Our short history

Wow, college multimedia has come a very long way.

Va.Tech, the Collegiate Times and mobile journalism

I must say, I was incredibly impressed by the efforts of the staff of Virginia Tech’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times. The day of the shooting, instead of repeating everything we got from wire services for thebatt.com, I chose to write brief updates and then link to CT’s website. These journalists, these students, did a simply amazing job of reporting from the field. They pulled out their laptops, audio recorders, digital cameras, etc. and showed what it means to be a mojo (mobile journalist). Corporate media could learn something from the CT staff.

It must be tempting, during of a situation like that, to pull back from the action, to sit back and let the tragedy and the drama sink in. Instead, the CT staff chose to act. Through all the commotion, their website’s server crashed, but luckily College Publisher bailed them out, and they kept going. In watching the news that day, I found that the CT staff often had the news faster and more accurately than the major news services, and they probably had the best advantage of putting student reaction into the stories.

Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media just posted his experience with the Collegiate Times. If you don’t have time to read it, basically, he was at Va.Tech a week before the shootings doing training seminars about new media and mobile, online journalism. Bryan, and I certainly agree, believes the CT deserves a Pulitzer.

I wasn’t here in 1999, but I have to imagine that The Battalion’s staff of that year would have done the same with the Bonfire collapse had it happened this year. From what I remember, most Batt staffers were either at the site or in the newsroom that entire week, with several of the editors bringing sleeping bags to the newsroom so they could work in shifts. I don’t want anything tragic like that happen at A&M again, but I would hope this Batt staff would be able to pull of something like the Collegiate Times did.

Why open source will change the media

Arvinder Kang over at Our News Network has a great piece on the movement of the media world to open source software. Go check it out.

For student journalists eager to learn

I’m a student journalist, as is everyone at The Batt. We’re lucky to have a great budget, which gives us the ability to purchase great equipment and great software (I’m using a Mac Pro to do Batt video), but our budget is obviously not unlimited. I’m sure Bob Wegener, Student Media’s general manager, would love to buy training software for every piece of software we use, but sometimes that’s not possible.

But, if you’re an aspiring “new media” journalist like me, you’ll want to hop on over to YouTube (yes, YouTube) for great software training.

My new favorite location is MacVideoHelpline

There’s surprisingly tons of free software tutorials on YouTube, covering everything from Final Cut Pro to Flash to Photoshop.

Cold, football and barbecue… in April.

Texas A&M Parent’s Weekend 2007 has come and gone, and I must say, I’m a little glad to see it go. There were quite a few things to cover, and definitely not enough staff and cameras to cover them. But, for those things we did cover, here’s a look at them:

Amanda Bentley, normally a sports writer, volunteered to do some video for the weekend, and ended up being on the job ALL weekend. Hopefully I can convince her to come write a post about her experiences, but in the meantime, I must say I don’t think I’ve ever been as impressed with a single staffer’s effort.

Here are her two videos:

Bevo Burn BBQ beats nasty weather

Meet the Parents of the Year

Keep in mind when you watch those: they’re her very first attempts at newspaper video. Actually, I think they’re her first videos.

Good job Amanda, keep up the good work!

P.S. Here’s the video I did over Parents’ Weekend. And if you ask me, Amanda’s videos blow mine out of the water.

Maps: online and in action!

I’ve finished the Atlas map of the 2007 National Aggie Muster locations.

There are a few A&M clubs that registered with the Association of Former Students but have not provided addresses. I’m going to follow up with those clubs tomorrow and get their locations on the map as soon as possible.

Obviously, the most important Muster map is to come, the Texas locations. But there are several hundred entries, so putting that database into Atlas will take a few more days.

On a side note, I’d like to say that as much as I enjoy using Atlas, there are quite a few features missing (like tracing paths from one location to another, custom location icons), but considering this software is free, I’m not complaining. I tried out Google Maps‘ new feature, “My Maps”, which is the same concept as Atlas, but with a few more features. The problem about it is, and this is why I’m sticking with Atlas: you can’t embed My Maps.

Maps galore!!

So, I’ve been busy this past week. Not counting the conference in Nashville last weekend, this week was pretty crazy, due to everything from tests to job interviews.

But I’ve also been busy working on some new stuff for thebatt.com. The company Faneuil Media, started by a former Google employee, has created a software called Atlas, in which the user can input database information (that which can be mapped, of course), and Atlas will create an interactive, embeddable map.

