Imagery - first ideas from Ja'Mein, Maria and Fernando

Our vision is to provide a site where citizen journalists and the public alike can showcase their photo and video images of newsworthy events.


1. Who is our target audience? (hint: Don't try to be all things to all people)

Our target audience will be local, national—ideally, international—media outlets (TV, digital and newspapers, news websites, etc.) Our users will be people who want to get the best of the best, without having to wade through just any uploaded material.


2. What is the competitive landscape? (hint: Sites that do it well)

Our competition is formidable. It includes You Tube, Citizen Tube, I report, and This is me reporting. However, although they have the basic component of our project, namely, amateur-produced photos and videos, what they are doing is not exactly the same as ours. We can in fact learn from their websites how to do something different.


3. How do we differentiate ourselves? (hint: Secret sauce)

We will differentiate our website by merging images and blogging, citizen testimonials, video dialogues and citizen voting to showcase the best material that we can market to media outlets. In addition to breaking news, our image blogs will cover forthcoming, citizen-contributed events, as in FLickr Blog . For issues of national importance and controversy, we will allow video debate as in bloggingheads.tv . The image blogs and "diaVlogs" will be voted upwards through Digg or something similar. Our nearest sister website is purplestatestv, with the difference that we will add public debate and citizen participation to vote up the photo and video images to be showcased on the website.


4. How do we create our site? (hint: Staff and schedule)

Staff:

* One website designer.

* One search engine optimization expert.

* Two sales people who offer the images to the media

* Someone to act as a verifier or watchdog (to filter out unrelated content)

Schedule:

* One month to do research on marketing requirements

* Two months to build the website

* One month to spread the word and test it

* One month to tweak it and build sponsorship

* One month to create the buzz and go "live"


5. How do we get our content? (hint: Pre-built, manual, automatic, updated)

We will crowd-source from citizen journalists already submitting content to local and large metropolitan newspapers and websites. Our website's structure will be similar to Craigslist in being organized by Region (states and major cities) and by key Topic (major political events, social movements, public upheavals, natural disasters, etc.). People would upload their images to a website with a pre-built structure. Updates will also be obtained from RSS feeds from the citizen journalist websites that have now proliferated.


6. How do we market our site? (hint: Spread the word)

* By spreading the word among people we know, professional journalism associations, citizen journalist non-profit organizations, and media outlets

* Through search engine optimization

* By social marketing--utilizing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook

* By links in our blogs and blogs of people we know and are willing to help.

* Once we manage to actually get these images out to the media, we would ask for two copyright notices—one for the actual owner and another one for our website.


7. How do we sustain the site? (hint: Show me the $$$)

* By selling the images to media outlets and splitting the profit with the owner of the image.

* By earning a percentage of the ads (also splitting the profits with the owner of the image)

Invest More in Your Education Spending Less

If you're worried about rising tuition costs, if you're aware that speaking a foreign language and having international experience opens many doors, if you have given up hope that you can go on a study abroad program, don't dismay just yet.

In today's globalized world, what could be better than to have a global education? Just to get an idea, consider these facts about careers in the federal government:

  • There is a growing demand for people with foreign language skills across the federal government.
  • Since 9/11 the FBI has hired close to 1,000 linguists. It is projected that 274 new hires will occur in the next fiscal year.
  • The National Security Agency (NSA) is aggressively recruiting and plans to hire 1,500 people a year, many of them language analysts, until 2010.
  • Due to a the high demand of qualified linguists, the Pentagon is temporarily recruiting foreigners on work or student visas.
Also, according to jobmarketsuccess.com, speaking a foreign language has the following advantages:

  • it shows mental agility and flexibility
  • it shows dedication and tenacity
  • it makes you a more culturally-aware and tolerant person
  • it might be useful to you in your career

This website will open your --and your parent's-- eyes. You will find that going abroad as early as in junior high school is more affordable than you think.

We are not a study abroad program. Rather, we provide you with all the tools you need to put together your own program. We give you all the necessary information to apply to the universities that you like in the countries that you choose, as opposed to what's available in your university study abroad program.

By helping you in your research, we're already helping you immerse in a new culture, all by yourself. You will not be surrounded by a group of kids who speak your same language, eat peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and go to McDonald's in Russia or Argentina. You will be surrounded by kids who speak the language you want to learn, immerse in their worlds, cultures and schools, and drink okroshka or eat dulce de leche. And by the time you come back, you will have learned more about the culture you immersed in than your peers who did the study abroad program, spending less than the equivalent of one year in a private college.

Don't be afraid of becoming an independent study abroad student.
We'll tell you how. You'll reap the benefits.

This multimedia project involves the following components:

  • Summary information and links to high schools and colleges abroad that accept international students, their requirements and costs (if any).
  • Information about scholarships, jobs, exchange programs, lodging and more.
  • Video testimonials of people who have studied abroad and how the experience has changed their lives.
  • A support network for both parents and students.
  • Tips on how to get credit for your international experience in USA colleges.
  • Referral to translation services needed to fill applications, understand and fulfill requirements, etc.
  • How much more multimedia can you get?


    For the past few years, NPR has been making a conscious effort to reinvent itself as a multiplatform force, investing a lot of money in training its people and acquiring new equipments. Allegiances aside, since I've already confessed I'm an NPR fan, I think there's no doubt they've succeeded.

