SoloJourno

Via PBS Media Shift:

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction.

So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists? I interviewed 25 of the journalists I follow on Twitter (most of them Australian with a smattering of South African and U.S. respondents) to find out first-hand.

This is the first installment in a two-part MediaShift series on the theme of journalists and Twitter.

Read the full article.

Via Mashable:

Journalists are using Twitter to engage with their audience, connect with sources and continue building their personal brands.

The 140-character format forces writers to focus their attention and get to the point quickly. But this isn’t just sound-bite style reporting. I talked with some reporters about Twitter and how they use it.

Read the full article.

New York City…center of the universe. Okay not quite, but there are a lot of great multimedia stories and interactive projects emerging from the City that Never Sleeps. There is perhaps no better way to take in the many landmarks of Manhattan than an aerial tour of the area. In today’s economy, a helicopter ride perhaps isn’t the most efficient means of transportation, but thanks to Pixelcase you can still take in magnificent views of the city. The interactive, panoramic photographs let users zoom across the New York skyline, above the noise and traffic.

Read the full article.

The Digital Journalist: May 2009

Feature article/gallery: Back in the White House After All These Years: Pete Souza by Dirck Halstead,

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is normally not a hospitable venue for return engagements. From 1983 until January of 1989, photographer Pete Souza served as a member of the White House photographic staff documenting the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The “Gipper,” as he was known, was 50 years older than the awestruck photojournalist.

Feature article/gallery: The Kentucky Derby: Scenes of the Season by Bill Luster.

“Until you go to Kentucky and with your own eyes behold a Derby, you ain’t been nowhere and you ain’t see nothing.”

Read the full issue.

This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances.

A distinguished panel of experts, drawn from cultural scholarship, legal scholarship, and legal practice, developed this code of best practices, informed by research into current personal and nonprofessional video practices (”user-generated video”) and on fair use. Full identification of panelists is on the back cover of this document.

Video is increasingly becoming a central part of our everyday landscape of communication, and it is becoming more visible as people share it on digital platforms. People make and share videos to tell stories about their personal lives, remixing home videos with popular music and images. Video remix has become a core component of political discourse, as the video “George Bush Don’t Like Black People” and the “Yes We Can” parodies demonstrated. Both amateur and professional editors are creating new forms of viral popular culture, as the “Dramatic Chipmunk” meme and the “Brokeback to the Future” mashup illustrate. The circulation of these videos is an emerging part of the business landscape, as the sale of YouTube to Google demonstrated.

It is important for video makers, online service providers, and content providers to understand the legal rights of makers of new culture, as policies and practices evolve. Only then will efforts to fight copyright “piracy” in the online environment be able to make necessary space for lawful, value-added uses.

Mashups, remixes, subs, and online parodies are new and refreshing online phenomena, but they partake of an ancient tradition: the recycling of old culture to make new. In spite of our romantic cliches about the anguished lone creator, the entire history of cultural production from Aeschylus through Shakespeare to Clueless has shown that all creators stand, as Isaac Newton (and so many others) put it, “on the shoulders of giants.”

Read the full article. Download the full report (free PDF).