Yeah John, but which quarter? Do you really think they’re cutting city hall and cops reporters?
Mercury News plans to cut one-quarter of newsroom positions this summer – Grade the News
That guy you know from the Internet, probably.
Yeah John, but which quarter? Do you really think they’re cutting city hall and cops reporters?
Mercury News plans to cut one-quarter of newsroom positions this summer – Grade the News
Take this story with a grain of salt. Lots of moving parts.
Like Chron, Merc to cut 1/4th of newsroom – Peninsula Press Club
The 150th anniversary Flash package on San Jose State University from the Merc. Love the way the interview videos are broken up into the 5 questions.
This is the sort of job you might see more metro papers hiring for: “…we want them to know Flash, HTML and CSS, how to draw, have some print experience and most of all, have a nice design sense.”
Wanted: online graphic designer – Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley
I believe one of the goals multimedia storytelling should be to communicate in a web-native format, using stills, audio, video, graphics, and interactivity to draw readers into a story they wouldn’t have read if it were just printed text on a page — or a screen.
Would I have any interest in this train story in the Mercury News if there wasn’t a big multimedia package attached to it?
Probably not.
But Richard Koci Hernandez and the creative people who work with him have crafted a story of personalities and economics, using multimedia as a way to communicate, not just to illustrate.
And better yet, this is cinematic stuff.
Watching the videos in this piece doesn’t feel like watching a TV documentary, or a YouTube video — it feels like a movie.
How can a smaller paper without a squadron of photographers with Flash skills and HD cameras put together this sort of thing?
Well, Soundslides and a solid audio recorder are two places to start.
Total investment? $440.
Time to learn Soundslides? 30 minutes.
Then, check out Richard’s tutorial on chaptered Soundslides, which means building a few audio slideshows and then calling them from a Flash stage that you’ve designed to go with the story, acting like a frame for your multimedia.
If you want to learn more about how the train package was put together, Richard blogged about it from concept to finished product, writing about the inspiration and thought process behind the package, if not necessarily the technical details.
And now, two nitpicks:
I don’t think the second one detracts from the finished product at all, and while the lack of interactivity doesn’t hurt either, it makes me, as a reader, less likely to stick around longer than it takes to watch a video or two.
(Full disclosure: My paycheck comes from the same company as Richard’s these days.)
LATER:
For a completely different method of packaging multimedia with an online story, check out this piece at the Lawrence-Journal World, the Kansas newspaper known as the incubator of Django, Holovaty and Curley.
Designer Jeff Croft says the piece is a first attempt at disproving the notion that “you can’t art direct stories online.”
Slideshows, videos and reader comments are mixed straight into the text story, all on the same page, which looks like it was styled just for this story.
Is this the way we’ll all be publishing feature stories online soon? With a page designed specifically for the story, as we would have done for a big feature in print? If you’ve got the resources (read as: time), and your templates aren’t too restrictive, then by all means, I say it’s a great way to go.
A print designer leaves the Merc for … PayPal, of all things.
Front-page ad in the Merc’s print edition. Looks good to me, but why not a local advertiser?
Um, this is two critics from the Merc and one from Oakland! Damn, I hadn’t realized we could play that game. Wheels are turning…
“Indeed, Mr. Singleton intends to make a showcase of The San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a kind of laboratory for how to meld print with the Web.”
Question: Who Is MediaNews’s Dean Singleton? – New York Times
MercuryNewsPhoto.com redesigned while I wasn’t looking, and what popped out is a nice modern WordPress blog. Cool.
What that means, first things first, is that I (and you) can now subscribe to an RSS feed from the site. Cool.
Second things second, you can leave comments on all the slideshows, video essays, and Flash presentations on the site. Cool.
Here’s a tip, guys: The default WordPress footer has that weird link to the RSS feeds that starts with “feed://” — if you click on it from Firefox, it tries to load whatever feedreader it can find on your hard drive, which can and will confuse people. (Hey Matt, what’s the deal with that, anyway? Lorelle points out in comments that it’s the individual theme developers who choose how to display the feed URL.) Anyway, I’d love to see a link to the RSS feed in the sidebar.
Looks great guys – keep it up!