101
Adam Westbrook came to BCU to give us a quick lecture about visual narratives, focusing on video and soundslides. He showed us a few examples of visual storytelling and shared with us the basics, like story arcs, sequences, editing. It’s not something we can learn instantly but it’s easy to find references in our video drowned culture. Main ideas: web is not television, though video has a fundamental language that crosses over all types of moving image narratives, from news to cinema, from documentary to animation. And to make it work, keep it simple, and avoid the technical gimmicks, make it personal and intimate. Other advices include get lots of ambient sound, find color in the character’s surroundings and story.
One of the examples he brought us was this great story.
And the secret to become a good visual storyteller? Practice, practice, practice. Get a camera and just do it.
Apr/101
Breadth Portfolio: Part 2 – Flash Package
The second part of my Breadth Portfolio series, in this one i briefly explain how the Moseley Road Baths Flash package was made.
Flash
Moseley Road Baths
I’ve wanted to use Flash to create a multimedia package or to aggregate different types of content in one same product. Recycling the contents I had produced previously for HashBrum, I made a serious attempt to build one: “Moseley Road Baths- Pool of Affection”[i].
I’ll avoid commenting on the content of the piece, because all the questions are related to the construction process. First of all, Flash is an almost exclusive of Adobe, and its complexity make it hard to use, but in the right hands it can deliver amazing works. This is not the case, and there are many reasons for it.
First of all, Flash evolved into Actionscript 3.0 which is much harder to use than the previous 2.0 version that I was familiarized with. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have planned to use features that will only work with the 3.0 version, like mapping components. So I had to give up on my initial plan of incorporating a map into the piece, if I was to do it in AS2, although I searched intensively Google for solutions. But choosing which script language is used to build a work with Flash it’s just the beginning. We have to decide what contents are going to be featured, which technical specificities they demand, how are we supposed to navigate through them and which aesthetic options we will take. The most interesting part is that it is truly an interdisciplinary experience: I used video, and had to go through the options to embed it, and pick the best format (FLV) and size to convert it to; I had to create a look for the project, and I used image editors to edit pictures and small graphic elements; besides, flash is based in animation principles, so some notions on the subject will help.
Non-linearity is an important factor to this kind of work, and since I had divided the main video to small, independent bits it wasn’t hard to do. When I first started shooting this story, I had the notion I would use it for something like this, so I wasn’t that worried about creating a narrative chain throughout the filming, but just keeping it visually coherent, which under personal limitations is not that difficult.
Flash projects are also all about functionality (the way buttons are placed) and details (the way buttons move). To improve these two factors you must have a deeper knowledge of Flash (beyond button level), which is hard to acquire on your own. Though the web is filled with video tutorials and great websites on the matter, Flash is mostly about a logical process that it is hard to grasp on your own. But I fear the approach I took using AS2 is rendered obsolete, since AS3 is more powerful, albeit more difficult to use. This raises questions about how specialized a journalist’s skills can be, since it takes time to learn these new procedures, and which alternatives are there to Flash packages.
[i] Online http://tinyurl.com/ydufyp6
Mar/101
Moseley Road Baths: Flash Multimedia Package | Trabalho Flash Multimedia
click image | cliquem na imagem
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I had a go with Flash for my assignment for the Multimedia Journalism module of the MA. I recycled some work i had done before for HashBrum, and did what i had planned from the start, though not the way i intended. It is an experiment, and i had to do it in ActionScript 2 instead of 3, because i didn’t have time to learn how to work with Flash all over again. Anyway here it is, comments and ideas are appreciated. |
Fiz um trabalho em Flash para o módulo de Jornalismo Multimédia do mestrado. Reciclei algum trabalho anterior que já tinha sido usado para o HashBrum, e fiz o que tinha planeado fazer desde o início, mas não da maneira que queria. É uma experiência, e tive que fazer tudo em ActionScript 2 em vez de 3, porque não tinha tempo para voltar a aprender a trabalhar com Flash outra vez. De qualquer forma, aqui está, ideias e comentários são bem-vindos. |
Feb/100
Riding the 654 | Viajar no 654
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It is what it means. Bus ride from Perry Barr, where i have classes, to Handsworth Wood, where the Halls of Residence are. Nothing much to it. If you want a map to go with it just ask.
