Q. My students at
Emerson College are concerned about learning specific platforms (
Flash,
Soundslides), but do they matter as much as concepts (i.e. finding the best format for the story regardless of the specific authoring tools)?
David Wallace
A. Some good answers to this appeared in our
Feb. 13 chat on learning multimedia journalism, but we were not able to post them all. At our busiest, three of us at Poynter were reviewing and posting items simultaneously, keeping several threads going at once. I will distill some material relevant to Wallace's question here, drawing on helpful comments from two people who were in the chat.
One is
USA Today's William Couch, a 2007
Poynter summer fellow. The other is Mo Krochmal, an assistant professor at Hofstra University's School of Communication. This month, his students launched the hyperlocal
Nassau News Live from Hofstra's
NewsHub.
Couch: It's so important for journalists to think of every bit of content they produce as modular data so it can be ported to any platform or device. The proliferation of mobile device usage already is huge.
Krochmal: One of the skills I think journalists should have is to be able to think critically and apply the appropriate media to the storytelling process. Some can be visual, some audio, some text or a
mashup.
William Couch: The best thing I could have ever done to start teaching myself online design skills was to buy my own domain name, get a server for a couple bucks a month and install and play with a lot of open-source, widely used tools like
WordPress,
Drupal and
Django.
I would recommend investing in Jeffrey Zeldman's "
Designing with Web Standards." That will teach you a lot about how the Web has reached the state it's in now, and will give a good overview of how to design in
HTML. I would dismiss any
Dreamweaver class.
Dreamweaver can get the job done, but it's better to pick up a book (like Zeldman's) and grab a basic text editor (
TextMate,
BBEdit,
TextWrangler, etc.) and code from there. Dreamweaver can make you lazy with its visual mode, and if you use the visual mode only, the code it generates is poor. If you want an all-in-one package, use
Coda (from Panic).
Also, I would not rely on learning a proprietary
content management system (CMS) for basic HTML stuff. Learn it outside of the proprietary tools of the newsroom so they're extensible place to place, and profession to profession.
Mo Krochmal: If you want to learn more about content management systems without buying, try
OpenSourceCMS for test-drives and learning purposes.
Again, you can
read the archived chat here. In the spirit of rounding out this answer, please feel free to
add your comments.
Coming Wednesday: Are newsrooms learning from their interns?
