1.Have points for easy addition of applicable audio and video elements

The explainers are tasked with telling what can be a very complicated story, and asking your audience to swim through a sea of text can lead to a discouraged reader. Some stories just lend themselves better to video or audio explanations. “The Giant Pool of Money” could not have been a text piece; instead, it wove in several elements that were easily digested through audio. And Common Craft shows us that simple videos can be used to explain complicated concepts. (Check out their video explaining cloud computing versus reading a Wikipedia article.)

At the same time, we need to make sure there are simple ways for the reporters or web producers to produce multimedia explainers. Asking someone to spend five hours in a Final Cut suite to put together the video might be a strain on reporter resources, and the newsroom might not even have great video or audio recording tools. It’s important to include in the explainer simple audio and video uploading tools — they could even be plugins for reporters to record podcast/vidcast elements right at their desks with minimum technology. Admittedly, it would help to have more knowledge of the client’s multimedia capabilities before building these tools.

I mentioned the importance of using multimedia to explain concepts, but it doesn’t stop at audio and video. Infographics are the rising star of journalism, but there are so many badly done ones that confuse the point or even can bring an entirely different idea from the data as it’s presented. I think using a tool — even one like IBM’s just-created Many Eyes — that allows the web producer to quickly enter the data given to them by a reporter and then curate it in a visually pleasing way. It’s especially important for stories where the data has been fed from a reporter to a web producer/data specialist, where they maybe understand the context of the data a little less, but still have to get information up in a timely manner.

2. Create something that can easily pull from like content on the site to populate “related stories”

Our client has the advantage of having an dearth of resources and explainers on many subjects, but being able to curate all that great information is the next step. A great explainer tool will help pull any related links, and even allow the reporter to rank them by relevance in the back end. And it will help organize all the related stuff already in existence on the client’s site, or even other websites that the client trusts and wants to pull content from.

3. Customization

Our client specified that they have three different audiences — the public, victims of the stories, and other reporters — and each of those audiences will have very different needs for explainers. I propose either having a questionnaire at the beginning of the story to gauge the level of knowledge, or to have a “dial system” included in the explainer where the user could customize how deep they wanted to drill with the information. For reporters, they’ll want to access more complicated information the story quickly, and not have to wade through simple facts, but the public may want something that starts of as gentle hand-holding as they are guided through the main elements of the story.  The third group — the victims — may instead need links to resources on how they can get help, and we’ll have to decide if those should be embedded in the text, or created as a separate section of the explainer that can be reached through the opening “dials”. (I use dials as a placeholder term — this all depends on the explainer’s interface.) The most most important thing is to distinguish these different sections in branded terms that users will come to associate themselves with (and won’t seem demeaning). This leads into my final point…

4. A portable, recognizable brand that can be easily embedded as a whole, or in parts, on other websites

The brand is just as important as the explainer, and the partnership with our client makes portability a possible option, while still associating the brand with their website. Having pop-out elements that could be separately embedded by other news organizations, or an entire package that could be supplied to their pages, could be an important tool the explainer’s popularity, while still retaining the sovereignty of the brand. The audience knows they could find pieces on other news sites, but could find the whole explainer meal on the client’s page. It will probably involve creating a iconic symbol on the level with the Facebook thumbs up that people can associate with a strong brand of journalism, because at this point our client isn’t known as a news source outside of the news community, but they could be with the success of the explainer.

As journalists surge towards the web front (or media organizations are drug kicking and screaming), news organizations have an obligation, just as they do to publish a regular ethics policy, to explain to their employees as well as the outside world how they will treat the blossoming world o social media, and how they expect their employees to conduct themselves in that sphere.

Unfortunately, most media organizations are not as transparent on this subject. Some have included social media as a mere portion of one paragraph. The Austin-American Statesman’s policy does mention that social media falls into the public eye, and that employees should consider that all points of their policy extend there.  It does include the clause that almost all have…

Newsroom staff should avoid posting opinions that will reflect partiality or create perceptions of bias that undermine the credibility of the newspaper. This includes joining political causes or listing party affiliations on social media sites.

