DISQUS

Thanks for calling out ReportingOn and Wired Journalists! I'm a big HARO fan as well, and I've been keeping an eye on PitchEngine.

"Lede" is silly old-school newspaper spelling, so as not to be confused with "lead" (rhymes with dead), as in "leading" in typography, quite literally the strips of lead that were placed between lines of hot type to add spacing.

I'll leave it others to editorialize on the merits of using jargon that only exists so it doesn't get conflated with terms from a dead language.

Just a journalistic request: Every time a solar start-up claims they're going to produce cells of "n% efficiency," please go ahead and report what the highest efficiency cells on the market currently manage to pull down, for the sake of context and reality.

I mean, every single start-up *hopes* they can produce more efficient cells, or concentrators, or whatever they're working on, but let's keep track of how their claims measure up, shall we?

Oh, sure, absolutely. As long as you keep up your Twitter addiction no matter what, anything incredibly important will find you.

See also: Fred Wilson's post about funding Disqus:

"This allows the comments to go anywhere and everywhere where there is an audience for them. Abstracting comments from the blog hosting platform does for comments what RSS has done for content; it allows the comments to flow freely to whatever place it should most logically be consumed."

Math and logic available at Politifact.

I'm usually the first one to spout steam out my ears when I hit Cmd-U and see the telltale signs of Dreamweaver usage on a news site, but...

...this post from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame reminded me that there is a fine text editor built into Dreamweaver, which, used properly, will yield the good clean semantic code that the cool kids all advocate these days.

Then again, there are plenty of free or cheap text editors around that get the job done with enough spending money leftover to buy a Dan Cederholm or Jeffrey Zeldman book that will take you further than any piece of software.

To drive the point home: It's one thing to teach a copy editing class how to use proofreader's marks; it's quite another to point them in the direction of Copperud and Bernstein.

Clearly a Mets fan.

I'm going to go *way* out on a limb here and guess that commentary both pro- and anti- Yes We Can video is being made by folks with a political point of view.

Does the fact that this is the first I've heard of any "backlash" reveal something about my own political POV? Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, what would the Hillary Clinton equivalent be, and who would be in the video? Would it have had the same effect, if any?

Of course, all this only applies *if* you prefer hiring a developer to using free Web services and (often) free software to get these jobs done.

Obviously there are many, many advantages to hiring a coder, but I think it depends greatly on a newsroom's structure, mindset, and resources.

That said, a loud 'amen' to this: "Don’t send out an email to your staff asking if anybody wants to be the Web reporter/editor/producer/guy/girl with the full intention of hiring the person most interested.

Bug report: Pix that I took as verticals, uploaded sideways, rotated in Flickr = sideways in FlickrFan. Does that make sense?

As someone who constantly urges reporters to step away from their desks and hit the streets with multimedia reporting gear to get to know their beats in person, I should be pretty gung-ho about a, uh, distributed newsroom.

But...

As a reporter, I love bouncing ideas around a newsroom, getting feedback from my editors, seeing a printout of my story with physical, pen-drawn arrows and lines giving me advice of where to move a quote.

Of course, there are online equivalents of a lot of this - IM is one way to get things done. An internal social network (or even an internal white-label Twitter) might be another.

Good luck Robert - I'll be eager to see whatever's next for you.

Good theme choice - Copyblogger has great typography, puts the emphasis on content instead of "design."

I totally spaced on that. Sorry Patrick! We'll actually be passing through Half Moon Bay back and forth to SF today, but I've got my daughter, wife, her mother and grandmother with me, so I think mojitos by the fire ring are out of the question tonight.

Tip from a new Dad -

No, really, the nights are going to be pretty wild for a while.

Second tip -

It is impossible to know exactly which pieces of baby gear you need and which you don't until the child needs to be fed, diapered and put to sleep at 3 a.m. Then it will all become perfectly clear.

Little did we know the trail we were blazing in 1994 (at an undisclosed location in north Dade) when we revolted after the rumored biggest cheater in the class of 722 made valedictorian. We threatened to not show up, to turn our backs, whatever it took. And then they held auditions for speaker. The winner did well enough, although he was pretty nervous.

I thought all that was part of the joke - that here was this relatively dumb idea that he could get people to make a big deal out of for the low low price of...

If you're going to stay on campus and work for the school paper, it better be as some sort of hardcore multimedia reporter/producer.

If you want to cut your teeth as a writer or editor on a daily, do it, but produce multimedia anyway. Just start shooting and building stuff on your own, so you have more than just a bunch of print clips to drag around to job fairs and interviews.

If at all possible, get off the reservation and go work for the Sun.

I think the journalistic possibilities - live streaming with a webcam and an EVDO card - are far more interesting than the "watch me scratch my nose" applications.

Toss a tablet PC and a webcam that plays well with a service like ustream into three or four reporters' backpacks, and suddenly you have a live feed playing on your site when news breaks.

Ah, but there's so much more to it once you go a little further down the rabbit hole.

Typography. Line-height. The divine proportion.

Many of the principles are the same in print design and web design, when it comes to layout and content.

And what's all this about pencil and paper? We started with InDesign and spent time talking about print layout conventions and when to break them, why to tease what where, and what a six-column photo can do.

Come for the opportunity to tell all your Internet friends how your breakfast is -- without blogging it for the whole world (and the search engines) to see -- but stay for the snarky commentary on how someone else's breakfast went down.

Re: SJSU --

I see Prof. Greene already commented, but I'll elaborate a bit on what has changed in the journalism program.

The 'podcasting' you mentioned has gone from one section to three, and each prof. has their own style. One might be more video than audio, and the third might be more general, but this semester they finally got some gear: A bunch of Edirol R09 audio recorders and a handful of point & shoot video cameras.

I can't begin to tell you how big a difference I think that makes -- that someone finally made a budgetary commitment to something more than a room full of iMacs, though that's not such a bad move either, bringing iMovie and Garage Band into the mix.

All three sections of the class are full, and one group of students has formed an emerging media club, bringing in compsci majors and others to form a campus group, not an exclusive club for journalism majors.

There are more SJSU J-Schoolers blogging now than ever (and in public, using blogger and wordpress, not just myspace and livejournal), videoblogging and podcasting, too.

I'm not going to sit here and say everything has changed, but things are obviously changing.

Feel free to take a little credit, btw, because your visits have certainly inspired the change agents in the building.

Basic rules to learn in order to break them later:

:::Shoot multiple angles and sizes -- close up from one side, wide from another, mediums for everywhere, lots of details.

:::Break up the main action with the details.

:::Keep the audio of the main action running.

:::Think of illustrating a scene, as if it were "moving pictures" and not "television."

:::Storytelling doesn't have to hit the viewer over the head.

Sounds like a good idea :)

Sandbox is a great place to start - I had to tweak the markup in a few places, but there's a million dynamic classes built into it.

If you want one category to look different from the others, so be it. Want to make a particular post or page stand out? Can do.

That said, it starts you off with a RATHER blank canvas, but it's a great way to practice your CSS.