Alrighty then...so Jen and I met today and had a little chat about
where we are, and where we go from here. Thought I'd post some of the thoughts and notes from our meeting, so here it goes...
Basically, the most essential thing to do at this point is to build a
community. How do we practically do that? Talk with people of all
ages, colors, shapes, socioeconomic status, professions, etc. and
learn what they're looking for in an economy-focused site. What do
they want to know? How can we tangibly serve them? Right now, it's all
about talking with people, understanding their needs and then
compiling our info to work towards meeting those needs through
creating a sustainable site...one of the biggest challenges Jen is
dealing with at the moment.
As of now, we have some content from traditional newsrooms whose
primary focus is themselves. There's nothing too wrong with that as
that's how they're making (or trying to make) money, but it just means
that content for our project is put on the back burner. For example,
very little is actually happening with the videos the Missourian
promised to deliver. So, what do we do without solidified titles of
reporter, producer, salesperson, etc.? Research.
Basically, Money Commons itself is still a theory, which isn't
necessarily a bad thing at this point. We just have to figure out what
all kinds of people in Columbia want/need and then build the idea of
MoneyCommons.com from there. So, in interviews with community leaders/
professionals regarding the economy, or while just having
conversations with locals, let's be intentional about asking and
taking notes on their thoughts. Then we'll compile our info and begin
to build our site with a clearer picture of our community.
This whole web thing is a bit of a mystery and no one has solved it!! So it seems experimentation is KEY!!!
Monday, April 6, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Giraffes, KOMU, the Missourian and Cramer
Economy videos from the Missourian are coming along...slowly, but surely. Two of the reporters (Kyle and a sweet girl whose name I can't remember) are still working on two videos each. "How to retire in this economy" and "How to say 'No' to your kid" are two the one girl is working on, with the second being one of a few videos geared towards parents on how to teach their teens various common-sense money tips/tricks in this economy. Other examples of videos to be done are "How to teach teens to budget" and "How you can help your kid graduate in this economy." Not necessarily the exact titles, but so far, those are the key ideas. Kyle is working on a "How to save on your utilities" story and another investment tips piece. All four of these will be shot by Spring Break (one week away, woohoo!) and edited sometime afterwards. Also, the "How to market yourself" video is still a work in progress.
As far as KOMU goes, yesterday was an interesting shift day. The TiVo and capturing tool on Avid were both not working, so no video could be posted to the web after the 6. Kind of frustrating. Scott Schaeffer tried super hard to trouble-shoot the problem with us, but no luck. Unless, something changed over the past 12 hours, there's no video up from yesterday evening's newscasts. Only text.
One thing I'm pleased with is that I've completed all of my media giraffe interviews! They're both quite interesting sources and I'm hoping to complete them over Spring Break or during that following week.
And finally, one great night of television: Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer...
Check out Newsy.com to see my story/analysis of the face-off. : )
As far as KOMU goes, yesterday was an interesting shift day. The TiVo and capturing tool on Avid were both not working, so no video could be posted to the web after the 6. Kind of frustrating. Scott Schaeffer tried super hard to trouble-shoot the problem with us, but no luck. Unless, something changed over the past 12 hours, there's no video up from yesterday evening's newscasts. Only text.
One thing I'm pleased with is that I've completed all of my media giraffe interviews! They're both quite interesting sources and I'm hoping to complete them over Spring Break or during that following week.
And finally, one great night of television: Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer...
Check out Newsy.com to see my story/analysis of the face-off. : )
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Missourian Meeting
So, here's a brief update from the meeting at the Missourian today...
The three economy videos we talked about last week are still a work in progress. They are:
1. How to market yourself
2. What to do if you lose your job
3. How to retire in this economy
This week, three more video-based stories the Missourian reporters are pursuing are:
1. How to save on your monthly utility bills
2. How should you invest differently in this economy
3. Tips for how parents should teach their kids/teens to manage money. (We talked about this being two videos...maybe one focuses more on how parents can "say no to their kids and make it stick.")
There are also quite a few print stories the reporters have been working on. One on food and fuel prices will be on the Sunday cover of the Missourian, and there are several others that are in the early stages of reporting.
Also, Jen, if we can't seem to get KBIA in on this collaboration yet, the Missourian has a link on the bottom of their homepage that says "Audio." If we click here, there are a bunch of random KBIA pieces, including economy stories, and we can pull them to our site from there.
The Missourian is also in the process of designing a separate webpage called "Economy 101" for all of their economy stories, which we could attach a link to from our site. As far as I know from chatting with the reporters briefly, there is already an RSS feed in place for those stories to go to moneycommons.
