New Media Consortium Presentation, June 10- Susan Walker, Boston University
Rembrandt, Art Heist, Cold Case, Hot Web Site
Thanks for coming…. This session is how we, in the journalism department at
Boston University, use professional partnerships and integrate multimedia into our
courses. I’m also going to outline how you can do this, without major computer labs,
Flash software, or tons of skills and resources. Multimedia on the cheap, giving your
students professional opportunities beyond the step and fetchit internships.
Why? The seismic changes in the journalism industry actually, in our minds,
provide opportunity. We have struggling newspapers, facing declining readership,
staff cutbacks, and “old” legacy editors and reporters. And these newspapers are
need to survive, and get a second life, or make that first life, on the Internet through
cross platform reporting- using video and audio and the Intenet as well as the
printed word.
Then, on the other hand, we have our college students- hungry for professional
experience, the millenials, the digital natives, who are known to “graze” …Their
energy, talents, obsessive interest and savvy both as news consumers and news
producers can be harnessed through what we call professional partnerships.
My background is that of a professional, not a PHD, I’ve been a television news
and documentary producer and after 25 years in the field- I switched hats. for the
last decade, I’ve taught at BU- broadcast, television, journalism courses, along with
an online journalism course created, in part, with my colleague multimedia
professor Michelle Johnson who is currently giving a new media workshop to old
newspaper journalists at the Maynard Institute summer program at the University
of Nevada, Reno.
I’d like to show you how we at BU partner with local and regional newspapers, in
different ways, to provide coverage of special events, political races and issues and,
in the case study I’m about to show you- with a follow-up to a major news story for
our area…the theft of art work from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.
It was Michelle’s idea to incorporate a professional partnership project as the
final assignment into the two sections of Advanced Online Journalism course that
we teach. The story- half a billion dollar art heist from the Isabella Steward Gardner
museum. The BU journalism students collaborated with the Boston Herald
newspaper reporter Tom Mashberg covered the case as well as the FBI- The goalcreate a multimedia, interactive and archival Web site this spring semester, during
the 20th anniversary of the heist. Use the Internet, not really a journalism tool in
1990 when two men dressed as police broke into the museum and stole renowned
art works by Rembrandt and Vermeer. This summer, 2010, we are using this
collaborative Web site to help update and maybe even crack the cold case the FBI
calls “one of the top ten art crimes.
Rather than speak for my colleague, Michelle Johnson, or the students involved, I
want to show you a video showing you behind the scenes…or behind the screens of
this project.
Play Quicktime file off desktop….9 minute video showing Gardner museum theft as
well as other professional partnership projets.
http://vimeo.com/12302669
Let’s take a look at that Web site today.http://www.bujournalism.com/gardner/
Look at the entry video, the interactive element …the tip box is on the home
page….making it easy polling users on possible suspects- also chronicling how many
visits using a free plug in from Google.
Go Bulletin Board, interactive simple, conversational language….arranged in a
graphic format, the bulletin board, that investigators often use.
Go to suspects page….roll-over on each page- you have a thumbnail description of
each suspect…you can drill down if you want to know more…remember the viewer
is the chooser…know as little as much as you want about each topic or suspect
through a click-through, echoing media critic Jeff Jarvis…says, do what you do best
and link to the rest.
Click on Miles Connor, play video of Tom Mashberg…
Go to That Night…this is where you get the map and timeline created in Flash….done
by the student who never touched Flash before.
Go to Stolen Art….this is the art historian from UMass describing one of the best
known paintings, by Rembrandt, The Storm. You can roll over the painting and get a
text box while still hearing about this painting from the expert.
And the archival piece….the headlines from the Boston Herald…the online
repository for both Tom Mashberg and the Boston Herald on previous coverage of
this crime. (Click on one of the headlines).
You saw in the video how we are also partnering with local newspapers…and the
ABC News affiliate in Boston, providing the Web coverage of the Boston Marathon.
Special event coverage is a specialty. Turn our news room into a blogging, tweeting,
Web producing machine on election nights.
