Mindy McAdams' "Reporter's Guide to Multimedia Proficiency"

If you’re a journalist serious about being an indispensable part of your newsroom, and aren’t particularly tech savvy, you owe it to yourself to read Mindy McAdams’ ongoing series, “Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency.”

In the 12th part of the series, McAdams offers advice on how to shoot video. At the bottom of her post, she has links to the previous entries, which cover podcasts, blogging, Soundslides, taking photos, and editing audio.

Learning Flash (in a flash)

Do you know how to use Flash? If not, set aside about a half hour to take UF journalism prof Mindy McAdams’ three-part Flash Tutorial.

Basics of online journalism

Kudos to University of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams for pointing to Paul Bradshaw’s PowerPoint on writing and producing for the Web. Bradshaw covers the basics: considering the what user will do with the information, crafting literal headlines, writing for scannability, and much more.

Journalism and hyperlinks

Beatblogging.org looks at three different bloggers (two of whom work for the Dallas Morning News) who are making smart use of hyperlinks in their blog posts to help readers navigate the information overload of the Web.

It’s called “good curation,” the process for which is described in lucid detail by University of Florida professor Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism.

Great tips for journalists

In Steve Yelvington’s post about the roles local news websites should play in their communities, one quote really stuck out for me:

Show me one single local newspaper site, just one, that has done a great job of building topics pages. Yahoo has topics pages. Cnet has topics pages. Newspaper sites? They have stories. Incremental stories that beg to be placed in context.

Ouch. Take THAT, online dinosaurs! I found Yelvington’s insightful comment via Gina Chen’s excellent Five Tips for Journalists on the Web, at Chen’s Save the Media blog. Here are some other links I’ve added to my growing list of bookmarks: