Ryan Sholin » flash http://ryansholin.com The future of news. And more. No funny stuff. Thu, 24 May 2012 18:54:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 2006-2007 ryansholin@gmail.com (Ryan Sholin) ryansholin@gmail.com (Ryan Sholin) http://www.ryansholin.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com 144 144 Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. Ryan Sholin Ryan Sholin ryansholin@gmail.com no no Updating Flash Journalism http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/08/updating-flash-journalism/ http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/08/updating-flash-journalism/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:30:11 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/08/updating-flash-journalism/ Mindy McAdams on why her 2005 book is out of date, how she’s getting her students caught up, and how you can follow along.

Updating Flash Journalism

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2009/12/08/updating-flash-journalism/feed/ 0 Cross-pollinate or shrivel http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/19/cross-pollinate-or-shrivel/ http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/19/cross-pollinate-or-shrivel/#comments Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:01:25 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/?p=1013 I’m profoundly enthralled by things like rapid news-driven development in Django, and building a CMS that can switch from a beautiful feature layout to a Drudge-like breaking news linkbomb on a dime, and of course, leveraging the steady stream of free embeddable tools showing up online every day for your own newsy purposes.

But none of those pieces of the puzzle I’ve become so interested in these days — on their own, at least — come close to connecting readers to each other, or to the news, or to a news brand in some sort of interesting way.  I’ll get back to that in a moment.

Learning from Design

The SND session I went to last week with the highest awesome quotient was clearly Stephanie Grace Lim‘s session on “finishers” — design moves that take an idea from fruition to execution in a series of short repeatable steps.

One of the many fun parts of her presentation pro wrestling exhibition was “The Pollinator,” a way to get into the habit of listing the possible ingredients in a graphic and connecting the dots to create eye-catching juxtapositions to tell your story.

That’s the sort of basic thinking that’s necessary to brainstorm our way into new story forms online.

For example, here’s a doodle I just came up with:

Cross-pollinate your stories and tools to experiment with new online story forms.

When the “interactive” tools at our disposal consisted of Flash, and “multimedia” was a way to organize text, stills, audio, and video in a button-pushing environment, there were plenty of ways to decide whether the one tool in our box could do the job.

So here’s what I’m proposing:  If you’re the online editor, or the interactive director, or the news developer, or the innovations editor, or the title of your choice, when you come across a story — whether it’s a noisy breaker or a long-term FOIA-rich piece that a reporter is putting weeks (months?) of their life into — stop for a minute and think about which tools to deploy in response.

Obvious enough, right?

Just keep in mind, you’re allowed to stray from the established norms (blotter = database, profile = slideshow) and cross-pollinate stories and tools to make something new.

Onward to stage two

I mentioned a problem earlier, wherein much of what I’ve become interested in lately is, essentially, one-way communication.

That’s yesterday’s news, if I can beat a dead horse cliché.

So, the next piece of cross-pollination I’m selling you today is this:  *Every* piece of content, or interface, or display that you create should be infected with two-way communication.

Simple method: Comments.  If you can’t build it, embed them with something like js-kit or Disqus.

More complicated, but still basic: User-contributed photos, video, stories.

Challenging goal: Tie each reader’s interaction with your online news product together with a social profile and opt-in tracker, allowing readers to gather their favorite stories, comments, photos, and yes, perhaps they’ll want to follow their friends as well.

There’s more to this, of course.  There’s embeddable video players and widgets and Facebook apps and Twitter as a conversational tool, but none of this really address the larger issue:  Organized media no longer has a monopoly on content creation.

So while we do our best to insert our own content into the diasporic spread of homebrew news and information, or to adopt the successful methods of social networking on our own sites, it remains likely that the tide has turned against organized news as a tenable business.

It’s time to cross-pollinate.

To become news development shops that sell tools as a product.  To let readers into the reporting process.  To build evergreen content with legs — to think in terms of permanent information stored online, rather than temporary news, flashing by as a headline on a page or a screen.

Read Ethan Zuckerman’s write-up of Persephone Miel’s Media Re:public presentation at the Berkman Center earlier this week.  That’s the thread that’s tying these two ideas together in my head. (Um, cross-pollinating, even.)

Persephone and I talked more than a little about the twisted relationship between the future of professional news organizations and the future of citizen media in Boston earlier this year.  She’s been studying the problem in great detail.  From Ethan’s excellent paraphrasing:

There’s a million things we can try. We can experiment with networked reporting, with new editorial structures, with partnerships between professional and amateurs.

