Khoi Vinh, design director of nytimes.com, wrote a posting about how print designers can adapt to web design, with both some practical tips and general lessons.

To start out, many print designers seem to think they learn web design by using Flash, since it “seems to allow the closest approximation of the print designer’s pasteboard,” wrote Vinh.

“But I think it’s absolutely the wrong way to start learning how to work on the Web. It leads too easily to the assumption that a similar amount of authorial control can be exerted in online design as can be achieved offline.”

Vinh’s first piece of advice to transitioning designers is thus to learn HTML and CSS, which are the foundations for anything on the web.

He also recommends two books to that effect, “HTML, XHTML and CSS Visual QuickStart Guide” by Elizabeth Castro and “Eric Meyer on CSS.”

But even learning HTML shouldn’t be the first step. However obvious this may seem, Vinh’s primary piece of advice is “is first embracing the medium as something different from print.”

In the same vein, but deeper: “on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it’s a method for making behaviors possible.”

In complement to the previous piece about the Press Association’s training programs, here are a few very practical videojournalism lessons gathered live from the video storytelling class taught by David Dunkley.

The video course as a whole spans over about two weeks (and costs roughly £2000). A first week is spent with another trainer to learn most of the technical aspects of the camera and its handling. Student journalists also follow a two-day course to learn about editing. Dunkley’s particular role in the program is a two-day storytelling course, which is aimed at breaking the basic rules and learning how to use video to improve coverage – to ‘think video’.

The format of the class enables a lot of one-on-one interaction (there were five students that particular day, Oct. 22) and practical exercises done outside, ‘on the ground’. After practicing each ‘drill’ or technique, students come back to the cozy classrooms to view their footage and openly discuss mistakes and strengths. A good share of classroom time is also devoted to visioning of VJ pieces, as well as movies that use VJ techniques (the main one: the camera is the subject, United 93, Bourne series).

The goal of the class is “to fall off the bike as much as possible while we’re here,” says Dunkley.

A state court has ruled in favor of a request by The Dallas Morning News to obtain emails sent by city officials, including from their personal accounts or hand-held devices. This is the first case of the Texas Public Information Act being extended to (personal) emails.

"This case is very significant," said David Starr, vice president and deputy general counsel of Belo Corp, parent company of the Dallas Morning News.

"It's the first Texas court decision addressing whether e-mails relating to city business that are sent or received on a personal e-mail account are subject to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act."

Under Texas law, government correspondence, including e-mail, is considered public, unless protected otherwise.

Not only that, the ruling implies that electronic information can be made public, notwithstanding of the device it was sent through (city officials have argued that the emails were personal because sent from personal mobile devices).

But “the delivery platform doesn't make any difference. It's what the content of the message is. If the content of the message is about governing, then it should be public," said Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

It took 22 months for the court to decide in favor of the News reporters who requested to see the emails. They had filed their request in late 2005.

Publishers everywhere are being asked to implement ACAP, Automated Content Access Protocol, developed at the initiative of the World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council.

ACAP will allow publishers to better protect their intellectual property rights by giving them more control over what search engines can gain access to.

ACAP should give content owners more confidence about publishing on the Web. The new web publishing standard was unveiled at a conference this week in New York, opened by WAN president Gavin O’Reilly. He said, "We can overcome this obstacle to development thanks to ACAP. ACAP will give the content industry worldwide the incentive to innovate, create and disseminate. Newspapers, magazines, books, journals, directory publishers: anyone involved in digital publishing can now adopt a standard that will protect their interests and will make them masters of their own content."

Globally, publishers are being encouraged to use ACAP, which will allow publishers to communicate their individual access and use policies in a language that search engine robots can read and understand. Publishers can choose to limit how long the engines can cache their content, enforce page-wide no follows, along with other options.

The Times Online has been the first to implement the new ACAP.

The Herald just launched a print redesign, which puts much focus on cross-promoting the print and online edition and increasing interaction with readers.

In the new design, the paper invites readers to send in opinion and comments about news through their mobiles, as well as vote in online polls and participate to a weekly contest for user-generated photographs.

“The challenge is that of taking an established and revered media brand outside of its traditional boundaries and engaging it audience like never before. Ultimately our operation will expand beyond the format that it has used for 162 years and develop into a multimedia brand across several different platforms,” said Jethro Goko, editor-in-chief of the Herald and its sister title the Weekend Post.

Read here to see an example of the Washington Post’s print incentives to draw readers online.

The time when newspapers thought promoting the online edition risked cannibalizing the print product is long gone. Now more than ever, newspapers must fight to attract readers to any medium they can offer.

Source: biz-community.com through IFRA Executive News Service

The French National Syndicate of Journalists (SNJ) issued a concerned statement after the freesheet Matin Plus featured on its front page a story about the visit of Cameroon’s president, Paul Biya. Why?

