But, what fascinated me the most when reading about Felker’s life, was his persistence during the 60s to reinvent this medium of journalism in the face of the burgeoning TV broadcast news industry. I think the New York Times put it best in this paragraph:

“New York [Magazine's] mission was to compete for consumer attention at a time when television threatened to overwhelm print publications. To do that, Mr. Felker came up with a distinctive format: a combination of long narrative articles and short witty ones on consumer services. He embraced the New Journalism of the late ’60s — the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth.” - NY Times Felker (July 1, 2008)

I couldn’t help but realize the connotations to what is happening today with digital media. As the cacophony of Internet publishers, bloggers, PR firms, social networks and everyone else (and their brothers) overwhelm the traditional print format, no one seems to really be stepping up and saying: Let’s reinvent storytelling to fit this new medium and establish it in the best way we know how.

As we have proselytized during every Knight workshop, the Internet should not be just another distribution platform for news; it’s a brand new medium fully capable of its own merit. It’s almost disheartening to see newspapers simply shoveling the same exact print stories that run in the newspaper straight to their Web site — and then ask why they can’t compete for attention.

It’s unusual because every other medium of news has adjusted the craft of storytelling to fit the medium its told in. Radio news isn’t some print story read over the air. Radio news reporters molded the craft of journalism for the spoken word. TV especially had to adjust their format to fit the medium of communication. But it seems like every industry these days simply shovels their stories online; whether they work for the medium or not.

In the same fashion that Felker defined the glossy pages of the magazine, the long-form narrative, the beautiful full-page advertisements, we need a pioneer to come along and truly define the Web for what it’s capable of producing. We need a news organization to serve as an example of what journalism can be on the Web. There are lots of great multimedia projects out there, but that’s just what they are: single pieces of great work. I would like to see an entire organization serve as a shining light to the rest of the industry; one that says, ‘Hey, we’re taking this thing seriously.’

This is a momentous occasion for me. I feel like over the last two years, I have been wishing for this very thing to well, sprout up.

OK, enough with the puns. But this application is really really cool. It is, for all intents-and-purposes, Adobe Flash ultra-simplified, and it’s on the Web! And it’s FREE. You launch the Web app without having to download any software (except Adobe Flash Player, but there is a 97 percent chance it’s already on your system) Once inside, you can choose from a number of template themes, or opt to create your own. You don’t even have to setup an account to start using it.

Boy, did I put this baby to the test. I teach an Advanced Flash course at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and one of the first things we do is create a Flash template. A Flash template is simple but powerful. Basically it’s a Flash project with three sections, one that takes you to a Soundslides sections, one that shows a map mashup, and another that plays a video. I was utterly shocked when I found that I could do ALL of this, and MORE, with Sprout.

The interface is very much like Flash. You have a property inspector, tool pallet and a components window.  Building the project was absurdly simple. I didn’t have to click a help button once. Though, this is coming from someone who is quite familiar with Flash. I would imagine someone who has never touched Flash might need a few references to understand how the program works.

You can create buttons, multiple pages, add video, mashups, news feeds, twitter feeds, calendar components… and the best part of all, you never even have to touch a lick of ActionScript. I think that learning code is the by far the biggest challenge for people wanting to really do amazing things on the Web. And now the tools are making is just so much easier.

I tried looking for some of the fall backs to this program. And from what I can tell, there are very few. The major one is that the Flash file is hosted on Sprout’s Web site. They will give you the embed code to put it on your own Web site or blog, but you still are relegated to having hosted on their servers, which seems to be a major issue with news organizations that want branding. It would be nice if they let you download the .swf file — much the same way Picnik.com (a sort of online photoshop) lets you download the photos you edit.

Also, in the Sprout editing environment, there is no timeline. It only works with pages — which is how most advanced Flash projects are made these days. No one uses tweens anymore, unless you’re an animator. Flash has evolved to be something so much more; a non-linear storytelling platform.

It also lacks layer arrangement, which can be frustrating. If one element gets lost underneath another element, you are left using a set of “bring to front” tools to rearrange the layers. It’s a little finicky, and I wouldn’t doubt that a person could get left with a malfunctioned project, especially if it’s complex. But Sprout doesn’t seem like it’s the best platform for overly complex projects. It’s easy and simple. It’s all about User Interface, and that seems to be the emerging trend in software these days.

I was taking photos for the campus newspaper part-time, which seemed like a whole lot more fun than programming classes. So, one afternoon I switched my major from computer science to journalism. Newspapers seemed a lot easier to do than programming, and the male-to-female ratio was a little bit better in that department. I never thought I would have to touch a lick of code again.

Fast forward a few years, then lo and behold journalism is all about multimedia and suddenly coding skills are in high demand. I guess those 10 months of intro to programming classes really paid off. But now I’m finding, maybe I should have stuck with the programming gig after all.

I had this very thought a few weeks ago when Apple announced the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone. As soon as heard the news, my first inclination was “I gotta do that.” It turns out, Apple software is based on a programming language called Objective-C. I took a peak and was utterly delighted to learn that ObjC is quite similar to another programming language called C++ that I had to make friends with once upon a time.

