Today is my last day at the Daily Freeman. I can’t believe how fast the past few months have gone by.
I remember when I first started (January 25th, 2011) I was nervous, unsure, and always waiting for instruction. Along the way I became way less nervous, more confident in myself, and started to venture into my own projects and started looking at sites on my own rather than waiting for detailed instructions.
I went into this internship not knowing what to expect to learn from it.
When I first talked to Ivan Lajara on the phone towards the end of last semester, he talked with me about the transition the Daily Freeman and all other publications were making from print to digital media.
It was everything that I learned about in my classes; the end of print media is coming and everybody is trying to prepare themselves as best as they can.
Ivan told me that the internship would be focused on digital media and the tools that would be helpful and necessary to learn throughout this transition.
Upon arriving at the Daily Freeman for the semester, I learned that Ivan was a part of year-long project within the Journal Register Company called IdeaLab. During these twelve months, Ivan along with 17 other people would be experimenting with the latest technology and tools available to journalists.
Throughout my time here at the Daily Freeman, I was able to observe the JRC Chats that many of these participants took part in approximately every week. I also followed their twitter accounts and checked out some of their blogs, learning about what they were experimenting with.
I picked up the habit of checking the Nieman Journalism Website every Friday to read their week in review. The Nieman Journalism Website is a project developed and run by Harvard University that follows the advancements and tries to make sense of technology and how it affects journalism. The “Week in Review” written weekly by Mark Coddington, provides a summary of each weeks latest news, focusing on technology in journalism.
The main purpose of the internship is to discover, play with, consider, and share new tools that are easy and quick to use while maintaining relevance and success in the field of journalism.
I can go on forever about the different kinds of tools that I have played around with for hours on end trying to figure out how they could be used in the field of journalism and if it was even worth the precious time a reporter has to use it.
Slideshows were one of my favorite things to play around with because it was fun, easy (for the most part), and was full of pets (it was during the pet photo contest)! I learned that slideshows could in fact be used in the field of journalism as a supplement to almost any kind of story.
Maps were one of my least favorite tools to work with during my time here. I understand that maps are very important and useful to stories because they can put things into perspective for readers and it supplements a story well. However, making them was not exactly my forte and for me personally. The best part of making maps was when I was able to make a game out of maps…that was really cool!
Timelines are very important tools to use at a news organization. It is a way for readers to receive accurate information about a story in a different medium than that of a typical news story. My favorite timeline to make was with Dipity because it was an interactive timeline that readers can toy around with and click links to get to more information. Timelines play a key part in digital journalism because they interest the reader and provide a condensed version of the story.
Visualizations are also necessary to have when dealing with digital journalism. Readers want to see information in a form other than just text. If you are able to put together a graph. chart, table, or any other visual representation of the information you are delivering, then do it. There are a ton of really cool websites that I have experimented with that allow you to create these types of things quickly and easily.
I learned the importance of measuring metrics and what studying the analytics of your newspaper can do for an organization. Metrics provide answers to questions such as what kind of people are viewing your website, your stories, at what time, where they clicked the link from, how long are they staying on the page. By studying this information, you can see what is working and what is not working. It allows you to see the problem, and provides an opportunity for revision.
It seems as though social media is taking over the world and if you don’t jump on board, you are going to be left behind. That is why news organizations maintain social media accounts and are studying how best to operate them. During my internship I learned the best practices for a newsroom's twitter and facebook accounts. It seems silly but there is so much reason behind the small details in order to maintain a healthy relationship with your readers.
Those two tutorials were done in front of a small Flip camera and were live-streamed onto the internet. Live-streaming is something that news organizations should take advantage of when given the opportunity. Ustream is a great way to do this whether you are taping a tutorial, a press conference, a rally etc.
Cover it Live is another way to actively keep readers engaged in a topic of conversation. It allows a back and forth conversation, using twitter or the comment box provided to voice your opinion.
One thing I did on the last day was learn how to use the YouTube video editor. Videos are unbelievably useful and almost expected in this age of multi-media reporting. Being able to shoot and edit your own video to supplement a story to put on the web all within a limited time frame is something that is very valuable to news organizations. Here at the Daily Freeman, they have the program FinalCut and use it to edit videos and put on the web. However, FinalCut, as well as ProTools and Avid Media Composer take time; and journalists don’t have time. YouTube video editor is simple to use and takes almost no time at all to put together.
Besides learning all this technical, digital stuff, I also learned just from experiences and physically being in a newsroom.
I can tell as soon as I walk into the building what kind of day it is; sometimes the phones are ringing off the hook, people are yelling, and fax machines are buzzing. Other times it’s a much more relaxed atmosphere, people laughing, lots of quiet moments and some casual conversation. Physically being here has proven to me something that one of my college professors, Rob Miraldi said in class once. He said that being a journalist makes you an expert in something new everyday; and I have seen that just by observing and listening to the things going on around me.
I’ve also experienced some ethical issues that have come up in the newsroom. The first one that sticks out in my mind was when there was a reporter here who had saved a woman from jumping off of a bridge. He had kept this story to himself because he is a reporter and did not want to draw attention to himself. A few days after the incident, he casually mentioned it to another reporter who told him that that was a story that needed to be told. The ethical dilemma was that this man was a reporter for the paper... would it be ethical for the paper to write about him? This ethical dilemma resulted in an article being printed with his story in it. It received a lot of feedback, some positive but also a lot of negative feedback with people criticizing the paper for writing about and “glorifying” its own reporter. The defense for this decision was that yes both a news organization and a reporter must stay objective. However, there are exceptions when extraordinary circumstances unfold and a story develops. In this case, this story was about a man who saved a woman’s live. That was the story, and it didn’t matter if he was a reporter, a doctor, or a homeless man. It was still a story.
The second ethical issue I saw had to do with the Kingston murder trial. The Daily Freeman sent a reporter into the court room with an iPad and permission granted from the judge to “tweet” details of the case during the trial. For the most part, the rule in a courthouse is that there are no cameras, video cameras, or phones allowed to be used inside the court. Many people followed the court case via Cover it Live, which the reporter participated in by using twitter. The question remains: is this ethical? The Society of Professional Journalist’s Code of Ethics does not answer this question and so it is up in the air for many journalists. Many people question whether there is a real NEED for people to know those details in such a quick manner. Here at the Daily Freeman, this act was justified because of the fact that the trial was an open, public trial and that there are limited seats within the court house. The reporter was simply adding more seats the to court house by tweeting the details of the case to readers.
In conclusion to this final and ridiculously long blog post, I want to say that throughout my months here at the Daily Freeman I have learned more than I ever expected to when I walked through the front door of this newsroom. For the past three years I have been sitting in classrooms studying journalism, public relations, ethics, and practicing the skills my professors taught me. It was here at the Daily Freeman that all of this knowledge I have attained and the skills I learned about finally made perfect sense. I was able to see that I don’t just sit in a classroom for no reason. Although some of it may be useless, it does give you a backbone for when you go into the real world. I am so very grateful to have had this experience here at the Daily Freeman and to have learned all of these new skills that I will be able to take with me for the rest of my college experience and into the work place when I graduate.
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