It basically breaks down to these seven things.

• community and citizen journalists
• niche topics
• staff with multiple skills
• transparency
• audio and video aren’t “web extras”, they’re just part of the story
• respond to criticism positively
• leave the “save it for print” mindset behind.

Essentially, become a web-first newsroom.

The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction | Linux Brain Dump

I wish I’d known about her blog before now, because I think it’s going to be essential reading.

Email:
———-
To: Journalist-in-residence, UQ School of Journalism and Communication
From: Dave Earley

I haven’t kept up with video journalism (VJ) sites much, mainly because it usually requires high-speed internet when videos are involved, and I’m on free student dialup! I haven’t really found any VJ ‘forums’ either.

By the way, an example of a good university news site is Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times.

Hope the following is helpful, and not link overload.

The only site I could recommend off the top of my head is Michael Rosenblum – but other than discuss theory, he doesn’t go into a lot of technicalities on his blog about how to do VJ. So I’ve put him in ‘interesting reading’ links. He runs training worldwide in VJ (including for the BBC), but perhaps the best start would be this page:

http://theconcentra.org/en/links/
It looks like it has some good links that could be helpful

After a bit of searching, you might also find these useful. I haven’t had time to look into them in-depth (as I said, dialup is not conducive to fast content viewing online):

http://www.onqco.com/
http://www.current.tv/make/training?section=editing
The CurrentTV guide is fairly basic, but provides some good information – I’ve looked at it before. Actually if you follow that link, at the bottom of the section there is a ‘Learn More’ button where you’ll find more links.

http://www.mrdot.co.uk/videojournalism_today.html

Interesting reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_journalism
http://rosenblumtv.com/index.shtml
http://www.integratedmedia.org/nav.cfm?cat=14&subcat=123&subsub=0
http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/video_journalists/
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/wiki/video/
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/22/news/video.php?page=1
http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/videoblogging/p/journlismvlog.htm

Yes, I do housework since I’m home most of the day with naught to do. Although given the state of things as they were when this video was taken in December you wouldn’t know it.

The sound and picture quality aren’t great on my six-year-old camera, but it does the job.

Kate offered to do ‘snacks’ for a weekend youth camp that we otherwise weren’t involved with, or attending.

We were required to provide much more food than we had initially expected, and stayed up till 1.30am finishing the cook-a-thon. This is a brief story, in pictures, of that evening.

Click here to see the full gallery, with mostly the same pictures.

The tools were ready.

The ingredients were ready.

And Ariel was getting worried about what exactly was going on.

Once we got into it there was quality melting chocolate,

and cheap melting chocolate that just looks wrong, but otherwise was great.

Once the melting had been done,

the ingredients mixed,

and cookies ready to bake,

there were beaters, spoons, and bowls aplenty to be “cleaned”. Mmmmm.

It was all a bit rich though, so some anti-sweeteners were required. Milk and pear had to suffice.

One scoop for the mix, one scoop for Dave. One scoop for the mix, one scoop for Dave.

Jam-drops (pre-cooked), fudge, and chocolate coconut slice were all there too.

The caramel slice needed a base, some caramel, and chocolate over the top!

But it just wouldn’t set in the fridge, ending up in disaster. Oh well, two caramel slices that had to be eaten with a spoon. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Of course, there’s always washing up to do to end the whole process.

As vertically challenged people, it can be difficult to find pants that fit to length. Generally in Australia pants are bought on waist size only, unlike in the US where you can choose both waist and leg measurements. This has particularly been a problem for me recently when buying new jeans that are so long as to almost trip me up.

Buying my last pair of jeans was an adventure in itself – at least for the store assistants pictured above – since the last pair my size had to be removed from the mannequin.

Note Exhibit A: a pair of jeans flowing well past my heel, and half way around my foot. Flares may be making a comeback, but I think this is taking it a little too far. So what can be done? Dry-cleaners offer a hemming service, but $15-$20? I think not!

When we were married Kate’s mum gave us an old Singer sewing machine. It sat unused until recently, when I decided something had to be done once and for all about my jean predicament. Note that since about the age of 14 while living at home I had to wash and iron my own clothes, as well as sew my own buttons back on. Yes, a modern day Oliver Twist, if you will.

And so I searched hither and dither on the internet for instructions on how to hem jeans. I seemed to have hit the jackpot at one forum where they talked of the hem tutorial to end all hem tutorials. But, alas, they noted the link had been taken down, and so the search continued.

Never fear, Fig and Plum referenced the very same tutorial (obviously it was a good one), but had also saved the Word document! (DaciaRay.com also created a tutorial with pictures although the following tutorial is the one I used. And so, here, I present to you the document “Hemming Jeans Like a Pro”. You can also get it as a PDF if you prefer, although the file size is much bigger.

Hemming Jeans Like a Pro.doc (0.2mb)
Hemming Jeans Like a Pro.pdf (2.1mb)

And so, having followed the instructions as best I could, you can see the results for yourselves.

Exhibit B: hemmed jeans, well-hemmed, if I say so myself.

Return next week for Home Economics 101, as I present to you, cooking with Dave. Or more accurately, cooking with Kate, with pictures and taste-testing by Dave.