May 23, 2013 • 387 notes • futurejournalismproject
futurejournalismproject: Why It’s Time to Rethink Web Video Entirely Producer Adam Westbrook recently built an essay called The Web Video Problem about how cinematic video content is wrong for the web, and that we can and ought to recreate the visual storytelling experience on the web entirely. Toward that end, he’s working on web publishing house (Hot Pursuit). He writes: In visual storytelling on the web we are still talking about images in deliberate sequence. We are juxtaposing these images, either over time (in a linear audio/visual way) or in space (like a web comic might). If we accept this definition of visual storytelling (in the purest sense) then it doesn’t matter if it’s video, a web comic or even an animated GIF - or a combination of all these and more. Combine this with the growing capabilities of the web browser, and the connectedness of the internet, and potentially we have the ability to tell dynamic, visual stories in a way that hasn’t been done before. This excites me very much. The essay is nicely built and designed with bold, scrolling visuals (using the curtain jquery plug-in, which yes, is very popular these days and can be downloaded here for your own building pleasure) so that you can choose to read the whole thing or just get the highlights. It’s worth checking out.  Bonus: He provides some great resources on visual storytelling: A good briefing on the principles of visual storytelling are featured in the second issue of Inside the Story Magazine, available here. If you don’t want to pay for the whole thing, this free articlecovers a lot of the same ground. Scott McCloud’s comic book on comic books is an essential read for visual storytellers. Craig Mod’s essay on Subcompact Publishing informed some of the ideas about thinking web-natively, as did this article by John Pavlus and this piece by Bryan Goldberg. Finally, Steven Benedict’sanalysis of Spielberg’s cinematic storytelling skills demonstrate what visual narrative can acheive, and let Steven Soderbergh tell you why this new thing shouldn’t become like the movie business. Image: Screenshot from The Web Video Problem

futurejournalismproject:

Why It’s Time to Rethink Web Video Entirely

Producer Adam Westbrook recently built an essay called The Web Video Problem about how cinematic video content is wrong for the web, and that we can and ought to recreate the visual storytelling experience on the web entirely. Toward that end, he’s working on web publishing house (Hot Pursuit).

He writes:

In visual storytelling on the web we are still talking about images in deliberate sequence. We are juxtaposing these images, either over time (in a linear audio/visual way) or in space (like a web comic might).

If we accept this definition of visual storytelling (in the purest sense) then it doesn’t matter if it’s video, a web comic or even an animated GIF - or a combination of all these and more.

Combine this with the growing capabilities of the web browser, and the connectedness of the internet, and potentially we have the ability to tell dynamic, visual stories in a way that hasn’t been done before.

This excites me very much.

The essay is nicely built and designed with bold, scrolling visuals (using the curtain jquery plug-in, which yes, is very popular these days and can be downloaded here for your own building pleasure) so that you can choose to read the whole thing or just get the highlights. It’s worth checking out. 

Bonus: He provides some great resources on visual storytelling:

A good briefing on the principles of visual storytelling are featured in the second issue of Inside the Story Magazine, available here. If you don’t want to pay for the whole thing, this free articlecovers a lot of the same ground. Scott McCloud’s comic book on comic books is an essential read for visual storytellers. Craig Mod’s essay on Subcompact Publishing informed some of the ideas about thinking web-natively, as did this article by John Pavlus and this piece by Bryan Goldberg. Finally, Steven Benedict’sanalysis of Spielberg’s cinematic storytelling skills demonstrate what visual narrative can acheive, and let Steven Soderbergh tell you why this new thing shouldn’t become like the movie business.