But we probably won’t. Legacy media is focused on the bottom line. Journalists are becoming more like bloggers, but often in bad ways. Civic-minded projects (like mine, I’m guessing) ignore how people really consume media. Amateur investigative journalism isn’t easy, and crowdsourcing is really hard to do well. We’d hope that public broadcasters would lead us into the promised land, but they apparently live in their own world.

I’ll leave off today with this:  Think about what you, your newsroom, and your organization are doing to cross-pollinate.  To mix and match story forms, to invite the public into the news, and the news into the public, and to participate in figuring out the future of news by trying to build it yourself.

Now, back to work.

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/19/cross-pollinate-or-shrivel/feed/ 2 Upstatement – Downloads http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/09/upstatement-downloads/ http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/09/upstatement-downloads/#comments Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:08:36 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/09/upstatement-downloads/ A Flash actionscript library. @darlacameron called it “Flash for the masses.”

Upstatement – Downloads

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2008/09/09/upstatement-downloads/feed/ 0 The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris http://ryansholin.com/2007/12/11/the-whale-hunt-a-storytelling-experiment-by-jonathan-harris/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/12/11/the-whale-hunt-a-storytelling-experiment-by-jonathan-harris/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:24:05 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/12/11/the-whale-hunt-a-storytelling-experiment-by-jonathan-harris/ Not my favorite subject matter to say the least, but an immersive-obsessive approach to storytelling nevertheless.

The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/12/11/the-whale-hunt-a-storytelling-experiment-by-jonathan-harris/feed/ 0 Not just a homicide map – OJR http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/20/not-just-a-homicide-map-ojr/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/20/not-just-a-homicide-map-ojr/#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:44:54 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/20/not-just-a-homicide-map-ojr/ More from Sean and Katy on the Not Just A Number project running at the Oakland Tribune.

Not just a homicide map – OJR

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/20/not-just-a-homicide-map-ojr/feed/ 0 Interactive collage – MultimediaShooter http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/17/interactive-collage-multimediashooter/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/17/interactive-collage-multimediashooter/#comments Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:32:34 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/17/interactive-collage-multimediashooter/ Check out what Koci put together with a beta tool from Vuvox.com. Interactive package with multiple slideshows and other elements — if it’s as wysiwyg as their other tools, this is killer.

Interactive collage – MultimediaShooter

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/11/17/interactive-collage-multimediashooter/feed/ 0 video.Maru – polyGeek.com http://ryansholin.com/2007/07/03/video-maru-polygeek-com/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/07/03/video-maru-polygeek-com/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:16:51 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/07/03/video-maru-polygeek-com/ Flash video players; no actionscript necessary. Heck, no code at all, really. Could be really, really useful for lazy folks like me that just can’t get excited about learning Flash.

video.Maru – polyGeek.com

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/07/03/video-maru-polygeek-com/feed/ 0 dfGallery 1.003b – Deziner Folio http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/20/dfgallery-1-003b-deziner-folio/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/20/dfgallery-1-003b-deziner-folio/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:47:57 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/20/dfgallery-1-003b-deziner-folio/ A free flashy photo gallery dealy. via koci.

dfGallery 1.003b – Deziner Folio

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/20/dfgallery-1-003b-deziner-folio/feed/ 0 How to Compress Videos for YouTube « Will Video for Food http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/05/how-to-compress-videos-for-youtube-%c2%ab-will-video-for-food/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/05/how-to-compress-videos-for-youtube-%c2%ab-will-video-for-food/#comments Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:08:57 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/05/how-to-compress-videos-for-youtube-%c2%ab-will-video-for-food/ A look behind the curtain at YouTube’s compression settings and how to make the most of them. via Angela G.

How to Compress Videos for YouTube « Will Video for Food

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]]> http://ryansholin.com/2007/06/05/how-to-compress-videos-for-youtube-%c2%ab-will-video-for-food/feed/ 0 Special Report – September 11 – HeraldTribune.com http://ryansholin.com/2007/05/01/special-report-september-11-heraldtribune-com/ http://ryansholin.com/2007/05/01/special-report-september-11-heraldtribune-com/#comments Tue, 01 May 2007 15:07:44 +0000 Ryan Sholin http://ryansholin.com/2007/05/01/special-report-september-11-heraldtribune-com/ Sarasota’s 5-years-later package. Note the one-screen, easy-to-navigate, no-popup UI, just a simple Flash template with a default video player and the Soundslides component where useful. via Lucas and Mindy and others.

Special Report – September 11 – HeraldTribune.com

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