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• Ten Ways To Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now, Media Storm

Often, as multimedia producers, we are given work to edit that others have created. Some things simply cannot be changed, like an out-of-focus photograph. But there are some things we can do right now to improve the work no matter how challenging the original assets may be.

(Note: This list is not meant to be dogmatic. I’ve broken all these rules. They’re offered as a suggested starting point.)

• 2009 Research Papers, International Symposium on Online Journalism

A program of the Knight Chair in Journalism and the UNESCO Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Below are the peer-reviewed research papers that were selected for presentation for the second day of the symposium event. Listed in alphabetic order.

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Why Should we Expect Worlds to Collide? A Case Study Analysis of “Jornal de Notícias” and its Strategic Production Changes
by Luís Antonio Santos and Manuel Pinto
no abstract is available
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• How citizen media is creating a new news cycle, Alfred Hermida

Speaking at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas, Rachel Nixon, Global News Director at NowPublic.com talked about a new news cycle.

The ability of people to witness and report the news to their network – Facebook, Twitter, etc – creates a emerging news cycle, argued Nixon.

In the past, she said, someone would witness an event, tell a reporter, who would filter and process the information, before feeding it back to the public as a produced news story.

Now people can share with each other what they saw or experienced, but “90% of the time, these people are not journalists.”

Nixon wanted to dispel some of the misconceptions about the notion of “citizen journalism”: primarily the idea that amateurs would replace professionals.

• Begging for your readers’ money: What works and what doesn’t, Window on the Media

With the advertising market diving yet deeper, spoiled readers that will turn their backs on you if you put on a paywall, the tip-jar model is appealing.

What these examples show is that it can’t replace any traditional sources of income. At best, it can be considered pocket money.

The most successful examples here, Follow the Media (FTM) and, to a certain extent, the Berkeley Daily Planet, relied both heavily on dramatization. If you don’t pay, they said, we will leave.

• Being an intern in unsure times, Frustrations of a young journalist

My internship at the Herald was not, in many ways, ideal.

Four weeks into my internship, the next round of newsroom layoffs was announced. Three weeks later, they were implemented.

Those three weeks were tense and quiet. The silence was the most unnerving. A few rumors swirled, but nothing like what you would expect from a room full of journalists.

People talked about furloughs and discussed privately whose jobs they thought were in trouble.

Then the layoffs came, and everyone from secretaries to editors were crying in the bathroom.

Being an intern during that time was draining. I wasn’t completely a spectator, but I wasn’t participating either.

My job wasn’t at stake, and my career wasn’t on the line. As an editor darkly noted later, I didn’t even take a pay cut.

But I was watching my future collapse around me.