Image: Screenshot from The Web Video Problem

May 22, 2013 • 55 notes • futurejournalismproject
futurejournalismproject: Gender Balance in News Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media.  The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices. For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media.  Via Guardian: In the UK, newspaper front pages rarely include women, and women write a minority of articles. Women are prominent at the Daily Mail, where they write most of the celebrity news, fewer news articles, and almost no sport. Even when publications do include women, they’re often at the mercy of their audiences. 20% of Telegraph opinion articles are written by women, but women’s opinion articles attract only 14% of the Telegraph’s shares and likes on social media. And according to studies done by the Women’s Media Center, in both legacy and newer news sites, women are too often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like fashion, relationships, and food, rather than urgent and/or international issues. On a positive note, Global Voices, an international citizen media news site, is one of the only news organizations currently known to have equal gender participation. According to The Guardian, 764 women wrote 51% of all articles from 2005-2012.  Related: Gender balance is the new rage. I just wish somebody had spread the word to the Wikiverse: Wikipedia Bumps Women From ‘American Novelists’ Category. — Krissy Image: Screenshot of graph from Open Gender Tracker

futurejournalismproject:

Gender Balance in News

Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media. 

The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices.

For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media. 

Via Guardian:

In the UK, newspaper front pages rarely include women, and women write a minority of articles. Women are prominent at the Daily Mail, where they write most of the celebrity news, fewer news articles, and almost no sport. Even when publications do include women, they’re often at the mercy of their audiences. 20% of Telegraph opinion articles are written by women, but women’s opinion articles attract only 14% of the Telegraph’s shares and likes on social media.

And according to studies done by the Women’s Media Center, in both legacy and newer news sites, women are too often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like fashion, relationships, and food, rather than urgent and/or international issues.

On a positive note, Global Voices, an international citizen media news site, is one of the only news organizations currently known to have equal gender participation. According to The Guardian, 764 women wrote 51% of all articles from 2005-2012. 

Related: Gender balance is the new rage. I just wish somebody had spread the word to the Wikiverse: Wikipedia Bumps Women From ‘American Novelists’ Category. — Krissy

Image: Screenshot of graph from Open Gender Tracker

May 18, 2013 • 119 notes • explore-blog
explore-blog: Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.

explore-blog:

Mark Twain on “sponsored content” and “native advertising,” 1873.

May 18, 2013 • 4 notes • panopticaust

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, by Noam Chomsky

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.

(via megaphonemagazine)

May 15, 2013 • 2,045 notes • ad-busting

Unbustable ads

ad-busting:

image

H&M’s new beachwear campaign featuring Jennie Runk is pretty awesome. In this article she explains that women have sent her messages saying that this ad campaign has given them the confidence to try on a bikini for the first time in years!

See… it does make a difference when we see diverse body types in advertising and media! 

(via hbwomen)

May 15, 2013 • 46 notes • extremetech.com
new-aesthetic: How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop | ExtremeTech “Perhaps most importantly, though, cameras simply don’t capture the same gamut of color or dynamic range as human eyes — a photo never looks the same as the original image perceived by your brain. Is it okay for a photographer to modify a picture so that it looks exactly how he remembers the scene?”

new-aesthetic:

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop | ExtremeTech

“Perhaps most importantly, though, cameras simply don’t capture the same gamut of color or dynamic range as human eyes — a photo never looks the same as the original image perceived by your brain. Is it okay for a photographer to modify a picture so that it looks exactly how he remembers the scene?”

May 15, 2013 • 461 notes •
The real value of a real education … has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness.
David Foster Wallace (via explore-blog)

(via teachreadingwrite)

May 14, 2013 • 1,793 notes • futurejournalismproject

futurejournalismproject:

White Men, Everyone Else: Gender and Ethnic Diversity on Cable News

Media Matters spent the month of April reviewing evening guests on cable news. The results, unfortunately, don’t surprise: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC “overwhelmingly host male and white guests.”

Read through for the details as the watchdog group breaks down the numbers for each network. We learn, for instance, that “Out of 1,677 total guests, CNN had the largest proportion of men — 76 percent — during the month of April;” and “Fox News had the largest proportion of white guests — 83 percent.”