Here are two examples of what I’m doing for The Batt using Atlas:

1. A daily police blotter. I got this idea from Ball State University. Why copy the local P.D.’s blotter onto your website when you can show your readers where all the activity occurred?

2. Aggie Muster locations. This one is still very much in progress, as the database I’m working with is, quite frankly, enormous.

This technology is still pretty basic, but it’s great when we want to display information on a map, and it let’s the user interact and view the “story” at their own pace. These are two things we’re working on, do you, The Battalion readers, have any ideas for interactive maps?

 UPDATE: Typically, I can embed the maps directly onto the page, like users can do with YouTube videos, and what we’ll have on thebatt.com on Monday. But for some reason, WordPress isn’t playing nice with Altas, so I just had to link to the maps.

New staff

Congrats to Zack Morgan, The Batt’s first full-fledged video reporter. He did a great job covering last night’s student body president run-off election debate, and in fact has been doing great covering the whole election.

Considering the room the debate was held in was most definitely not set up for media, I think Zack did a great job. If we had more cameras, we could have recorded each candidate separately, making the video flow much smoother. But we got it up, and that’s what’s important.

Inspiriation from a child

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day with the Raulerson family.

Today, The Batt published a huge 3 page story and a photo essay about Tacey Raulerson, the 7-year old daughter of two A&M staff members. She was born with retinoblastoma, a cancer in the back of her eyes. When she was nine months old, she had one eye removed. The other one was removed last summer.

The Raulerson family, Taecy, Tammy and Michael, is nothing short of amazing. They have dealt with countless surgeries and sessions of chemotherapy, many early-morning trips to hospitals in Houston, and of course, Tacey’s blindness. The Bryan-College Station community has been amazing to the Raulerson family, providing everything from medical expenses to trips to Disney World. And the Raulerson’s couldn’t be more grateful.

My day with Tacey started out at 4 p.m., when I pulled up to their house just as Tacey’s friend (her new boyfriend, I would learn later), was leaving. She has spent the day playing at his house. It amazed me how many friends Tacey had. As I followed Tacey and her mom while Tacey rode her bike around the neighborhood, quite a few kids came out to talk to Tacey and see if she could come and play. I don’t remember my elementary school classmates being that nice, so I complement the kids of Rock Prairie Elementary for being so kind and loving.

Tacey’s a pretty talented bike rider, especially considering she’s completely blind. She rides down the street, following the vocal directions of her mother, who trails close behind her. When Tacey went to fast, struck a curb and feel pretty hard off of her bike, she cried a little. But in the spirit of a true 7-year old, got right back on her bike and rode off. Not once did she claim defeat, not once mentioning how hard it is to ride a bike while blind.

We had dinner at Double Dave’s, where Tacey ate quite a few of her favorite items, the pepperoni rolls. We went back to the Raulerson house, where I interviewed Tammy, then Michael, and then the family together. I wish I could have included everything they said in video report, because at several points, I was brought to the verge of tears.

The Raulerson family is strong. I put this quote at the end of the video, and I think it embodies what their experience means, and should provide hope to any family going through a situation like this:

” …there’s so much more to be thankful for than there is to regret.” -Tammy Raulerson

Innovation in College Media

I got back from Nashville late Saturday night, and boy was it a great trip. I attended the Center for Innovation in College Media’s first conference, and learned quite a bit about the importance of online journalism. Speakers included Jennifer Carroll, the vice president of new media operations at Gannett (the publisher of USA Today and 90 small and mid-size papers), and Jason Levine, a worldwide product evangelist for Adobe. Also, journalism pioneer John Siegenthaler made and appearance.

Overall, the conference was great, we covered things like how to shoot video for newspaper websites (as opposed to shooting for TV), how to integrate interactive maps as story-telling, using RSS feeds and things like digg and del.icio.us to your advantage, and optimizing features through College Publisher.

Look for some radical changes at The Batt, especially thebatt.com, in the near future.

UPDATE: Angela Grant, multimedia producer at the San Antonio Express-News, has posted the notes, outlines and handouts from her session about online video on her blog, InTheCircle. Her shooting tips really helped me, because shooting video for newspaper is quite different from shooting for TV. Make sure and check her stuff out, it’s a must.