While it’s great to acknowledge the problems that can be caused by assumed bias displayed through social media, many policies don’t go further. However, NPR has one of the best and most thorough social media policies. It not only suggests how reporters should conduct themselves personally, but also how they should handle situations where they must enter online communities to gather information for stories. It also stressed that reporters put privacy protection on their social networks, but said that even those aren’t foolproof, a good reminder to everyone.

Surprisingly, media dynasty The New York Times doesn’t seem to have a social media policy locatable by search engine, which is frustrating, not to mention shocking for such a big organization who even has staff members dedicated to social media. Instead, they have a section in their ethics policy that archaically refers to “web blogs” and seems like it hasn’t been updated in the last seven years.

The Wall Street Journal takes an older, combative stance on social media in its policy; it discourages reporters from “mixing business with pleasure” on social networking sites, and generally discourages them from even talking about their work.

Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited. Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.

If anything, the social elements of the web should be embraced as an opportunity to provide more transparency to the readers, not to close off news organizations like pedestalled gods. It’s a style of thinking that needs to die way before the printing press.

I think news organizations might want to look to other groups. While it’s not journalism, public relations firms do have have ethics standards, and I think Porter Novelli has one of the best social media policies. It’s short, but cuts right to the point; it essentially says “everything will probably be traced back to you or us, and will be online forever, so don’t do it.” And really, that’s all that it should boil down to: don’t be a jerk in a place that it can’t be traced back to you. Really, don’t be one at all.

Despite critical cries to the contrary, journalism and the news media have a long tradition of laying down very strict and specific codes of ethics for practicing journalists. Once the newspaper business moved out of its tabloid, “yellow journalism” age, editors became concerned with upholding standards of truth and honesty. A cynic may say it’s a ploy to sell papers with an honest brand, but many do believe in those codes.

One of the best and most thorough codes has stood the test of time; in 1922, the American Society of Newspaper Editors posted a code of ethics that I feel still could have been written in this decade. While it covers the basics, one point I find most interesting:

Impartiality. To be impartial does not require the press to be unquestioning or to refrain from editorial expression. Sound practice, however, demands a clear distinction for the reader between news reports and opinion.

One criticism of many newspapers is they have lost the editorial edge due to fear of being labeled as biased, and I think it’s a good reminder from this code that we, as journalists, stand to still question and point out problems.

Al Jazeera is a network that comes under fire from many parts of the world, but its code of ethics printed on its website is impressive. They too tout fairness and honesty, but also bring up one point that I feel many journalists, or rather news organizations, forget during the heat of the moment.

Welcome fair and honest media competition without allowing it to affect adversely our standards of performance so that getting a “scoop” will not become an end in itself.

I’ve butted heads in news organizations before because I wanted to be certain that something I was blasting out on social media was the most accurate and responsible, facing retorts that we’d rather be the first. In this age of instant reporting, it seems like Al Jazeera’s tenets are something we should be reminded of regularly.

Business Week’s ethics policy gains points because it can be simply found at their domain name / ethics — a true model of media transparency that I feel many should mimic. It was also impressive because it mentioned their policies dealing with advertisers, something that was not always addressed high up on the page, which must be very important for a business publication.

Thus, we treat companies that advertise with us exactly the same as those that don’t. We don’t favor any company or subject of a story, or discriminate against any — for any reason.

The Online Journalism Review’s ethics guide is one that I feel is most important and applicable today, especially for some many journalists who are still trying to navigate what can be a slippery plane of web ethics. It puts in clear terms how journalists can integrate the web into their reporting, including addressing problems of plagiarism and attribution.

Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without the basic standards laid out by Society of Professional Journalists. I appreciate their ethics codes because they aren’t too brief on points such as how journalists should minimize harm to those they are reporting on, something other codes only dedicated a sentence to. I think even in this time, we should still remember who our obligation is towards, and be aware of what impact our stories could have on people that aren’t in the public eye.

Today a tweet appeared on the Austin American-Statesman Twitter account that read:

Mention this tweet for Buy 1 Get 1 tix to area’s #1 haunted house - offer ends Sept 30. http://www.mansionofterror.com (Ad).

My immediate gut reaction was to recoil at the sight of advertisements on my newspaper’s twitter account. It’s journalism, dammit! The lines shouldn’t blur. But that’s also the idealistic part of me that doesn’t always realize news sometimes has to make money (not that it always does - rimshot!)

The Stateman’s advertising plan was laid out in this article. The ads have to be tailored and offer something — a specific discount — to the viewers. They can only be for food, drink, or local entertainment, and they’ll only run twice a day. I was most impressed that it had to be a service, hopefully so that followers will feel like their being offered an additional service instead of spammed.

The Statesman’s social media head, Robert Quigley, said these factors were very important to him when picking an ad.

“I really care about the Twitter community, and I know the community well. I won’t jeopardize that, and that’s why we are strictly limiting this to two tweets a day per account,” Quigley said.

Full disclosure: I know Rob and consider him a friend, and I can believe him when he says this stuff. I think that the Statesman has picked the best way they could to run this experiment.

That said, I’m not sure I would ever consider doing it on a news account. I feel that news accounts can deliver much more light-hearted feel on Twitter while still being informative, but you’re still providing a service and gaining your follower’s trust. I don’t want to feel like they are being mislead or being offered something they may not actually want. I even have problems retweeting things on my personal account if I feel it wouldn’t best serve my followers (or annoy them). And trust me, while I love my PR friends, this happens a lot. It’s up to each account owner to run their account as honestly as possible.

The Statesman has over 13,000 followers, and the Mansion of Terror paid $150 to reach them for Thursday. It’s not a bad deal, and from what Quigley says, he’s gotten a lot of questions, but mostly positive feedback.

“It has been mostly positive. People seem to understand that we’re a business and that we’re trying innovative things to remain strong,” he said.

I’ll be trying to get updated numbers on how well the ad worked from the Mansion of Terror, so stay tuned.

I finally had the chance to sit down with Fast Flip, the newest news reader creation by Google, and my feeling after 30 minutes of use was: why? But after another 30 minutes, it turned to: Ooooh, hey!

Google is trying valiantly to release software that will help the news industry, and I have to respect them for such a noble pursuit, but I can exactly understand how Fast Flip does that.

I started browsing on the general view, and ended up skipping over half the articles. That’s easy enough, but I don’t know how you’d keep people’s interest with that view. So I switched to just the view by publication, which was a lot cooler in theory, until I wanted to read more than two paragraphs of an article. I don’t mind being redirected, but why wouldn’t I just read the publication’s website? And if I’m using the mobile version, redirecting is a pain that I think would annoy some users (especially since Safari is one of the iPhone’s worst features).

Browsing by topic is again, nifty, and I suppose it offers me more of a preview of an article than Google news would, but what’s allure of not using Google News? I can hypothesize that you’ll get a wider variety of topics than Google News, which sometimes can narrow our worldview by only showing the top stories. It can also feature enterprise stories that magazine has worked on that will fly under the radar of top story aggregators.

It also has the ability to search on random topics. Some of my suggested topics included “Seattle”, “Japan”, “Beatles”, and “Politics”. It was kind of a different mix.

So overall, it’s mildly cool. The problem with tools like this is they need to be applied correctly in order to flourish. Hopefully Google will expand the number of publications using Fast Flip, and publications will figure out how to promote their Fast Flip presence, or better yet, figure out to make a similar technology for mobile apps of their own. That’d be swell.