The news of the visit received little coverage by other mainstream media, so it’s somewhat surprising that Matin Plus chose to devote its front page to the story on Oct. 26.

Matin Plus is jointly owned by the Bolloré group (70%) and Le Monde (30%).

“One will notice that the Bolloré group has numerous interests in Africa, including in Cameroon,” said the SNJ in a press release.

The freesheet “emphasized an event that is far from being major and coincidentally is linked to economic interests” of the Bolloré group, said Dominique Candille, secretary general of the SNJ.

“Journalist syndicates have every reason to want to hurry the resolution of issues of editorial independence,” said the SNJ in its press release.

As of late, there have been several examples of supposed mingling with the editorial independence of French newspapers.

Source: Le Monde through IFRA Executive News Service

As newsrooms and readers change, so do the staff’s roles within the newsroom. Nowadays, the “data delivery editor” is responsible for constructing and organizing databases, which become increasingly relevant to local users.

At The Roanoke Times, Matt Chittum is building a database and accompanying map to help users spot bears, since black bear sightings are frequent in Virginia.

This bear map is only one of many databases to be compiled in the paper’s website DataSphere. The DataSphere collects in one place the multitude of newspaper databases that could be helpful to the local audience (also see the DataUniverse put up by the Asbury Park Press).

“I didn't want us to forever shy from running them (databases) because we had one really bad experience. I wanted to show they could be used for the good -- for good journalism -- if you carefully weighed the value of the information you were presenting," said Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant.

And indeed newspapers can create a quality editorial product through databases. Chittum filed another database that enables users to follow the 21-year career of Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer. The New York Times set up a graph and map of presidential campaign visits.

Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor & Publisher decided to talk about his failed company, the Enthusiast Group, which was an experiment in grassroots media and social networking, to teach the lessons he learned and to save others from the same failure he experienced.
The Enthusiast Group created websites based mainly on user generated content and social networks to serve people that were passionate about various sports, each sport having its own website with its own “enthusiast-in-chief,” or editor to blog, shoot video, and interact with contributors by commenting or answering questions. The enthusiast-in-chief provided the professional content on the site, but most content came from users.

The growth in traffic for the sites was slow and not enough to sustain the business. Outing says now that user-generated content is just not good enough, but it can be very useful and successful if leveraged in the correct way. He said that his business made the mistake of relying too heavily on UGC and if he could go back he would have hired more athletes or adventurers to contribute to the site because quality is what really attracts the audience.

Outing explains that there are whole magazines dedicated to various sports and activities that are full of professional content, so people may just go there for their information if the content is not good enough on sites such as his. He said that he received some amazing content from users, just not enough.

More newspapers are trying to compensate declining ad revenues by creating ad-sponsored editorial sections. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) launched a new section about emerging technologies sponsored by Acura’s Innovation for Life campaign.

Any Wall Street Journal Digital Network content covering emerging technology feeds into the sponsored section. Acura is also the main advertiser for WSJ’s newly-launched ‘All Things Digital’ section.

WSJ has already carried out similar sponsored sections with UPS, and its affiliate MarketWatch.com with British Airways. The New York Times had created a microsite that displayed FedEx video ads exclusively.

"You're going to see more leadership brands like the Journal listening, being more solution-oriented and sitting down with clients to come up with more interesting programs along with traditional advertising," said Mike Jensen, sales director South West for the Wall Street Journal Digital.

Source: clickz.com through I want Media

Agence France Presse has announced that it has taken a 30% stake in Scooplive, a French company that runs a citizen journalism platform for films and photos. The site was started in 2006 as a way to allow citizen journalists to sell their videos and photos to media organizations around the world.

The move by AFP is meant to help its clients in the media field by getting them closing to readers and finding videos and content from citizen journalists to compliment their own production.

Following the 30% stakes taken by AFP and IAM, another French company, Scooplive is to be renamed Citizenside.

Source: Agence France Presse Mail

The Online Journalism Review reported yesterday about a European news RSS aggregator, which seems to have gone under the radar. Launched in August, Imooty.eu enables users to scan geographically-based news across blogs and newspaper sites.

Users can click on a map to access local news from small and big newspapers alike, as well as blogs. Readers can also choose to navigate feeds by topics and themes.

So far, the site includes feeds from most countries in the European Union, and a few others.

To date, Imooty.eu currently scans about 400 newspapers and about 700 blogs, and is still growing.

According to one of the site’s founders, Kristoffer J. Lassen, the general access point for many European readers is regional news. And with increasing immigration, there are more and more readers who need a simplified way to access comprehensive news from another country.

“The Imooty platform will play an important part in satisfying the emerging demand for a common European media universe,” says Lassen.

Imooty currently only pulls RSS feeds, but is working with news publications to get access to their archived content.

Click below to learn more about Imooty.

Source: Online Journalism Review