    If you have some time to spare, you may want to read about The Transformation of NPR, published at the end of last year by American Journalism Review, and then check the many examples where NPR meets or exceeds its goal "to get our [NPR's] stories and our storytelling and our journalism out to people wherever they are and in whatever form they want to experience it," as NPR Vice President for News, Ellen Weiss, puts it.

    But if you don't have enough time, just check out today's story on Obama's trip to the Middle East. In just the summary page, NPR gives you the whole package: The story itself, compelling, well-researched and well-written, as NPR has us accustomed to, the Two-Way Blog with a video of Obama's speech, which you can watch in its entirety or just highlights of it (On the "New Beginning", On Moving Forward, and On Stereotypes), the transcript and the audio of the speech, a photo gallery, and a timeline of US Presidents and the Muslim World, from the 1940's until today.

    Inside the link, you can also find the analysis of the speech on "Morning Edition", in case you missed it on your way to work, and other related articles.

    And this is just one story. If you look at the rest of the website, you can find pretty much the whole range of multimedia services (except for Twitter)--Radio, podcasts, NPR social network, newsfeeds, mobile, newsletters and a gadget for the Google Desktop Sidebar that plays streams of NPR's programs and let's you listen to the NPR Hourly Newscast.

    Just a decade ago, who would have thought that public radio would be at the forefront of embracing multimedia?

    *Picture taken from NPR's website (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

    Little interest in our neighbor to the South

    Today, the political blogosphere is all about Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia. But another milestone took place a few hours ago, also in a foreign land, that may have a huge impact on American foreign policy. The foreign ministers of 34 countries of the Americas (including US Hillary Clinton) met yesterday and today in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to discuss the status of Cuba in the Organization of American States (OAS). After hours of negotiations (that were preceded by months of negotiations by lower-ranking diplomats), all 34 countries decided unanimously to discontinue the measures imposed by Resolution VI of the Eighth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, held in Uruguay in 1962, which excluded the government of Cuba from participating in the inter-American system. Although the foreign ministers also noted that Cuba’s re-entry to the OAS will happen only at the request of the government of Cuba and through a process that involves upholding the principles of democracy and respect for human rights by Cuba, this resolution is already stirring up debate among Cuban-Americans based in Miami and even among some anti-Cuba senators.

    Leaving aside what I think about Cuba's re-entry in the inter-American system, I must confess that I was a bit disappointed to find out that this topic was almost ignored by political blogs, except for a few exceptions.

    If anyone is interested, here are two good videos posted in You Tube, although before the approval of the resolution, which give a summary of what was happening with Cuba.

    Clinton outlines conditions for Cuba entry to OAS

    OAS discusses Cuba's re-entry

    My Do's and Don'ts of Political Sites


    DO'S

    * Do embed audio and video clips on every post, as the CNN Political Ticker does.

    * Do make an effort to have clean-looking and well-written posts, like The Caucus, the political blog of the The New York Times

    * If your articles are going to be long, do be thoughtful and do your research well, as Harvard's http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/ does. This is the only reason not to update your blog every day.

    * Do have a very sleek design, like Slate.



    DON'TS

    * Don't make it almost impossible to find out who wrote what. Although The Economist is one of my favorite publications, I'd like to know who is writing on their Democracy in America blog

    * Don't allow your home page to look like a yellow newspaper. Huffington Post might want to hire a new designer.

    * Don't have a blog if you can't update it on weekends, like NPR's Political Junkie. That's when most people have more time to read.
    Managing Multimedia Projects - Week 2
    Favorite Multimedia Projects

    1. NPR as a whole is one of my favorite mmp.  I listen to the radio every morning on my way to work. Many times when I get to the office, I log on to their site to find more information about what I just heard. 
    Recent examples of projects I've liked are: 
    • Pinpointing Airports With High Rate Of Bird Strikes, an interactive map that shows the US airports with the highest rates of wildlife strikes. This was done in the aftermath of the now-famous US Airways pilot who successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River after being hit by a flock of birds. 
    • The Obama Tracker, which charts significant events and developments in the new administration. 
    2. Only recently did I discover a great gadget used by he Washington Post, called "Understand more about..." It's a small window with circles containing the names of all the actors mentioned in the story. When you click on any name, it tells you what other stories have been written about this person, business, etc. Check out one of today's examples to understand better how this works—"The Depression Test". "Understand more about" is the genius invention of Evri, a Seattle company that "is building a way for content to network–a way for that great article you just read to make meaningful connections with every other contextually relevant article, paper, blog, image, audio clip or video on the web. With more than 15 billion documents on the World Wide Web today, there could be hundreds of thousands of documents with similar keywords requiring readers to sort out what is relevant. Evri’s technology automates connections between Web content by applying a more human-like understanding of the words on the page. We think that there is a big opportunity to help website publishers better engage their readers and help readers discover compelling content in a new and addictive way." Evri is still in beta.

    3. GlobalPost has a multimedia section that is not too fancy as far as technology is concerned, but I nevertheless enjoy it. Check out, for example, the audio slideshow "Looking good: High style in the Congo,by Finbarr O'Reilly.