To the bosses at the New York Times;

Two months back, you appointed Jennifer Preston as your social media editor. The internet was abuzz with excitement as to this progressive step on your part; as a flagship newspaper, it’s important to be a trendsetter in your field and to jump on the bandwagon, right?

Whatever Preston has been doing, I don’t know if I’d call it social. There is over a month-long gap in her personal twitter timeline (from here to here.) It’s almost if this Mashable post that called her out on her lazy Twitter behavior made her (or her bosses) realize that internet has her under its gaze. (Note that post coincided with the day she started tweeting again.)

Now with the New York Daily News‘ interest in hiring their own Social Media Editor, I have to wonder if these posts are actually being used to improve strategy. Has Preston improved social media relations for the New York Times that name recognition alone couldn’t do? So far, I haven’t seen evidence to prove so. (Meanwhile, my hometown paper is kicking butt with social media, after appointing Robert Quigley as the Social Media Editor.)

But I think, and popular opinion agrees, that a social media head should be visible on and offline. They should engage in discussions, follow people back, come to tweetups, and post thought-provoking tweets and blog posts. After all, the first word here is “social”, and if you take your personality out of it, what do you have? A glorified online editor sitting behind a desk who doesn’t know who their community is.

So I had the pleasure of interviewing the three founders of “Lights, Camera, Help”, Austin’s first film festival geared at helping non-profits gain exposure. The festival kicks off at the end of July, after a public submission period that lasted almost two months that garnered submissions from all across the country — and a few from other places too.

The idea man, David Neff, said he heard about health-related non-profits (Neff works for the American Cancer Society) wanting to do something similar, and he thought the idea should be expanded to all non-profits. He, Aaron Bramley, and Rich Vasquez all have non-profit ties as well as ties to film. Their goal was for non-profits to get the exposure, but also learn how powerful video can be to their organizations when used well.

While the submission process is closed, the three still have a lot to cram into the next month before they’re ready for the festival, which runs July 31 through August 1.

Enough from me; just watch the video I put together.

‘Lights, Camera, Help’ interview from Chelsea Stark on Vimeo.

To learn more, go to LightsCameraHelp.org

The internet is exploding with talk of the election protests in Iran. The information is almost inescapable on Twitter, yet many noticed the absence of updates on the story on CNN on Saturday and Sunday as it was breaking.

Really, CNN? Where were you? The problem with this is that is that if people revolt against CNN’s coverage (and some of the backlash was huge), then they’ll stop trusting their coverage and begin moving to non-traditional media outlets, like Twitter, Youtube or Flickr, to get updates on a fast-moving, riveting story like this. The problem with trusting sources like this is that some of their information can be unverified. One of the few major values of news networks is the fact they *should* have verified information; something like Twitter could be easily used to spread propaganda by both sides.

For all the moaning the mainstream media is doing about losing revenue, you’d think they would try to do a better job of covering serious issues, not dropping the ball perfectly into the hands of citizen journalists, practically sealing their fate as a dinosaur with little relevant to add to the story. Instead they should be combining both the new media tools, the technology and personnel at their disposal, and their access to tell the best story that clears up the facts and brings this situation into everyone’s homes.

That’s not to say that there is media fail across the board; the New York Times is doing a commendable job compiling the most interesting bits from the internet and converging it with their own reporter’s coverage. (Read some from their blog). A couple of notable twitter accounts include Change_in_Iran and PersianKiwi.

Often Watchmen is called one of the greatest comic books of all time, so good that it transcends comics and is an actual god-damned novel with pretty pictures attached. Fans of the award-winning comic have both clamored for and bemoaned the day it would become a feature film for 20 years, and Zach Snyder made it a reality.

As a true-blue geek, I viewed the movie with the same excitement and skepticism as most others; it’s clear that this was a task in the geek universe similar to Atlas’s burden, but it also must be palatable to a mainstream audience. It’s obvious that Snyder tried to essentially perform the splits over a gigantic fault line. If he failed in one way, he’d have vast nerd armies going medieval on his ass if he tarnished the legend; His previous directing effort of 300 might have been bad (in my own opinion), but it wasn’t nerd dogma. At the same time, he had to make something that was worth making and bring the story to life to a whole new generation.

