Yesterday marked the opening of The Amherst Wire’s newsroom, UMass Amherst’s first independent, web-only news operation.
To recap on how we got here, The Amherst Wire was hatched in January 2008 by three students in Steve Fox’s multimedia journalism class. In the early days, we collaborated largely by E-mail and weekly editor’s meetings in the journalism department lounge. This semester, with a growing staff of volunteer reporters and the addition of four new editors to our team, we felt the need for a more functional space to call home. And so after consulting with the department’s adviser, we got permission to set up shop across the hall in Bartlett 107 every Friday afternoon.
We still have our editor’s meetings every Tuesday, but now anybody can come in on Fridays to workshop pieces and pick up new skills. The newsroom is equipped with computers from the journalism department’s Mobile Laptop Lab, wireless Internet, a whiteboard and projector for tutorials on the tools of multimedia reporting.
Our first day in the newsroom was spent getting the new editors up to speed on web server basics, AmherstWire.com’s directory structure, File Transfer Protocol, Wordpress and phpMyAdmin. As a practical exercise, I walked everyone through downloading a fresh copy of WP 2.7, uploading it to a new directory on our server, and completing the installation process for a self-hosted Wordpress blog.
Next week, the real work begins. Tuesday is our first all-staff meeting of the semester and we expect reporters to start coming in with their projects on Friday.
My hope is that The Amherst Wire’s multimedia newsroom becomes a place where people can go to learn things they normally wouldn’t find in traditional print newsrooms or journalism classes. Part of our revenue model will be to charge nominal fees for a number of the more involved workshops and open them up to local newspaper reporters and freelancers as well as students.
Here’s a sampling of the what we’ve got lined up in the coming months:
- Link journalism
- Ethics for online news
- Crowdsourcing and social networking
- Online comment moderation
- Blogging techniques
- Digital photojournalism
- Creating online photo galleries
- Audio slideshows
- Podcasting
- Video for the web
- Motion graphic design
- Web design with HTML/CSS
- Multimedia feature page design
- Computer-assisted reporting
- Web mashups
What additional workshops would you like to see happen? What do you consider to be essential skills for online journalists?
Is this project something you’re receiving credit for, or does it exist outside of other courses?
@Daniel – This exists outside of regular coursework, but editors get independent study credits for the extra time they put in.
First .. I think this is a great project. Hopefully newspapers that are really making the switch to being online first can learn from project like these
Second … really great, comprehensive list!
I do have some suggestions for additions, although perhaps these would be sub-bullets in your already quite wide-ranging list.
1. Vlogging. (I’m not talking podcasting here. I’m talking sending an reporter out with an easy video camera, such as the flip, and getting video for his or her story or using the video camera to talk to the reader directly on an blog. This would include learning to edit the video using programs such as Movie Maker.)
2. Creating a conversation. This is more of a mindset topic … but these new tools only work if journalists change how they think. We’re not publishing the news or broadcasting it or even posting it. We’re conversing with readers; we’re helping them make sense of the world and giving them the type of information they want in the format they want it. That means news isn’t just what journalists say is news. We might be giving readers information about where’s the best place to get a haircut or the best pizza shop, not traditional news topics.
Great stuff! Glad to see you finally have a place you can call home.
@Gina – I really like those suggestions. You’re right that it’s important to get journalists into the mindset that news is no longer a one-way street.
@Eric – Thanks! I’m looking forward to this semester.
Why not use the multi-user version of WordPress – http://mu.wordpress.org/ ? Single login across all blogs in the system, no install required, etc.
I’d add “Campus media co-ops,” because I don’t really think any of the campus media outlets can do this alone.
AmherstWire’s got some great new media experimentation going on, but lacks a frequent and steady stream of content. The Collegian’s got a lot of man power but is short on folks with tech skills [I'm still pretty illiterate with anything outside video and podcasting]. UVC is probably the only place where shots are being framed right and light and audio quality are being considered, but because of the better quality, turnover is slower.
I’m looking forward to meeting Wednesday to discuss filling in the gaps.
@ceejayoz – WPMU is something I’ve been considering for a while. I actually just noticed that they’ve released version 2.7, so we may look into making the switch soon.
@S.P. – Exactly, none of us can do it alone, nor should we. Here’s hoping the summit will pave the way for more cross-org cooperation.