I actually went out and bought a book on ObjC and it has very quickly brought me back to common phrases I once cringed to hear, like polymorphism, inheritance, pointers and methods. (I can hear echos of liberal arts majors running away screaming)

OK, so all of that aside, here is the million dollar question: What should I program? So far, I’m successfully mastered the “Hello World” program (a program that displays those respective words). Apple has a ton of really great documentation and coding samples of how to do things like take advantage of location aware functionality, etc. They just released a program tool called Interface Builder, which is essentially a drag-and-drop program builder. It makes the coding part much easier for a novice such as myself. I’m ready to go, but where should I start?

Here are a couple of ideas I was throwing around:

• Location aware app that will tell you nearby services like shopping, theaters, gas stations, etc. Maybe I can connect it to http://www.everyblock.com/ ?
• A journalist toolbox, that will offer you Computer Assisted Reporting tools at your finger tips. Everything from where to get a person’s home tax records to how to file a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA). Maybe I can store it in the phone’s mysql lite database.
• RSS aggregation program that will give you headlines from a variety of sources (I’m sure this someone else already has done this. It’s pretty easy to do.

Any more ideas? What do people want out of their iPhones?

I used to listen to the radio when I had a driving commute at a previous job, but this time I get to choose exactly which casts I want to listen to and in which order.

Lately I’ve been listening to Slate, NPR and a few others. Just so many of the segments are incredible. I actually feel rejuvinated when hearing a great piece that opens my eyes to larger world we live in. Most of the time I’m left intrigued.

So why is podcasting still a small niche in the total number of audio listeners? Well, logistics plays a big part. You need an mp3 player and, software to aggregate the casts. But more importantly you need time. Time to listen. No one actively turns on a radio to listens to news. Its a passive form of news consumption. You listen to it while doing something else, like driving or doing the dishes.

This question came up recently during a Knight multimedia workshop we were teaching at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Someone described podcasts as “radio without listeners” and my heart sank. How could this precious piece of daily enlightenment simply not exist in the lives of so many people. I suspect once cars become further integrated with iPod, this form of news consumption will become more and more widely used.

If you still don’t believe me, I challenge you to listen to the following cast and not be fully intrigued. It’s a piece from NPR’s Driveway Moments about a man trying to come to terms with a lobotomy he had when he was 12. I know, the topic sounds a bit weird, but this bit of audio is one of the most incredible pieces I’ve heard. The quick cross edits, the haunting voices, everything about it is so riveting I forget I’m listening to a news story. It’s 20 minutes long. You might not have the patience to listen to the whole thing sitting here on this blog (the reason why radio doesn’t work online), so remember you can always download the podcast.

Howard Dully\’s My Lobotomy piece from NPR\’s Driveway Moment

I have to admit, the service works pretty well. It’s free except for the cost of the text message your carrier charges (most carriers give an allowance of text messages). In a test I text messaged “carl’s jr. six dollar” and got back information that their Six Dollar Guacamole Bacon Burger was 1117 calories. That’s not counting the fries or the large soda. Pretty soon I was texting the name of everything I’ve eaten in the last couple of weeks. (I didn’t have the six dollar burger in case you were wondering)

This type of feature isn’t anything new. Lots of organizations are using texting services to get or return information, including Google’s new 411 service. Just text your search query to “G-O-O-G-L-E” or 466453, and it’ll return local info. (Ex. “sushi 94720″ will return sushi restaurants near UC Berkeley).

Local KITS Live 105.3 San Francisco uses text messaging to get responses from listeners to polls or song requests. The DJ will ask a question like “Text in your favorite place to vacation” and within seconds the messages come pouring in. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s most immediate form.

It seems the only people who aren’t using a text messaging service are news Web sites. At least, I haven’t seen any. A few will provide “SMS alerts” but even then, I’m not sure I want give the power to a company to send me text messages all day about a range of topics I can’t control, dwindling down my monthly 250 text message allowance. I’d rather have the query-answer method any day.

Why is it that the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times can’t be the one to provide me with directions to restaurants or the latest movies playing via my cell phone? Google wins again.

The idea, once it’s fully developed, would work like this: Set your mobile phone on an area of your desk that has a special reader pad. The pad signals your computer and takes you to a site that would allow you to download RSS feeds, news stories, blog, personal notes and even directions to say a restaurant right to your phone.

The RFID part of it is more of a gimmack, the real beauty is in the software. Making it simple to, well, put the newspaper on your phone. There are a ton of programs right now that will technically do that, but none with the beauty and simplicity as this one. And one thing software developers are quickly learning these days is that User Interface is everything.

Their idea was so cool, they won the Yahoo Hack Day London 2007 competition. (I admit, I didn’t even know that was going on)

They are going to have the software ready “very soon” on their Web site ShifD.com.

Watch the video of them explaining their product far better than I could in this blog:



I like Brian because he is a visionary. He is not one of the ones trying to “catch up” but rather he is helping to lead the charge with innovative storytelling. He comes from a photojournalism background, and I suspect his workshop will be more visually oriented that others, especially given the nature of his business.

