Military Editors » Web/Tech

Thinking about Tomorrow

neal — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:13:50 +0000

Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, says we’re going through a revolution similar to the one the West went through in the 1500s after the invention of the printining press. Journalism will survive, he believes. Newspapers will not — not even on the internet.

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Read it at Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

Store this

neal — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:21:11 +0000

I don’t know how many people use the metadata to store photo cutline and credit information in your photo files. It’s the only sure way to make certain the cutline doesn’t get separated from the images. Unfortunately, its usually only the .jpg format that gives us the ability to store this information, and you have to use Photoshop, IrfanView or a similar program to find it. However, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Canon and Sony released new standards for tagging image files with searchable data no matter the format. This may not affect you today, but soon you will see more photo storage programs (perhaps even Windows) offer better tagging options. Expect life to get easier for our one-PA shops.

Audio newsgathering kit

neal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:23:54 +0000

From Teaching Online Journalism: The best first step for a print reporter toward multimedia is audio. You already know how to conduct an interview, so you
’re more than halfway there. Now all you need is some decent audio gathering gear and Audacity, a free audio editor that works on both Windows and Macs.

Best Military Web site

neal — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:52:00 +0000

The site pictured (and linked) below won the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward for best military Web site for 2005.

Link: U.S. Department of Defense Transformation Official Website.

There’s so much goodness to this design it’s hard to describe right now. Look at how much information they were able to put into a clean interface. And it IS clean, thanks to thoughtful design. It’s well segmented by topic and nicely balanced. It offers its most important news up front. And it includes an attractively packaged photo. There’s no mystery to this page – readers aren’t left wondering what the point is.