During our week 4 session we talked a little about using Twitter and Facebook to background people as a prelude to week 5's visit by Simone Wilson.
We talked about my coverage of the so-called Hollywood Boulevard rave riot and how putting together different online accounts, using YouTube video and checking Twitter reports could help you cover an event without even being there.
Students showed off their own remixes of that night's coverage, including Creative Commons-allowed photos and fresh video and some of us had never seen.
The lesson here was that linking to multiple sources and pulling video and photo from available content can give you a stronger story than if you had just "aggregated" a post based on one outlet's own take.
I showed you another example of how you can aggregate a story, or take information from another source, and still make it your own while moving the narrative forward.
We looked at this story I wrote, about how San Bernardino has become the second-largest city in the nation. That fact was found by the San Bernardino Sun newspaper. But I also looked at Census figures and pulled some other interesting ones. I contrasted the poverty with the fact that California has more billionaires than just about anywhere else besides the United States, China and Russia. I also linked to some history about the Inland Empire's role in the subprime real estate disaster. I tried to inject the piece with links and perspective.
The we analyzed two TV news websites to see how television treats online news. We wrote two to three paragraphs comparing NBC Los Angeles to KTLA News.
In my view NBC gets it more, with a vertical, blog-like layout, a more irreverent voice, and a keen use of raw and b-roll video that you rarely see at other stations. Clearly the operation wants to reach out to young readers.
KTLA's sometimes sensational news is also aimed at getting young readers to come into the fold. But it appears to hang on to a newspaper-like notion: That the web will help save its traditional product -- in this case, the broadcast.
KTLA's site has an old-school layout, a lack of voice (often wire stories are used) and a strange way of handling video -- with links in stories instead of embedding.
But many of you preferred KTLA regardless.
We talked a little about how using audio in online news is rare outside of radio, but it does happen. I suggested that if you capture audio recordings of sources and want to upload it, you should use it sparingly and edit it down to the soundbites. Soundcloud is a great place to edit and upload audio, and I gave you an example of a story for which I uploaded audio to Soundcloud (here).
For your homework I went off-syllabus and had you write a story about the latest developments in Occupy L.A. The idea was to use at least three sources, with one of them being an original interview, video or audio bite from you, and others being links. Three to five paragraphs.
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