Other multimedia training workshops tend to go about training in different ways, I think. Here at Berkeley’s Knight Workshop, I feel like we are more technology oriented and we cater more toward journalists that are just starting out on the digital side of things. Our aim is to help “mid-career” journalists who are trying to catch-up.

The price of the MediaStorm workshop is pretty steep: $3,000 for an “observer” position and $4,500 for a participant such as a reporter or editor. I assume a news organization will be footing the bill for an employee, that’s usually how these things work. Then when they go back, they can help spread the knowledge.

He failed to mention Knight in the list of “others” on his FAQ however. (I should note that we are the first result to come up when doing a Google search on “Multimedia Journalism.”) Maybe he’ll give us a shout out later.

Read the details of MediaStorms workshop here.

EDIT: Brian Storm e-mailed me to tell me they added Knight to their list of “other” workshops. Oops, forgot about the trackbacks. A big thank you goes out to MediaStorm.

The iPlayer is simple enough. Stream all of the BBC content on the Web. Everyone is pretty much already doing this, except, the BBC is actually looking ahead to the future. They are trying to make their content available in as many venues as they can. Very soon everyone who owns an iPhone in Europe will know they can watch BBC content on their iPhones, and the BBC will undoubtedly see a jump in traffic. If they play their cards right, they will start offering other services to iPhone users like movie times, weather, stocks, etc. all through widgets or programs.

Now I use Apple’s iPhone as a reference, but I’m really speaking of mobile devices in general. I like to use the iPhone because I think it does serve as a rather interesting barometer given its popularity and capabilities (not to mention Google recently announced that iPhone searches on the internet are 50 times more than any other cell phone).

Pretty soon, the mobile computing platform will become ubiquitous. Some say in five years, others in two years. But no matter who you talk to, they all agree that mobile devices are the future. I’ve said it before, people today are in love with their cell phones. It’s their lifeline to the world, their method of personal communication. Now, it’ll be used as a platform for mass communication. The only question unanswered is who will be leading the charge? A Silicon Valley startup, or a news company?

Think about it: In the 80s and earlier, if you wanted to advertise your business, what were your options, really? Well, there were billboards and store signage, but the reality is you probably would have gone with newspapers, magazines or TV.

These days you can advertise just about anywhere. They are selling ads on airplanes, at the gas pump, and pretty soon your cell phone. (more on that later) The truth is the news media was too slow to adopt the Internet, so other companies sailed that ship first.

Really, it should have been a news organization that became the next eBay, craigslist, youTube or FaceBook. Now they are scrambling to catch up. But there is hope, and it’s emerging sooner than people think.

In two weeks a major cell phone manufacture will release a Software Development Kit (SDK) that will teach developers how to write programs for its handheld device. I speak of course about the iPhone. Not that software for cellphones is anything new. But this time the world is paying attention. Very soon the handheld market will explode. Already cellphones are a huge part of the lives of young people, and the capability of these devices to view Web sites is proliferating. For once, the journalism industry can look to the horizon and see the next big thing.

I once heard a talk at a journalism conference where a professor said the main advantage the newspaper has over the Internet was that he can fold it up, take it on the train, or take it to the bathroom. Well, it appears that issue is about to be solved. Will news companies sit idly by and watch this new technology emerge without their participation?

Already, the iPhone has a Web SDK and very few news organization are taking advantage of it. In fact, CBS news is the only news site that has offered an iPhone-specific version. And I can tell you this much: Just about every iPhone user knows about it because they are the only ones doing it. So far there are 5 million iPhone users — not a relatively large number. But the idea is right on. Be an early adopter and people will come to you first.

The NY Times could be building an iPhone news reader. Or maybe a program that would allow you to buy books from their best seller list. Already Apple has given advanced copies of its SDK to a photo company which will automatically print photos you take with your iPhone and send them to you. There are possibilities out there for this one. Is the news industry going to let this one pass by?

This link should say it all.

In a world increasingly dominated by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even things as simple as blogs, the methods by which young people communicate, have gone completely digital. In a recent ethnographic survey by Jacobs Media, people under 25 cherish their cell phones as if it were their only lifeline to the outside world. They don’t just love their cell phones, they feel as if they need their cell phones. It’s almost like electricity. When the power goes out, you start to realize just how much you rely on it as you sit there in the dark.

So why do journalism students need to learn programming? Because journalists are relying too much on others to publish to the Web. One only has to ask the question of why a journalism company didn’t become eBay, Yahoo, or even Google. In the 80s, if you wanted to find out about what was going on in the world, you went to the newspaper or TV News. If you wanted to see what people were selling, you looked in the classifieds. If you wanted crosswords, or comics, or read light-hearted columns, you didn’t read blogs, but rather you got those things from news companies. Not true any more.

The news media missed out because they are run by “journalists,” not programmers. And while the journalists were busy telling stories, all of the computer science majors graduated from college and jumped into dot com startups that took control of this online world.

Programming — or scripting — is a lot easier than it sounds. Taken one step at a time, the concepts of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and ActionScript are within reach by the laymen. I personally found high school Algebra 1 was far more advanced than calling functions or writing a for loop.

It’ll be tough though. Journalism has always been more of a liberal arts field. English and History majors become journalists, not engineers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.