What I've learned (5)

I’ve learned that advertising is the biggest source of revenue for online journalism and that new money-making methods need to be found.

What I've learned (4)

I’ve learned that online journalism entails many of the same legal and ethical standards of print, but that there are some differences.

What I've learned (3)

I’ve learned that writing for online is different than writing for print. Online writing should be shorter and more direct as readers skim.

What I've learned (2)

I’ve learned about linking; how to do it, when to do it, where to do it, and the legal and ethical rules associated with it.

What I've learned (1)

I’ve learned that bloggers can be journalists and journalists can be bloggers, but that there are different standards and rules for each.

What I've learned - Twitter style

I've learned a lot in Online Journalism class this semester.

One of the things I learned about - and had no clue exisited until this class - was Twitter.

So, in honor of Twitter, and in order to reach the 65 blog posts required for an A grade (I'll be honest), I'm going to post five important things I've learned in this class in five separate posts Twitter-style. I thought it would be a nice touch to use something I've learned while telling you what I've learned.

Remember, each post can be no longer than 140 characters.

I hope you've enjoyed the blog over the past few months. Thanks for reading.

Counch potato Saturday

This has nothing to do with online journalism, but I felt the need to address it...

Today is definitely a great day to buy some snacks and just bum out on the couch all day.

With classes over for the semester and some great college football and basketball match-ups lined up on the tube, that's definitely what I'll be doing.

We'll start it off on ABC with the 1 p.m. ACC Championship between Boston College and Virginia Tech. Then I'll jump over to CBS for the 4 p.m. SEC Championship between No. 1 Alabama and No. 4 Florida. But, my viewing of the hated Gators will only last until about halftime as I'll be forced to switch it over to ESPN and watch the Hurricanes basketball team take on Kentucky.

Definitely a great day to be a sports fan...

Final Project

For our final assignment in Online Journalism class, we were required to use some type of multimedia to display some of the skills we learned throughout the semester. I chose to go with Soundslides and create a narrated slideshow of a story I covered while on assignment in Panama last month.

Check it out below:

Back to Barnes

Remember my post from last week about my hometown newspaper's great coverage of a man named Steven Barnes being released from prison after 20 years following the discovery of new DNA evidence?

If you don't, check it out here.

And then read this column by the paper's managing editor Mike Kilian. It gives the reader an inside look at all of the hard work and coordination required of many different people inside of the newsroom for a story like this to be successfully covered. I also think it gives the casual reader a better appreciation of the hard work many reporters put into their jobs.

New Media Usage

Check out this research brief from the Center for Media Research:

Millennial Journalists Leading New Media Usage

While journalists across all age groups and beat assignments are rapidly adopting social media tools into their everyday work, the greatest usage is shown by young "Millennial Generation" journalists.

Preliminary findings about these Millenial Generation journalists, shared by the Society for New Communications Research Symposium, showed that 100% of Millennial respondents (i.e., 18-29 year-olds) believe new media and communications tools are enhancing journalism, versus 40% in the 50-64 demographic.

Don Middleberg, formerly Associate Professor of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said that "The most... significant finding of this... survey is the rapid adoption of new media and online communication among all journalists. The disparity in usage and perceived value of these new tools and technologies to the future of journalism is particularly striking among the youngest demographic versus the oldest."

The study, conducted by SNCR and Middleberg Communications, includes the following key findings:

*87% of 18-29 year-olds believe bloggers have become important opinion-shapers, versus 60% of 50-64 year-olds
*87% of 18-29 year-olds confirm that new media and communications enhances the relationship with their audience, versus 42% of 50-64 year-olds
*48% of all respondents use LinkedIn, and 45% use Facebook to assist in reporting
*68% of all respondents use blogs to keep up on issues or topics of interest
*86% of all respondents use company websites, 71% use Wikipedia, and 46% use blogs to research an individual organization

Middleberg continued by saying "... we have new ways to reach and communicate with a whole new generation of journalists. The communications professionals who embrace these changes will be far more effective and successful."

While it's not entirely surprising, notes the report, that this younger generation of journalists are users of these new communications tools... they understand how to use them effectively in their work, and are pushing the journalism profession as a whole to create a more collaborative, reciprocal, interactive, and fluid form of journalism.

What is striking about this survey, says the report, is that it is very clear that the ‘Millennials' - the younger journalists entering the workforce - are adopting new media and social tools more readily and seeing their value, especially in terms of collaborating with their peers and strengthening their relationships with their audiences and the people in the areas they cover.

Final results of the study are scheduled for release in the Spring of 2009. For more information, please visit this site.

Great story, great coverage

My hometown newspaper, The Observer-Dispatch, recently broke a huge story about a local man possibly being released from prison after 20 years due to new information discovered from new methods of DNA testing.