The first task was tackling the humongous back story, and some parts of the movie did that brilliantly. The opening sequence during the credits was probably one of my favorite condensed chunks of the movie, which when paired with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” was a perfect fit for the time period and the longing for times past, which is a theme of the novel. (While writing this review, I’ve listened to that song at least three times.) Still, the movie is looong; it’s got 12 comics slapped into one huge trade with lots of text to cover, and it still (thankfully) skips some stuff.

The challenge of being true to the material was a bigger one, and many things were shot-for-shot lifts of the panels. I got chills when I saw Archimedes, the flying owl craft of the Nite Owl, rise out of the water next to New York City. And Rorschach, one of the most interesting characters of the book, was exactly like I imagined him to be, and he was expertly played by Jackie Earle Haley.

At the same time, while it was amazing to see some of my favorite scenes play out, I felt like the movie focused too heavily on the action of the comic book, and not the interwoven story and human drama as it played out. While everything on screen was faithful to the comic, it almost was so to a fault. First and foremost, Watchmen is not a superhero story; it uses superheroes and sci fi elements to play on the elements of human emotion, namely fear. Turning it into some dumbed-down action movie robs it of the powerful message, and while the message is still there, it’s somehow easier for the reader to let it digest when they aren’t sucked in by the flash and dazzle of the movie. There was also a lot of gratuitous blood. I may be a fan of over-blown action movies, but there is a time and a place for everything, and sometimes the subtlety of what isn’t shown is more thrilling than seeing a pool of blood ooze from beneath a bathroom door.

I don’t know how to feel about the entire movie. I wasn’t disappointed, but at the same time I feel like the cliche “the book was better” holds true in this case. It’s not because of any mangling of the story; I really feel that Snyder tried his hardest to do right by the fans — and the author, Alan Moore, who has snubbed the film anyway — but the comic simply is the best medium in which to tell that story. It’s fun, and worth a viewing, but doesn’t hold the same magic that the 20-year-old book does.

As a special note to all other fans of the book who were agonizing over it: the new ending does not suck. In fact, I really thought it added a lot to the story and kept the movie away from “goofy sci fi realm” while also avoiding spending too much time on the mysterious backstory. I may be called a blasphemious traitor, but it’s true.

Austin self-branded ‘nerdcore’ rapper Terp2It may need to find a new label for himself, because his most recent effort, ‘My Weiner Touches the Ceiling‘, is hardly nerdcore.

I’m not really sure what genre Terp’s music fits into, but after giving the album several listens, I feel almost like comedy-core could be an accurate term. Chris Trew’s background is in improv and comedy in Austin, and I feel that the music he makes is in jest, but I’m not entirely in on the joke.

It’s clear that Trew has fun with the music he makes - just take at his music videos. I can respect him for that, because isn’t that what we all want to do? At the same time, I miss the days of old when rap was still music and you couldn’t get away with just talking rhymes in front of a generic beat.

I don’t want people to think I’m a snob, but I think the addition of the label nerdcore just chaffes me the wrong way. To say that Terp is nerdcore is a stretch, because nothing about his rap is really nerdy - he may be a geek himself, but it’s hardly reflected in his music aside from occasional reference to his iPod or carrying a fannypack. Sorry, there isn’t a genre called ‘awkward-core’.

His songs themselves consist of pretty generic beats, which should never been musically discounted. But his lyrics and energy aren’t well-meshed to the music, and the songs didn’t leave me wanting more. Some songs, like the track “O”, had catchy ideas behind them, but didn’t quite make it from concept to catchy rhythm.

I should be watching Terp at a live show in Austin soon, so I’m definitely willing to give him a second chance. I hope that his on-stage persona brings something new to his rhymes.