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É o que significa. A viagem de autocarro desde Perry Barr, onde tenho aulas, até Handsworth Wood, onde fica a residência. Nada mais. Se quiserem um mapa a acompanhar é só pedir.
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Feb/100
BBC UGC Tour
video by Dan Davies
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Although i wasn’t able to go with my colleagues because i’m flat broke, the MA students went to London last week to visit the BBC newsroom and especially the UGC unit. Since i can’t tell you much about it, here are the videos Dan and Caroline made. |
Apesar de não ter podido ir com os meus colegas porque estou assim nas lonas, os estudantes do MA foram a Londres a semana passada visitar a redacção da BBC em especial o departamento de UGC. Como não posso contar como foi, aqui ficam os videos que a Caroline e o Dan fizeram. |
videos by Caroline Beavon
Jan/100
news:rewired – the afternoon sessions
This is the third post about the news:rewired conference. You can read the first and the second posts too.
In the afternoon i was signed in for the Data Mashing session. I kinda expected it to be a bit technical, and i wasn’t wrong. You can’t learn how to create data visualizations and mashups in one hour, but you can get the logic and purpose of some applications to decide in the future if you’re going for this or that type of graph, or just to know that you can do this or that type of correlation between data sets. Data mashing is still a playground for those with a coder’s state of mind, and a nightmare for most of us mere wordsmiths.
So when Tony Hirst started his presentation the room was a bit caught off guard with the complexity of his work. Hirst started to explain that data tells stories, by using data visualizations reporters can look for anomalies, and find if that odd data means a story waiting to be told. He showed us some of the tools he uses in his projects with the Guardian’s Open Platform, like ManyEyes and YahooPipes, and how he geocodes that data with GeoCommons. It wasn’t a lecture for the faint of heart when it comes to coding and data geekery, but i can tell you i found it quite useful. Data mashing is one of the most important ways of getting those boring stories with loads of incomprehensible stats and figures into compelling, eye-catching visualizations. And they can also be a great tool in the research phase, when reporters are trying to look for the exception in the rule.
The next speaker showed us just that with his work with MySociety.org. Francis Irving uses data to make the powerful accountable and in the users reach. He proved that presenting the TheyWorkForYou website and the new WhatDoTheyKnow. Both these enterprises use open data to hold local and national goverment representatives responsible for their actions during their mandates. It was the “why” to the “how” that Tony Hirst showed us before.
David Dunkley Gyimah talks about video
Another speaker that i was looking forward to hear was David Dunkley Gyimah. I‘ve been following his blog since i started my own almost three years ago. He got me looking into multimedia, video journalism and online video narrative in a different way. The fact he is a fan of experimentation and he supports the creation of a unique voice for each professional instead following the exhausted television news model makes his views more interesting to follow. It is always more appealing to me hear about video using terms like cinema verité and documentary, and his style is more related to a more cinematic narrative that i feel more interesting to be used online than the 90 second pieces for night news.
He compared online video to blogs, saying it was a disruptive way to present the news, and that the online video journalist could work between the cracks of broadcast journalism. Either way, with all the visual culture that most internet users have, online video is a good place to experiment, and since it needs to be done fast and effectively, we can use the error in our favor. The weapons of choice are becoming more numerous than before, and go from a pro hd camera to a cell phone. It’s always the story and the skills of the videographer that make the final result good or bad. You can see a hectic David doing his presentation in the video below.
Dec/094
Portugal: Multimedia & Online Journalism Awards | Prémios de Multimédia e Jornalismo Online
Video Journalism award winner | Vencedor do prémio de videojornalismo
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Last week, the ObCiber awarded, for the second year, the best online journalism works in Portugal. It’s a good way to recognize and evaluate the state of multimedia and online activity of portuguese media, but the feeling I get is that there is a lot to be done. If we look at the nominees, we see that, basically, only three different major news companies made the cut: Jornal de Notícias, Público and Radio Renascença, which are in fact the ones who are developing multimedia in the newsrooms in a sustainable way. The portuguese public television RTP also made the list, with their effort in mobile journalism during the elections, something that deserves to be analyzed by itself, since it had an experimental side to it. But that will have to stay for later. Here are the winners of this year’s edition:
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Na semana passada, o Obciber atribuiu pelo segundo ano os prémios para o melhor jornalismo online em Portugal. É uma boa forma de reconhecer e avaliar o estado e a actividade online dos media portugueses, mas sinto que ainda há muito por fazer. Se olharmos para os nomeados, vemos que basicamente apenas três marcas informativas chegaram lá: Jornal de Notícias, Público e Radio Renascença, que são de facto os que estão a desenvolver o multimédia nas redacções de forma sustentada. A RTP também está na lista, com o seu trabalho de jornalismo móvel durante a campanha eleitoral, algo que por si só merece uma análise mais aprofundada, devido ao seu lado experimental. Mas isso vai ter que ficar para outra altura. Eis os vencedores deste ano:
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Full House for JN | Full House para o JN
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The most nominated and biggest winner was the daily Jornal de Notícias, one of the top selling newspapers in Portugal. They were practically running by themselves in most categories, so the Overall Excellency in CyberJournalism award was more than expected. They also won in Best Multimedia Story, with a work about the credit crunch and citizen’s debts, and Best InfoGraphics with a work about Poker. Público, last year’s big winner, got the Breaking News award. Radio Renascença, the most heard radio in the country, won in the Video category with a piece about nuns in a monastery (they’re a Catholic radio), rewarding their efforts in the video department, that is one of the most hard working in Portugal, and that has been consistently delivering good works. In college journalism, the Porto’s University news endeavour JornalismoPortoNet took the prize home with the “Porto Adrift” dossier. |
O mais nomeado e o maior vencedor foi o Jornal de Notícias, um dos jornais nacionais com maior circulação. Como concorriam quase sozinhos na maioria das categorias, o prémio de Excelência Geral em Ciberjornalismo era mais do que esperado. Eles também venceram na categoria de Melhor Reportagem Multimédia, com um trabalho sobre o endividamento dos portugueses, e Melhor Infografia com um trabalho sobre Poker. O Público, o maior galardoado no ano passado, venceu em Breaking News. A Rádio Renascença venceu na categoria de Video, com um trabalho sobre freiras num mosteiro (são a rádio católica portuguesa), recompensando o seu investimento no departamento de video, que é um dos que mais e melhor trabalha no país. No jornalismo universitário, o JornalismoPortoNet levou o prémio para casa com o dossier “Porto à deriva”
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Best Multimedia Story | Melhor Reportagem Multimédia
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Alfredo Leite, deputy director of Jornal de Notícias, told me that these awards are the recognition of the work that the newspaper has been developing, and an “added responsibility, since the Observatory (ObCiber) gathers some of the people we acknowledge as the most competent in Digital Journalism” in Portugal. He claims JN is one of the most solid news websites in the country “though most times we are not seen that way” by a mainstream audience. “It is also the confirmation of a multidisciplinary team that slowly has been integrating in the digital platforms all the journalists and other resources” of the newspaper. In my opinion, there has been an evolution in Portuguese multimedia news but there is a lot to be done. What i hear is that some strategic mistakes have been made in some newsrooms, by appointing people who know nothing about the internet to coordinate multimedia, the neglect of the online towards a dead tree investment, and a demand for quality where there are no minimum working conditions. But that is not journalism, is plain politics. Still, some are trying. And those will be the ones who will succeed. Tell me what you think about these works in the comments. |
Alfredo Leite, director adjunto do Jornal de Notícias disse-me que estes prémios são “o reconhecimento do trabalho que o JN tem vindo a desenvolver, muitas vezes de forma invisível, de consolidação da sua edição digital” e “uma responsabilidade acrescida já que este Observatório reúne algumas das pessoas a quem mais competências reconhecemos e matéria de jornalismo digital no nosso país”. Ele afirma que o JN é “das webs mais sólidas do país, ainda que nem sempre sejamos reconhecidos enquanto tal pelo mainstream.” “É também a afirmação de uma equipa multidisplinar que aos poucos tem integrado na plataforma digital todos os jornalistas e outros recursos do JN.” Na minha opinião, tem-se assistido a uma evolução no jornalismo multimédia em Portugal, mas é preciso fazer mais. Do que ouço, há erros estratégicos a serem cometidos em algumas redacções, que nomeiam gente que não percebe nada de internet para coordenadores de multimédia, há negligência nos conteúdos online em favorecimento do papel, e uma exigência de qualidade onde não há condições mínimas para o fazer. Mas isso não é jornalismo, são politiquices. Mesmo assim, há quem tente. E esses terão sucesso. Digam o que pensam sobre estes trabalhos nos comentários.
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