Hat tip to Chris Hayes, whose show is the most diverse in cable evening news. And getting there isn’t very difficult. “We just would look at the board and say, ‘We already have too many white men. We can’t have more,’” Hayes told Ann Friedman at the Columbia Journalism Review back in March. “Really, that was it.”

Images: Diversity On Evening Cable News, via Media Matters. Select to embiggen.

May 13, 2013 • 20 notes • englishteacheronline

Exam Time

englishteacheronline:

Free website for making mindmaps, study plans and flashcards.

May 11, 2013 • 302 notes • NPR
npr: Writer Eric Deggans argues that it’s just as easy to stereotype white, working class people as folks of color. He’s wondering: Why haven’t we seen stronger protests of shows that stereotype whites? — On ‘Hicksploitation’ And Other White Stereotypes Seen On TV : Code Switch Photo: A&E

npr:

Writer Eric Deggans argues that it’s just as easy to stereotype white, working class people as folks of color. He’s wondering: Why haven’t we seen stronger protests of shows that stereotype whites?

— On ‘Hicksploitation’ And Other White Stereotypes Seen On TV : Code Switch

Photo: A&E

May 8, 2013 • 197 notes • theatlantic
theatlantic: Obama ‘Handshake’ Proves South Korea Is Worse at Photoshop Than the North [Image: Yonhap]

theatlantic:

Obama ‘Handshake’ Proves South Korea Is Worse at Photoshop Than the North

[Image: Yonhap]

May 6, 2013 • 3 notes
shawnhbaldwin: Colors & Marketing: What are colors telling you?

shawnhbaldwin:

Colors & Marketing: What are colors telling you?

(via shawnhbaldwin-deactivated201305)

May 6, 2013 • 375 notes •
If a brand is making a promise that you’re going to feel better about yourself if you buy it, they’re making a false promise. Human beings metabolize their purchases very quickly. … This is an element of what social psychologists call “the hedonic treadmill”: If you’re always looking to validate yourself and get satisfaction from buying stuff or having a bigger house, then you’re on an endless, addictive treadmill. There’s no enduring satisfaction to this. If a brand’s only purpose is to get you on that hedonic treadmill, it might be good for business in the short run, but in the long run, you’re doomed. If you look at the components of long-term well-being, it has nothing to do with material goods. Once you’re past a certain level of material well-being, people’s long-term happiness and wellbeing is about having deep personal relationships, believing in something larger than themselves, and doing something meaningful that they enjoy.
Dan Pink on the psychology of consumer culture and how marketers manipulate it. Pair with the science of whether money can buy you happiness. (via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

May 4, 2013 • 1 note • hbwomen
May 3, 2013 • 353 notes • cheatsheet
cheatsheet: Not The Onion: The news that a 5-year-old had shot and killed his 2-year-old sister sparked a storm of outrage Wednesday, and much of the ire was directed at the fact that he used a .22-caliber rifle manufactured by Crickett, an arm of Keystone Sporting Arms that designs weapons specifically for children. The 5-year-old’s gun—which had been given to him as a birthday present—was marketed with the tagline “My first rifle.” Crickett’s website featured not just a friendly, cartoonish green insect as the company logo, but photos of young children cradling their weapons. Read more about the guns marketed to children. (Emphasis in above quote ours.)

cheatsheet:

Not The Onion:

The news that a 5-year-old had shot and killed his 2-year-old sister sparked a storm of outrage Wednesday, and much of the ire was directed at the fact that he used a .22-caliber rifle manufactured by Crickett, an arm of Keystone Sporting Arms that designs weapons specifically for children. The 5-year-old’s gun—which had been given to him as a birthday present—was marketed with the tagline “My first rifle.” Crickett’s website featured not just a friendly, cartoonish green insect as the company logo, but photos of young children cradling their weapons.

Read more about the guns marketed to children. (Emphasis in above quote ours.)