During Week 6 we talked a little more about voice. We used an example of a story in the New York Times about how Mitt Romney said he never paid less than 13 percent of his annual income in taxes and wondered how it might have been written with more attitude. We looked at how Gawker treated the same story.
We moved on to crime reporting in the digital era. Being on the cop beat isn't for everyone who wants to get into digital journalism, but just as with print, it's a good basis for figuring out the elements of our profession.
As you figured out with your Week 5 assignment, dealing with cops isn't always fun, but it's good exercise for reporting. But in this new era we can also get crime information from Nixle, police Twitter accounts, eyewitness Twitter accounts (who sometimes post usable photos from the scene of an incident), and police Facebook pages.
Besides the LAPD's blog and YouTube page there's a lot of crime info out there. The L.A. Sheriff's Department uses Twitter and Nixle extensively.
We talked a little about the new rules of online reporting: Break news if you can. If you can "be there," at a press conference or at the scene of a crime, you've got a huge advantage. But your next chance at gaining eyeballs and a competitive edge is to forward already broken news by picking up the phone or mining social media for new information that will add a new chapter to the story. Finally, you can take the Gawker route and simply add your spin, your voice, and your ranting to an existing story. The every popular list (5 ways to beat a parking ticket) falls into that last category.
We attempted a live demo of recording a quick video, uploading it to YouTube and embedding it in a post. Slow upload times meant that we'll have to try again during Week 7.
Finally we did a demo on creating a custom Google Map and embedding it in a post.
The assignment was to create an original YouTube video and embed it in a post with a few grafs explaining what it's about.
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