Three examples of sexy text «  Adam Westbrook

If you haven’t seen it, watch this extraordinary m/media jrnalism. Talking to the Taliban http://bit.ly/76vHGw via @storytellin

Understanding the insurgents is a basic part of reporting on the Afghan war, but it’s a remarkably difficult task. I’ve had several meetings with individual Taliban since I started covering Afghanistan, but personal contacts with the insurgents are growing more dangerous because they have started kidnapping journalists.
So we decided to try an unscientific survey.
I’ve been working with a researcher in Kandahar since September of 2006, meeting with him regularly for long sessions of tea and talk. He’s a close friend of The Globe and Mail translators in the city…The Taliban researcher was asked:
To find small groups of Taliban and try to speak with them individually. They don’t need to show their faces or give their names. (Persuading the insurgents to speak by themselves proved difficult, and clusters of three or four interviews often contain answers that echo each other, as apparently Taliban waited to hear what their comrades would say.)
To visit as many districts as possible. (He visited five: Zhari, Panjwai, Maywand, Arghandab and Daman. Access to each district was negotiated by him and a Globe and Mail translator.)
Ask a standard list of 20 questions, in the same order every time. (He largely followed this request, with a few exceptions: He sometimes felt it would be dangerous to push insurgents for answers about their loyalty to Mullah Omar, for instance.)
Try to get enough elaboration that the interview lasts a minimum of 10 minutes. (This improved during the course of the project, with durations varying from four to 15 minutes.)
The researcher’s work was supervised by a long-time translator for The Globe and Mail, who watched the videos and did the rough translations.

Lewis Carroll began Alice 147 yrs ago, Friday. Here 10 artists go down the rabbit hole w/ trippy interactive narratives http://bit.ly/37l4G2

New multimedia website for stories about development & human rights http://j.mp/5nG97 via @georgedarroch @duckrabbitblog

Consider projects that might not initially seem standard on a news Web site, like the Washington Post project “On Being”, a video project that provides a quirky, yet poignant take on the fascinating and diverse individuals in their market. Give employees the license to experiment but be ready to accept failure, as long as it is done quickly and cheaply. An experiment using Twitter to crowdsource a story that is unsuccessful may only cost the time of one or few employees, and the learning that comes from such an experience can easily offset the investment. But, a several thousand dollar expenditure in new equipment and resources that spans several months or years and ultimately fails is not acceptable or is rarely necessary, given the proliferation of free or relatively inexpensive tools and services available online.

RT @jayrosen_nyu: High cost, low quality, confused purpose: newspapers fail to crack the code in online video http://jr.ly/mmf8 Why is this?

In discussions with a handful of video journalists, these themes have emerged:

• • There’s a market for good video, especially in big cities, but good video is too labor-intensive to be cost-effective.
  • It’s very easy to produce amateurish video, but difficult to sell advertising into it.
  • As a result, video often is the first thing cut from downsizing newsrooms.

WOW: Ukraine’s Got Talent 2009 win 4 dramatization of German invasion of Ukraine performed w/ sand on giant lightbox http://bit.ly/1mDWLk

Worth watching sand animation right through. “The entire audience was in tears by the end” http://bit.ly/1mDWLk via @kottke@jessicadeva

RT @lisallynch: Great advice for stdnts: The figure 8: simplify your multimedia s/telling http://bit.ly/16AeeE via @gmarkham @alexgamela

Adam Westbrook’s template for multimedia storytelling

Interesting tool 2 explore 4 slideshows: Animoto = orchestrated video from photos. “Fast, free & shockingly easy” http://bit.ly/33h23F

RT @jayrosen_nyu: Wired: Demand Media pumps out 4,000 videoclips and articles a day. And it all starts with an algorithm. http://jr.ly/mmzt

How to Give the People What They Want

“The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), the ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and the competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results).”