Now I'm over here at KOMU, editing and publishing stories to the web...and of course, making sure we've tagged the previously completed economy stories with the "8 On Your Money" label. All is good so far!!!
The three economy videos we talked about last week are still a work in progress. They are:
1. How to market yourself
2. What to do if you lose your job
3. How to retire in this economy
This week, three more video-based stories the Missourian reporters are pursuing are:
1. How to save on your monthly utility bills
2. How should you invest differently in this economy
3. Tips for how parents should teach their kids/teens to manage money. (We talked about this being two videos...maybe one focuses more on how parents can "say no to their kids and make it stick.")
There are also quite a few print stories the reporters have been working on. One on food and fuel prices will be on the Sunday cover of the Missourian, and there are several others that are in the early stages of reporting.
Also, Jen, if we can't seem to get KBIA in on this collaboration yet, the Missourian has a link on the bottom of their homepage that says "Audio." If we click here, there are a bunch of random KBIA pieces, including economy stories, and we can pull them to our site from there.
The Missourian is also in the process of designing a separate webpage called "Economy 101" for all of their economy stories, which we could attach a link to from our site. As far as I know from chatting with the reporters briefly, there is already an RSS feed in place for those stories to go to moneycommons.
Now I'm over here at KOMU, editing and publishing stories to the web...and of course, making sure we've tagged the previously completed economy stories with the "8 On Your Money" label. All is good so far!!!
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Getting Organized
"Money money money mah-nay... MAH-nay!"
Have no clue who sings this song, but it's been running through my brain as I'm sitting here, staring at my old-school iBook G4 laptop, trying to think of what to post. I'll start with this past Thursday's Missourian meeting...
Basically, it seems like the economy beat reporters there are being proactive in creating meaningful content to add to their site and ours. This is awesome. The three stories they're working on this week are:
1. What to do if you lose your job
2. How to market yourself to get a job
3. How to recover in this economy
Also, I learned they're going to create a section in the paper and/or online called "Progress," which will be devoted to showing how Columbia will keep moving forward in this economic downturn. It will also help better illustrate the community's initiatives to bring money and people into Columbia. As far as I know, this will be coming out towards the end of March. So, as for the Missourian meeting, that's about it.
During my Thursday shift at KOMU, Liz and I focused on searching previous weeks' content in ACM to categorize stories under the "8 On Your Money" label. This was definitely a step forward as we now have more content to work from on moneycommons.com. Along with this, two examples of stories I helped edit and publish to the website were Paula Smith's on Columbia Regional Airport and Takeo's piece on Columbia Public Schools, which both aired on the 10.
I'll post another update on moneycommons.com progress sometime in the next few days...looking forward to begin working on the promotional side of things soon though!
Have no clue who sings this song, but it's been running through my brain as I'm sitting here, staring at my old-school iBook G4 laptop, trying to think of what to post. I'll start with this past Thursday's Missourian meeting...
Basically, it seems like the economy beat reporters there are being proactive in creating meaningful content to add to their site and ours. This is awesome. The three stories they're working on this week are:
1. What to do if you lose your job
2. How to market yourself to get a job
3. How to recover in this economy
Also, I learned they're going to create a section in the paper and/or online called "Progress," which will be devoted to showing how Columbia will keep moving forward in this economic downturn. It will also help better illustrate the community's initiatives to bring money and people into Columbia. As far as I know, this will be coming out towards the end of March. So, as for the Missourian meeting, that's about it.
During my Thursday shift at KOMU, Liz and I focused on searching previous weeks' content in ACM to categorize stories under the "8 On Your Money" label. This was definitely a step forward as we now have more content to work from on moneycommons.com. Along with this, two examples of stories I helped edit and publish to the website were Paula Smith's on Columbia Regional Airport and Takeo's piece on Columbia Public Schools, which both aired on the 10.
I'll post another update on moneycommons.com progress sometime in the next few days...looking forward to begin working on the promotional side of things soon though!
Monday, February 23, 2009
Flash, Photos and Video
These three things dominated my time while working at KOMU this past Thursday.