They've followed the story very meticulously and have done a great job of giving the readers all sorts of coverage through different forms of media from written stories, to photos to video. You can check out some of the coverage here as they've dedicated a special reports page to the constantly developing story. It displays some great breaking news coverage. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper's staff received a few awards for their work on this particular story.

Here's one video from the coverage that shows just how great online multimedia content can be. While it is rather simple, it allows viewers to see the emotion of Steven Barnes firsthand as he is being granted his release by the judge. It also shows Barnes' mother and sister embracing following the judges ruling. This gives users a part of the story that even the most skillful and poetic writing cannot always capture.

UM vs. UCONN game online

The 16th-ranked Miami Hurricanes basketball team is about 30 minutes away from a big match-up with the No. 2 Connecticut Huskies in the semifinals of the Paradise Jam Tournament in the Virgin Islands.

For those of you (like me) who don't have the Fox College Sports Network, you can watch the game online (for a fee) at this site.

Go 'Canes!

Occupational Outlook Handbook

I just received an e-mail from Dad with a link to Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook and thought I would share it with you all.

It has a lot of good information for those of us who will be entering the job market in the very near future. For hundreds of different jobs - including communications and the media, the handbook tells of the training and education needed, earnings, expected job prospects, what workers do on the job and working conditions. It also gives job search tips and links to information about the job market in each State.

Take a look. Who knows, maybe you'll find out that the profession you were planning on isn't right for you. Or maybe you're aspirations will be reinforced.

Mayne Street

I'm sure some of you sports fans already know, but for those who don't, ESPN recently introduced a new, internet-only series called Mayne Street starring ESPN personality Kenny Mayne.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mayne, he is a histerically funny sportscaster for the world's most popular television sports outlet.

The show is somewhat similar to The Office in its style of humor.

Check out the latest episode of Mayne Street below:



Click here to see other episodes and also some funny bonus footage.

Panama Day 5: An amazing experience

Well, we left the hotel around 1 p.m. this afternoon and I just walked into my house in Miami about two hours ago around 8 p.m.

Needless to say, I'm pretty tired, so I'm going to keep this short.

This trip truly was an amazing experience.

I don't think I really comprehended this until just now, but for the past five days, I worked as a real-life, professional journalist in a foreign country.

Not only did I get a chance to visit a place where I had never been and to make three great friends in my classmates Natalia, Alcione and Ligia, but I also got to do something that most student journalists (most professional journalists for that matter) will never get to do - work internationally.

I owe own many thanks to the University of Miami School of Communication and 1h20.org for giving me that opportunity.

From left to right: Me, Natalia, Alcione and Ligia in front of the hotel on our last night in Panama City, Panama.

Panama Day 4: Learning on the job

So that didn't go as well as planned.

Last time I posted, I was awaiting the arrival of University of Panama biologist Ariel Rodriguez for an interview on fresh water salinization.

Well, it's 8 p.m., and I'm still waiting...

I'm not quite sure what happened, but it seems that Rodriguez isn't going to show up. Natalia and I hung around in the lobby for nearly an hour after the scheduled meeting time, but it was of no use. And, conveniently, the cell phone number that we have for him did not work. I don't know how that happened.

I do know that Rodriguez was out of the country and flying back into Panama this afternoon, and was going to drive straight to the hotel from the airport to meet us. In fact, according to Natalia (who spoke with him over the phone last week to set up the meeting), he was quite excited about it. But, I guess this just goes to show that things happen and, in this profession, you have to be prepared for the unexpected.

While the lack of this interview is definitely a setback and will surely affect our visual presentation of the story (we were planning on producing a video), I'm confident that we can still reach Ariel once returning to Miami by e-mail or phone (we're leaving tomorrow morning so rescheduling is not possible). We won't have the video footage that we hoped for, but we'll just have to make adjustments as journalists all over are forced to do each and every day.

While I'm not exactly thrilled that this, our final interview of the trip, did not work out, it was definitely a good lesson to learn early on in my career. Things happen and you have to be prepared for the unexpected.

Panama Day 4: A sightseeing break

After what was an emotional and eye-opening day of work yesterday, we took the first part of today off and switched roles from journalists to tourists, making our way to the colonial section of Panama City known as Casco Viejo.

It was pretty neat to walk along the narrow brick streets of old Panama City and imagine what it must have been like just 100 years ago when the new, modernized section of the city did not exist and Casco Viejo was the place to be.

Here are some pictures from our trip over to Casco Viejo:

Vendors along an oceanside street in Caco Viejo. Yes, they sold the infamous 'Panama hats.'

A shot of the narrow brick streets that make up Casco Viejo.

