Multi-Media Reporting

Today at noon I observed another Cover It Now live JRCChat. The topic was multimedia reporting. I am starting to feel a lot more comfortable with the chats. I am becoming familiar with people who regularly participate in the chats. I am also becoming more familiar with the lingo that is used in the chats.

The discussion today was about what a reporter should be doing at a single event. Taking notes, video, tweeting, chatting, etc. There were many opinions. Some people thought that the low quality of video at certain events would mean that a reporter who is shooting it, wold be wasting their time. Others stated that because community members use social media to spread local news before newsrooms even receive the information that it is more important that they get videos out fast even if the quality isn't great.

Livestreaming was another topic of discussion. Livestreaming is only effective if you have a strong internet connection and good audio. If you don't have these two things, viewers will get annoyed and not tune in anymore.

Another question was about what the ideal size of a crowd to livestream would be. A large press conference is what some people agreed would be an ideal situation to do that in.

As always, the last question was not a question but an active response:p post a link. One of the links was a New York Times article about how some people think reporters are being replaced by citizens who are writing for free (example: Huffington Post). There was another article that argued with the NYTimes article.

After the chat, I separated some more pet pictures into categories. A lot of pictures got disqualified because they were postmarked after the deadline. I had some time to kill after that because Ivan was working on his computer and my next task was to sort the pictures that came in through e-mail over the weekend.

While I was waiting I found some cool website. Innovative Interactivity was one of them. I browsed around and ended up looking at examples of stories that were put together very well as multi-media packages.

After googling multi-media journalism for a while, I was able to get to Ivan's computer to sort through more pictures of cats, dogs, guinea pigs.. and today i received a picture of a mouse! After all of that I was assigned a task...to start the article on the pet contest! I am excited and I already started; however I am going to finish it tomorrow. Right now I am going to take some Tylenol because I have a fever =/.