Apparently, there is a revolution going on (it is not being televised), and Journalista is ready to join in. The hyperlocal revolution is the emergence of community journalism that is hyperlocalized. You have heard of hyperlocal Web sites and have probably even visited them, commented on them and used them to understand your own community in some way. Examples are Yelp or Patch. These are probably the most prominent ones, but others are: MyLATimes, Front Porch Forum and Meet Neighbors.

I found a site that offers tools, advice and resources for people who are ready to join the revolution! It’s hyperlocal 101, and it’s an incredibly useful site for community journalists because it’s current! The last blog post I read was on cell journalism, what it is, how to use it, its benefits and even a link to an article on its ethical uses! I find it particularly interesting because it not only offers advice and tips for journalists, but for entrepreneurial journalists who are creating their own blogs or publications and also would like to make a profit while doing so. For instance, Shields Bialasik, who seems to be a regular contributor to the site, discussed how important he/she has found trade/bartering when it comes to advertising for her/his hyperlocal blog, LocalsGuide. I was surprised that she referred to it as hyperlocal marketing. I am not sure if she created this term or if I am again enlightened to how much catching up I must do in terms of this revolution.

It’s late and Journalista has to drive home in the morning. So, Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well and take time to reflect on what you’re grateful for before returning to the metaphorical fist-pumping of the hyperlocal revolution.

George Seldes: Absolutely a press visionary, critical genius, and I think at least some of his books should be required reading for journalists. Check out Lords of the Press or Tell the Truth and Run. It gets you riled up in a great way.  No wonder he lived to 105.

Social media is just another way to procrastinate. Thanks, Social Media. Also, Pandora is quite possibly my favorite thing in the whole wide world.

I recently found information about YouTube Direct, which allows news organizations to accept and upload user-generated video content right on their sites. Besides being available on the news site, it will also be available on YouTube, which seems like a win-win for both news sites and YouTube, driving more traffic to the sites.

Now that I am learning how great and easy video is, I can definitely see this being useful for even small community papers that may not have the money or technical knowledge to maintain their own video content components to embed on their sites.

Also, YouTube is going to add an automatic caption feature, which is helpful for hearing-impaired audiences. In a recent Graduate Student Association executive board meeting, we discussed using a feature such as this to reach our hearing-impaired peers. The other plus to this feature is that it can also generate translated captions for content which is done in other languages. According to the link I read, there will be 51 languages that can be used in translation of video content. According to the Google blog, with captions, users can jump easily to the portion of the video they want to view. Google, which owns YouTube, will rely on Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) in combination with YouTube’s auto-caps (its automatic caption system). This means that the captions can sometimes be inaccurate. However, overall, captions with a few errors is better than not being able to understand the video at all.

There are not a lot of initial partners for the automatic caption features, but the ones they have are prominent, such as: PBS, Columbia, National Geographic, UC Berkeley, Yale, MIT and Stanford.

Automatic timing is yet another feature for YouTube. It allows users to just type in the transcript of what is being said and YouTube uses ASR and places the captions at the correct times during the video, so that the user does not have to wait.

For a very short tutorial on both auto-caps and auto-timing, click here.

So, Journalista was looking for a new site to inform you about for my weekly Techscan. I checked out the amazing site: 10,000 Words, and was perturbed by the link to a site, run by 10,000 Words, that proudly claims that Journalism Is Dead. The site is just various quotes about why “traditional” journalism is basically extinct. The explanation calls the quotes humorous and maybe some are, but mostly, I just feel “ouch.” Is it a sense of nostalgia that I’m feeling that keeps me from finding the site funny? I just want to believe that Journalism is alive, maybe it’s not alive “and kickin’ ” right now, but baby, don’t knock us because we always get back up. Made it through radio, television and we’ll make it through anything else…We just have to, um, figure out how.

Oh, and Oprah is saying she is quitting her talk show in 2011. However, doesn’t she say she is quitting every year? Does anyone else find it interesting that after she talked to Sarah Palin one-on-one, she decided she needed to end her talk show? I have much love for  Oprah, who started her broadcast career in our hometown of Nashville at the news station that my grandfather worked at for decades. You go, Harpo! And go brown journalistas from Nashville with unique names!

Hey there!

Your journalista has so much to share, but not the time right now to share all of it, so I’ll just give y’all a little taste.

So, I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon the Globe and Mail Web site. I’ve never been to Canada nor been necessarily concerned about the country enough to check out their news outlets.  However, this site was incredible. I love the special series that they run every now and then, especially this one (click the picture to view the entire series):

I love the photography and that they thought enough to include the ways they were able to pull this all together, which is helpful for other journalists.