No, that's not downtown Miami. It's downtown Panama City from across the ocean in Casco Viejo.

Luis, Alcione, Ligia and Prof. Garrison walking along a sidestreet.

Four young girls singing and dancing on a Casco Viejo sidestreet.

That's me.

Yup, more water issues (even when we're not working). This flooded street (it rained a bit earlier in the day) was shot from the car as we are making our way back to the hotel. While the Panama City sewage authority likely isn't happy, the local children were having fun with it.

Unfortuantely the day won't be all play as Natalia and I have a interview scheduled with University of Panama biologist Ariel Rodriguez in about 50 minutes. He's supposed to be meeting us in the hotel lobby at 6:30 p.m.

Rodriguez figures to be a key source in our first story, focused on fresh water salinization associated with the widening of the Panama Canal. He has been quite outspoken about the issue and, unlike the Panama Canal Authority (as we found out Thursday), Rodriguez believes the addition of the Canal's third lock may pose a serious threat to the quality and supply of drinking water in Panama's future.

I'll check in later and let you know how our meeting goes. Adios!

Panama Day 3: Harsh reality

First off, on a totally unrelated note, the 'Canes are officially 1-0 in games that I watch in Spanish after taking out Virginia Tech 16-14 last night. I guess I'll have to start making more frequent use of the SAP button on my remote control.

Now to the real stuff - today's work...

The day started off with a 6 a.m. wake up call to hitch a ride to a nearby village said to be without running water. Natalia and I hitched a ride to the scene - arranged by our fixer Luis - with a photographer and journalist from La Estrella who were also covering the story.

The approximately 30-minute drive from Panama City to the secluded village, and what I would come to see and feel in that village, exposed me to a part of Panama that I had not yet seen in my two days in the country. In fact, it exposed me to a harsh reality that I had not yet experienced at all in my life.

The poverty and hardship I witnessed just 20 miles outside the sultry skyline of Panama’s thriving cosmopolitan capital of Panama City borders on unimaginable. And to experience it is incredibly powerful.

Forget the internet, cell phones and television. These people aren’t worried about obtaining these luxuries (and, yes, that’s what they are – luxuries). Rather, the people I would come to meet – the subjects of my story – are forced to worry about something much more basic; something that most of us take for granted – water (and where and how they’ll get it).

The people of this village, which is tucked away in the rolling hills of the Panama countryside, are without running water. When they turn their faucets, nothing comes out. Their only source of fresh water comes from the rain that they collect in buckets. They are forced to wash their clothes in the streams of the nearby forest.

And in what seems to be the cruelest of all irony, this close-knit village is known as Tierra Prometida (translated: The Promise Land) when it is truly anything but that.

Rotting wood and rusty scrap metal make up the small, dirt-floor shacks that line the rocky and windy dirt roads of the waterless shantytown.

Even without being able to communicate directly with the people of Tierra Prometida due to the language barrier between us (Natalia did all of the interviewing in Spanish), I could still see the pain of the people simply by watching them and feeling their emotion.

According to them, their pleas to IDAAN – the government agency responsible for water distribution in the region – have gone unanswered and no end to their waterless woes seems to be in sight.

After spending a couple of hours with these people and taking hundreds of pictures, Natalia and I returned back to Panama City where we met up with our classmates Alcione and Ligia, our professor and Luis, and made the five-minute drive over to IDAAN in search of answers to what we had just witnessed in Tierra Prometida.

The two IDAAN officials with whom we met (again Natalia conducted our part of the interview in Spanish) said – almost too casually – that they didn’t have a solution to the problem, offering no hope that the people of the village would receive water anytime soon.

Leaving the IDAAN, I found myself feeling quite angry at the response of the officials and their apparent lack of care for the situation. It is their job to distribute clean, quality water to the people in and around Panama City, and they are clearly not doing their job in the case of Tierra Prometida. And for what reason? What have these people done to deserve such neglect?

I know that as a reporter, it is my job to stay neutral and not to bring my own feelings into a story. However, I’m finding it quite hard to do that in this situation. Seeing the conditions that these people are forced to live in, and then on top of it they are without clean water due to the incompetence of a government agency, it is hard not to sympathize with them.

Reflecting back on today, I think this experience has allowed me to see the true power we can have as journalists. We have the power to bring issues to light that would otherwise go unnoticed and ignored.

Hopefully that is what I can do through this story. Hopefully someone, somewhere, with the authority to do so, will take notice and make this injustice right.

Panama Day 2: Getting to work

Today was our first real day of "work" here in Panama.

And it was a long one.

After a 7 a.m. wake up call, my classmates and I, along with our professor and trusty guide Luis, made our way to the offices of the IDDAN, the agency responsible for water distribution in and around Panama City. This trip - to meet with IDDAN officials to discuss problems with water distribution in certain parts of the country - was somewhat unplanned and it showed in the outcome as no one was available to meet with us. However, the stop wasn't entirely useless as we did set up an interview for tomorrow afternoon.

From the offices of the IDDAN, we made our way to the Panama Canal Authority headquarters where my partner Natalia and I had a 10:30 a.m. interview scheduled with ACP environment department head Oscar Vallarino.

*This would probably be a good time to tell you about the two stories that Natalia and I are investigating...

*The first deals with the widening of the Panama Canal (a project that is already underway and is expected to be completed by 2014) and what, if any, affect it might have on the quality of drinking water throughout the region. Basically, fresh water and salt water mix each time a boat is raised in the locks of the Canal and if too salinization occurs (salt water moving into the fresh water bodies of the Gatun and Miraflores Lakes), it can make drinking water untreatable (without the construction of a new water treatment facility). Some (the ACP specifically) say that the level of salinization that occurs now and will occur once the new lock in up and running is not nearly enough to affect the quality and subsequent availability of drinking water. But, others (such as local biologists and hydrologists) believe the new lock will cause serious salinization issues.

*The second story is about a community located about 30 minutes (by car) from the heart of Panama City that does not receive any potable water. The residents' only means of obtaining water is from the small streams in the surrounding jungles (this water is obviously not treated for safe consumption). The people of the village say that their requests have been ignored by IDDAN, the agency responsible for distributing water in the area.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, our interview with Vallarino went very well. He gave us just what I expected - the ACP's side of the story which is that the canal's new lock will not affect the quality of drinking water and that the level of salinization that might occur is not nearly enough to cause a problem. Vallarino also showed us a detailed presentation explaining the widening project, which was very helpful to my understanding of the project. He also talked extensively about the huge economic benefits that the widening is expected to bring to Panama (again, the ACP's side of the story).

After leaving the ACP, we grabbed a quick lunch and then went on a private tour of the Miraflores Filtration Plant, which was arranged for us by Vallarino. The tour allowed us to see just how the water from the Miraflores Lake is collected and treated and then transferred on to the pipes and aqueducts of the IDDAN for distribution throughout the region.

Before making our way back to the hotel, we made one last stop at the University of Panama where Alcione and Ligia conducted an interview with a professor for their stories. While this stop wasn't necessary for my stories, it was a good chance to see another part of Panama City and to get to see a college campus in Central America.

We finally made it back to our hotel about 45 minutes ago, just in time for me to get cleaned up and ready to watch the Hurricanes football team take on Virginia Tech in a 7:30 p.m. game with major Atlantic Coast Conference implications! So, now I'm going to sit back, relax (yeah right, not with the importance of this rivalry game) and hopefully watch my 'Canes take down the Hokies!

Vayamos Canes!

Panama Day 1: We made it!

Greetings from Panama!

We arrived safely and on time (thank you American Airlines) at the Tocumen International Airport this afternoon and made our way over to our hotel in Panama City.

What should have been about a 30-minute drive to the hotel turned into a 1-hour and 15 minute adventure due to some very heavy rush hour traffic in and around the city. But, no worries, as the prolonged trip allowed us to take in the area a bit more and get a better feel for where we will be working over the next five days.

Upon arriving at the hotel, we got settled into our rooms and then met with an editor, Luis, from La Estrella, a Panama City-based newspaper (Here is a link to the paper's website).

This is when I experienced what I expect to be the first of many times I will have difficulty communicating with someone here in Panama.

What do I mean exactly? 

Well, I don't speak Spanish, and Luis doesn't speak English. While I wasn't able to communicate with him directly (which I'll admit was frustrating), my three classmates (Natalia, Alcione and Ligia) were each born in Spanish-speaking countries and are each fluent in both English and Spanish. They were very helpful with translating both ways and allowing me to at least have some sort of interaction with Luis.

From what little I could understand and what I was told by the girls, Luis was very helpful and will be an integral part of our trip. He will be setting up appointments with sources and even traveling to some sites with us. It really is a blessing that someone so well-connected to the area is willing to help out so much. It should really improve the quality and depth of our work.

After dinner, Luis led us on a walk around the city (which is somewhat similar to downtown Miami) and educated us a bit on the local surroundings.

That's all for today. Tomorrow the real work begins as we're heading to the Panama Canal Authority for an interview with the ACP's head of environment, Oscar Vallarino. He is a big part of my and Natalia's first story dealing with the widening of the Panama Canal and how it might affect the quality of drinking water for residents of Panama City and the surrounding area. More on that tomorrow...

Buenas noches!