Professional partnerships are used in our political reporting programs as well,
both at the Massachusetts State House…and our Washington DC program. Try to
take advantage of our location- Boston major media market and the state’s capitol.
http://www.bu.edu/statehouse/
Go to about us…what we are finding is that BU students are now providing more
coverage of state politics that any other news outlet…monster statehouse bureau,
producing byline stories for about a dozen newspapers and video and audio content
for the Web sites of these local and regional newspapers. Go to Broadcast and Web
videos….We are planning to build out the state house program approach and
become a student run, professor supervised news service to these local newspapers,
cable stations and small radio stations.
Another example of professional partnerships between university and local news
outlets is found in the New England Center for Investigative Reporting….
http://necir-bu.org
click on who we are….this is the first non-profit university-based investigative
reporting center in the country…Students, veteran journalists Joe Bergantino and
Maggie Mulvihill work with BU professors and their students on investigative
projects which can be found
(click on media outlets)
the front page of the Boston Globe…New England Cable News and NPR affiliate
WBUR.
Stories tend to be time intensive…involving sources, data mining, important
watchdog stories that mainstream legacy media simply don’t have the resources
to cover….(click on investigations)- provides real-world assignments at the same
time.
Now New England Center for Investigative Reporting is funded in part by the
Knight Foundation…But bringing it back to Michelle Johnson’s advice…you don’t
need huge grants, major computer labs, or even the city of Boston.
Look at your local outlets, newspapers, cable stations …or with liberal arts
courses, institutions such as orchestras, art museums etc. It helps the pros get online
and this enables students to hand in relevant assignments that are part of their
world, the Internet, multimedia “grazable” content. Assignments in today’s higher
educations should go beyond the tools of books and papers.
Where to you go to learn how to do this? You don’t necessarily have to learn Flash –
Steve Jobs has famously dropped Flash from his Ipads as he believes HTML 5 is
better software.
But like everything on the Internet, cheap and free instruction and template live on
the Web.
Passing out a take-away sheet on how you can do a Gardner kind of site on the
cheap….Share some of the comments of our students.
- I'm monitoring usage with Google Analytics through a plugin called
Google Analytics for WordPress. I'd prefer to use something like Hubspot,
but Google's version is free.
As to what template people should use, I've found that the appropriate
template depends on the content. Websites like Graph Paper Press offer
extremely attractive WordPress templates that emphasize photos and
videos as the story-telling vehicle. Those types of designs emphasize that
we can't rely on the content to draw readers in anymore. An elegant
display and clear, well-written teasers are key to enticing readers.
I'd recommend that educators stick to WordPress as a publishing platform.
It's a very flexible content management system and can be as simple or
complex as the author makes it. Best of all, it's free. The ideal setup, I
would say, would be for schools and departments to use the new
WordPress MU version, which allows a department chair or professor to
manage limitless sub-sites without using any more resources than a
normal WordPress installation would incur.
Gardner museum we had about six students working on the
project…during the course of several weeks…one frustration they shared
is that missing one of the small deadlines meant delaying the launch of the
Web site…all the small deadlines have to be met in order to publish.
Students were also able to practice software skills outside of class, using a
required group subscription to the following site.
http://lynda.com
subscription based service…students complained about the unwieldy length.
Not a big fan of commercial sites…want to work with students not on specific tools
but to be flexible about using different software.
Favorite site, shout-out to UC Berkeley who funded by the Knight Foundation have
this go to site- Knight Digital Media Center.
http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/
go to tutorials….
Click on Flash…everything you need, templates, instruction
Video includes Final Cut Pro, I movie, PC based Premiere, even which equipment to
buy.
Last but certainly not least, I like to show students what I consider best practices…
http://interactivenarratives.org/
The online news association sponsors the site, good look at what the pros are doing.
And then this is a pet peeve of mine as an educator…show students what their peers
are doing…either by projects from a previous class…even split out by whether this
was a first or mid-term assignment…or by student winners in national competitions.
Technology and new can be daunting…and you want to show students what their
peers are doing…and what is in the realm of possibility for them to do with the skill
sets they have at the time.
http://journalists.org/news/29726/Finalists-announced-for-2009-OnlineJournalism-Awards.htm
Like how they broken out award winners by small team…that is student solo
journalist…or so jos….as well as large team….
Thank you for listening and watching…and I hope to see your schools
represented in the student competition conducted by the online news association.
http://journalists.org/news/39022/Boston-selected-as-ONA11-site.htm
which just happens to be held in Boston, with Boston University one of the cosponsors, with our professional partners the Boston Globe and NPR affiliate WBUR.