With our new Flash skills, Liz and I took a map outlining the counties of Missouri and attempted to transform it into a rollover graphic highlighting the car sales per county. After a couple hours of failed attempts, we decided to create our own version of a would-be flash map on the white board using red and blue markers....Randy duly noted that one county Liz drew happened to look more like the state of Illinois than anything. So, after a few laughs, we popped back onto the computer and voila!...a magical thing happened: we remembered how to create a working button. : )
While Liz made more progress on the map, I continued to cut packages, create images and save them for Stephanie Stouffer to put on KOMU.com as my computer didn't have ACM. (By the way, I'm thinking I'll suggest that we re-organize the computers behind the new desk...the one that is most useless happens to be smack in the middle, where the more helpful one is jammed in the corner, giving little room for a chair and/or person to efficiently upload work through ACM.) Anywho, that's all to say I realized I did not remind Stephanie to add my name to the stories I worked on...and now, go figure, I can't remember the stories that aired during my shift. Even after scrolling through KOMU.com searching for February 19, I wasn't able to find anything. I did however, work specifically with Kirsten Mims and Paula Smith to help bring their stories to the finish line. In general, it seems the broadcast reporters are beginning to get the hang of their new reporting duties and how to work on ACM. That's encouraging!
Also, as far as this week goes, I'm hoping to set up an interview or two to create some original content for moneycommons.com. Last week I spoke with a married woman who has 5 kids, lives on a tight budget and shops mostly organic while looking around Columbia for the best deals and steals...and she said she'd most-likely be willing to share her tips with us for a short video. I'm going to finalize that sometime this week and hopefully get some reporting done as well!
This will be another busy-busy week, but I'm just reminding myself that Spring break is less than one month away!! Praaaiiise the Lord for some sun, a cool Grandpa (who we call "Bumpa"), my best friend from London and a beach. Oh yes. : )
With our new Flash skills, Liz and I took a map outlining the counties of Missouri and attempted to transform it into a rollover graphic highlighting the car sales per county. After a couple hours of failed attempts, we decided to create our own version of a would-be flash map on the white board using red and blue markers....Randy duly noted that one county Liz drew happened to look more like the state of Illinois than anything. So, after a few laughs, we popped back onto the computer and voila!...a magical thing happened: we remembered how to create a working button. : )
While Liz made more progress on the map, I continued to cut packages, create images and save them for Stephanie Stouffer to put on KOMU.com as my computer didn't have ACM. (By the way, I'm thinking I'll suggest that we re-organize the computers behind the new desk...the one that is most useless happens to be smack in the middle, where the more helpful one is jammed in the corner, giving little room for a chair and/or person to efficiently upload work through ACM.) Anywho, that's all to say I realized I did not remind Stephanie to add my name to the stories I worked on...and now, go figure, I can't remember the stories that aired during my shift. Even after scrolling through KOMU.com searching for February 19, I wasn't able to find anything. I did however, work specifically with Kirsten Mims and Paula Smith to help bring their stories to the finish line. In general, it seems the broadcast reporters are beginning to get the hang of their new reporting duties and how to work on ACM. That's encouraging!
Also, as far as this week goes, I'm hoping to set up an interview or two to create some original content for moneycommons.com. Last week I spoke with a married woman who has 5 kids, lives on a tight budget and shops mostly organic while looking around Columbia for the best deals and steals...and she said she'd most-likely be willing to share her tips with us for a short video. I'm going to finalize that sometime this week and hopefully get some reporting done as well!
This will be another busy-busy week, but I'm just reminding myself that Spring break is less than one month away!! Praaaiiise the Lord for some sun, a cool Grandpa (who we call "Bumpa"), my best friend from London and a beach. Oh yes. : )
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Craziest Week of My Life
...well, maybe not of my life, but of my semester thus far.
I have to say though... I learned LOTS during my shift at KOMU this past week. Since I was flying solo on the web for the first few hours on Thursday, I was able to do much more in terms of video. It was interesting to actually see how video from Avid News Cutter transfers (or fails to transfer at times) into ACM, which gave me a dose of insight into how to troubleshoot the problems that occur.
Something I've also enjoyed over the past couple weeks has been working with the broadcast students. It's fun to be in a leadership role where I'm able to guide others and help bring their stories to the finish line effectively. Working with 10 o'clock reporters is where this happens most, as it's a much more calm shift where one-on-one time is with the reporters is easier to come across.
And of course, I love images, so searching through video for the lead photo (when the reporters don't have time to - which is usually most of the time) is always enjoyable. One of my favorites this past week was the image I chose for the short piece on the swimming Grand Prix. Not sure if the image is still available directly on that page, but it was of two swimmers near the pool wall as another splashes to tag the wall as well.
Two other stories I worked on were on the NAACP and Autism.
It was also great to help Liz write titles and captions for some of the images in her post-ice storm piece...she was super-exhausted after two long days of reporting and little sleep, so we had a fun time trying to make her captions more coherent than what she was actually saying/thinking.