I just really am so in love with this format. It has everything: video, sound, photos, feedback, methodology, ways to give back, words from the editor about WHY this is important. The smart thing is that in order to check out the articles and certain features of the series, you must sign up for GlobePlus, which is basically $160 annually. You can also pay $16 monthly. You better believe if I had an extra $160 and if I lived in Canada, I would have no problem paying that. It is that incredible and has piqued my interest enough, and I’m the type that if I even have to register for free for a site, I just don’t care enough to go through the hassle. I guess the Boston Globe editor was so very right when he said that we have to be able to tell stories and tell them in innovative ways.

So, while compiling my research for my journalism history paper, I stumbled upon these quotes from Ed Howe, the once controversial publisher of the Atchinson (Kansas) Globe for 36 years:

“A man has his clothes made to fit him, a woman makes herself fit her clothes.”

“The difference between a good woman and a bad one is that a bad woman raises hell with a good many men, while a good woman raises hell with only one.”

“Nearly every successful man we ever met was a good billiard player.”

My favorite (I wish I knew the context):
“Don’t be ashamed if you can’t play the piano! be proud of it.”

Still getting the kinks out, but wanted to post what I’d done so far.

This is a soundslide presentation of a story I wrote about custodial workers at the University of Alabama. The story was recommended for a Hearst Award. However, since I’m a grad student, I can’t enter, but still incredibly excited.

Here’s the link: UA Custodial Workers Keep Faith and Spirits High

Wow.

I didn’t even know what FriendFeed was before I discovered BNO. According to its Web site,  BNO News is a “new international news agency targeting breaking and developing stories to a global audience.” Michael van Poppel, a 19-year-old who lives in the Netherlands, created BNO. To learn more about the service, van Poppel and how it came about, read here: van Poppel first began with copy of bin Laden tape

Anyways, FriendFeed is a hybrid of Facebook’s Live Feed and Twitter, which are basically the same thing, however, on Friend Feed, you can say that you “like” something like on Facebook. (While Facebook is making so many asinine changes, why not add a “do not like” or “absolutely hate” or “I just vomited in my mouth when I read your status” option?) Anywho, BNO is basically what most people do anyways, scan the headlines to understand what’s happening and read enough to get the gist of the story. It’s microwaved news. It’s the Toaster Streudel of New York Times and the icing is FriendFeed.Of course, you can also get your BNO News via Twitter as well. BNO has 1,361,841  followers on Twitter, as of right now at 5:12 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2009. CNN only has 595,730 Twitter followers, though CNN Breaking News has over 2 million.

The fact that the news is reported in real-time is a plus. The lack of what I think is appropriate attribution is, where’s the do-not-like button?

Including a BNO News iPhone app (charging $1.99 to download and a monthly subscription fee of 99 cents)was a good strategy because the iPhone is so incredibly handy. Plus, I would assume (I know, I know) that a large proportion of the audience of BNO News would be avid  iPhone users.

Besides following BNO News on FriendFeed or Twitter, users can also receive e-mail alerts.

Hopefully, people will use BNO as a starting point because apparently BNO is as “breaking” as news comes. So, readers can go there first to know what’s happening in the world around them and head to other news outlets to get the rest of the story.

Yes, your journalista is up and at ‘em at 5:30 in the morning. I just woke up this early for some unknown awful reason and figured since I’m up, I’d give you all a little something to talk about. I was speaking with another journalist about being a journalist and about going to school to become one. We both wondered if it was somewhat strange to go to school to become a journalist instead of learning about something you would cover as a journalist. We both acknowledged that it seems as though having a degree in journalism is almost a prerequisite in media jobs now, though this was not always the case. One of the main reasons I went back to school and again majored in journalism was because there are quite a few things that I want to learn to make myself more competitive. Competition is fierce in today’s job market, especially for us. Graduate school has been a blessing for me. I am learning so many different tools and about history, theory, methods that can only get me closer to true journalista status: a multimedia force to be reckoned with.

Here’s a great blog post about the subject: “Suddenly you became a journalist by getting trained in journalism, as opposed to being trained in science or economics or business or statistics or any of those things journalists write about.”

http://trueslant.com/jerrylanson/2009/10/27/shell-settle-for-nothing-short-of-plain-english/

Apparently marketing has no boundaries in this day and age. KFC is attempting to have The Grilled Nation added to the UN. I haven’t tried the grilled chicken despite it being free this past Monday.