Students in my zoomed into the prime time blogosphere this week providing live multimedia coverage of the Democratic presidential debate and the accompanying mayhem at the.
Besides making more than 150 posts to the many of the students published audio photos and text directly to the blog from their cell phones using a new remove tool called.
The 17 students also provided solid journalistic coverage of the week’s events including writing about shabby behavior on campus consistently ranked as the second most popular one on the blog after it went up Tuesday evening.
As of Friday morning the blog was less than 100 hours old and had received more than 1,100 pageviews. Stats from our host show that the audience is coming from WordPress tags. MySpace bulletins emails and link-love from places like Utterz and from in San Antonio and from my own Facebook profile where I’ve posted and linked to it.
The students have been required to maintain a personal blog all semester and this breaking news group blog was part of the plan in the syllabus all along. (Translation: They are being graded on their work so there was some incentive — besides the sheer fun of it — to participate enthusiastically!)
Some aspects of the blog came as little or no surprise because we spent a lot of time in class discussing things such as:
Journalism. They know one of my basic rules is “quote ‘em if they can’t take a joke.” So when representatives of CNN acted rudely in public the students wrote about it and. They told the truth. (New basic rule: Don’t underestimate students who buy their pixels by the barrel.)
But one thing I hadn’t expected was how much time we would spend in categorise wrangling with technology. It amazed me how difficult it was to even get a blessed conjoin of audio off of a digital recorder and onto the students’ blogs.
So after I talked to the co-founder and president of Utterz when I was at last week. I decided the student bloggers would try something I hadn’t planned on or tested because it sounded like just the pixie dust we needed to make this blog fly.
Utterz lets you use your cell to send in photos video text and audio then it mashes them together and plunks the finished product right down into a blog affix. If there’s anything else like this out there. I sure hadn’t heard of it.
fearless they tried it on deadline and they not only made it work they made it sing. One of them immediately waded into a crowd of demonstrators interviewed people with his cell telecommunicate and had the audio up on the blog in less than 10 minutes — it was Holy cow!
How long have I been waiting for something like this? I told Randy a story about something that happened long ago and far away in Phoenix where my husband was the assistant city editor in charge of the cops and courts team at the Arizona Republic in the mid-1980s. His reporters were lugging those huge shoebox-shaped Motorola “mobile” phones around to crime scenes out on the sticks and they also had those whiz-bang to file their stories.
One day my husband asked the Motorola representative if they couldn’t come up with some sort of gizmo to make the two devices physically connect to each other. The dude from Motorola just shook his head dismissively. “No one would ever use that,” he said.
As content director at. I launched what I jokingly referred to as the. We pulled off the unthinkable: We got television reporters and newspaper reporters and newspaper photographers to all get along inside the same blog and to file like someone else’s life depended on it.
We had it all — except the technology to easily pull it together. In the end the “man behind the curtain” at that blog was one of my Web editors taking dictation over the phone because we had no other way to get the television meteorologist’s spoken words to go from a cell phone in a satellite truck in the field directly into the blog.
Well now we do. And that’s not just a baby step toward real independent and mobile journalism.
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Related article:
http://charlotteanne.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/blog-it-well-and-they-will-come/
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