This week, our moneycommons team is also going to be working on getting in contact with actual sources. I think it was helpful that Liz and I met to create an outline for stories and that we posted that to googledocs for other reporters to see as well. It's exciting that Newsy wants to partner with us in this endeavor as well!
Time to run, but am looking forward to seeing what the rest of this week will bring!!
I have to say though... I learned LOTS during my shift at KOMU this past week. Since I was flying solo on the web for the first few hours on Thursday, I was able to do much more in terms of video. It was interesting to actually see how video from Avid News Cutter transfers (or fails to transfer at times) into ACM, which gave me a dose of insight into how to troubleshoot the problems that occur.
Something I've also enjoyed over the past couple weeks has been working with the broadcast students. It's fun to be in a leadership role where I'm able to guide others and help bring their stories to the finish line effectively. Working with 10 o'clock reporters is where this happens most, as it's a much more calm shift where one-on-one time is with the reporters is easier to come across.
And of course, I love images, so searching through video for the lead photo (when the reporters don't have time to - which is usually most of the time) is always enjoyable. One of my favorites this past week was the image I chose for the short piece on the swimming Grand Prix. Not sure if the image is still available directly on that page, but it was of two swimmers near the pool wall as another splashes to tag the wall as well.
Two other stories I worked on were on the NAACP and Autism.
It was also great to help Liz write titles and captions for some of the images in her post-ice storm piece...she was super-exhausted after two long days of reporting and little sleep, so we had a fun time trying to make her captions more coherent than what she was actually saying/thinking.
This week, our moneycommons team is also going to be working on getting in contact with actual sources. I think it was helpful that Liz and I met to create an outline for stories and that we posted that to googledocs for other reporters to see as well. It's exciting that Newsy wants to partner with us in this endeavor as well!
Time to run, but am looking forward to seeing what the rest of this week will bring!!
Sunday, February 8, 2009
To furlough or not to furlough...
Definition: Furlough: (from Dutch: Verlof) - A temporary leave of absence; sometimes involuntary because of work conditions
This was one thing University of Missouri System president Gary Forsee was set to discuss Friday, February 6 in his first State of the University Address. So basically, while working at KOMU News during our Thursday shift (and after discovering one of the reporters spoke with Forsee about furloughs earlier that evening for another story) we decided to preview the following day's address: "One on One with Forsee."
Also, "twittering" turned out to be quite interesting... We gave a countdown on the social networking site, Twitter, until our story was officially published on KOMU.com, to hopefully grab peoples' attention. Then we decided to ask questions about furloughs to our "followers." And we had one response... Victory! The comment came from a woman who said she'd rather have a furlough than a pay cut. No doubt why.
So, as someone who put effort into publishing and twittering Forsee's furlough preview, it was interesting to see a conversation - short and sweet though it was - actually take place via Twitter. It was quite funny when we saw the "tweet" from this lady... Liz and I got pretty excited someone actually responded to us!
Aside from this little experience, one thing I've especially enjoyed during my KOMU.com shifts has been editing images in Adobe Photoshop. I'm definitely thankful for the photo editing experience I've had through previous convergence stories, as I think it's given me a leg up in this process. It's obvious to me that a little TLC to the images makes a big difference. I definitely enjoy making the KOMU.com News page pretty through photography.
Oh yeah, real quick update... As of Friday, Forsee was given authority to furlough campus workers if needed.
This was one thing University of Missouri System president Gary Forsee was set to discuss Friday, February 6 in his first State of the University Address. So basically, while working at KOMU News during our Thursday shift (and after discovering one of the reporters spoke with Forsee about furloughs earlier that evening for another story) we decided to preview the following day's address: "One on One with Forsee."
Also, "twittering" turned out to be quite interesting... We gave a countdown on the social networking site, Twitter, until our story was officially published on KOMU.com, to hopefully grab peoples' attention. Then we decided to ask questions about furloughs to our "followers." And we had one response... Victory! The comment came from a woman who said she'd rather have a furlough than a pay cut. No doubt why.
So, as someone who put effort into publishing and twittering Forsee's furlough preview, it was interesting to see a conversation - short and sweet though it was - actually take place via Twitter. It was quite funny when we saw the "tweet" from this lady... Liz and I got pretty excited someone actually responded to us!
Aside from this little experience, one thing I've especially enjoyed during my KOMU.com shifts has been editing images in Adobe Photoshop. I'm definitely thankful for the photo editing experience I've had through previous convergence stories, as I think it's given me a leg up in this process. It's obvious to me that a little TLC to the images makes a big difference. I definitely enjoy making the KOMU.com News page pretty through photography.
Oh yeah, real quick update... As of Friday, Forsee was given authority to furlough campus workers if needed.
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