Archive for the ‘Internship’ Category

WooHoo!

Posted on: by Blanda 1 Comment

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I was pretty much set that I wasn’t going to do another internship for my senior year.  I figured The Temple News, freelancing, and school would give me all that I could handle.

But then an opportunity came along that was too good to pass up.  For the first time ever, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News were offering a multimedia internship.  Usually I would have hit the delete button, but if you didn’t notice philly.com has been revamped and is on the up-and-up.  For the first time the Inky and the DN are promoting video and blogs.

So I hastily applied, and got the call late last week that I was in.  I can’t wait to help philly.com in its turnaround and hopefully they let me try some new things.

Now I just have to figure out a way to pay rent…

5 things I’d tell a future newsroom intern

ajmh0e-small.jpgI just wrapped up my summer internship. Overall, I’d say the classic cliches about internships: learned a lot about myself and the industry. I also learned a lot about how to get things done due to the nature of my particular situation (I had to create a site). Therefore, I had to jump to various departments and ask/demand that certain things get done with varying degrees of success.

There was also an aspect of non-journalism related work such as coding, researching, and marketing that I didn’t ever imagine I’d have to do.

But here are a few tips I would give anybody going into their first newspaper internship:

  1. Old media, in general, is in a pessimistic state of mind. This is not a bad thing. Use it to your advantage, and bring fresh ideas to the table. Use the fact that you are an outsider as a positive and suggest new ways of telling stories. But don’t be a pushy know-it-all either.
  2. Learn or die. If you know soundslides, HTML/CSS, video or audio editing you are in great shape. Show off your “mojo” skills as much as possible, even when you are not asked (like this intern). You might be a stark contrast to the “normal” reporter and thus make an editor who is transitioning to the digital newsroom consider you.
  3. Editors=friends. The most important people to get to know are your editors. They have the ability to hire (and fire) you. They have combed through the resumes, and have read thousands of stories. Ask them what you stink at. Pry their brain on the industry, what makes a good reporter, and their best dinner recipe.
  4. Hang out with your fellow interns outside of the office at least once.
  5. Pitch stories outside of your section. Chance is, the newsroom is understaffed. Take advantage of this by giving editors what is essentially free labor. Get some diversity in your clips while establishing new professional relationships. You may even be able to swing some freelance work after you leave.

5a. For the love of god, stay out of office gossip.

(thanks to Joe for the above link.)

Two week vacation

This blog will see very light action as I’m taking a two week “computer vacation” after having to sit at one nearly all day for my internship.

 

I will have an wrap up of what I learned soon though, promise.

The Unami usability test results

This Wednesday we had about 20 or people come and test the site I have been working on: unamidelaware.com.

The results were interesting, but mostly along with what I expected. As with anytime I design a Web site (or write an article, or cook a meal…) I am aware of things I wish I did but just didn’t have the time or capability to do so.

For example ,many complained over the buggy-ness of the Flash slideshow. The slideshow was a cheap tool that I purchased because I did not have the expertise to code it myself. But a quick run down of the complaints and what we are doing to change them.

  • Right rail navigation is poor, roll overs shouldn’t be a way to navigate to articles
  • There is no indication that this is a Delaware related page
  • The video player is not very inviting
  • Our “stories we wish we wrote” is the only text on home page, and it misleads users to believe that its our main content
  • We are having major IE7 problems due to the JS-Kit comment system. This is not to say that s the fault of the script, but it may not be playing nice with whatever other scripts we have going.
  • There is no real “information hierarchy” to our site. This is because 1. There is no CMS, and 2. We are only putting out one article a day.
  • People clicked on videos
  • Our learn/connect/multimedia box was confusing as it was before the article

I’m at work with some changes, but this test essentially proved to me:

  • Videos are the next big thing for news, but they have to be presented inline with the article
  • The image first mindset doesn’t exist. People want to be able to digest information quickly by skimming and text allows that
  • You need a CMS, without question
  • People still like to browse by categories, date, and topics
  • Users aren’t that impressed by links to other related Web sites
  • The cleaner, the better.

The old design (left) vs the new (right):

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World, meet Unami (aka what Sean has been working on for weeks)

What happened?

Remember back when when I said I wasnt getting that Web site I hoped for?

I was only half right. To recap, me and three other interns were in charge of building a Web site. We had a grand scheme for all kind of features that basically boiled down to two catagories: Networking (user profies, comments, etc) and presentation (layout, images, etc).

We sought to build the site on some sort of Content Management System and we evaluated our options which all fell through. This when I made the aforementioned post. After licking our wounds we decided to just suck it up and do it ourselves.

From there I took designs given to me by one of the other interns and hand coded an entire news site from scratch. CMS be damned.

Thus Unami was born

What is so diferent about Unami?

Mainly the article page. Take a look below (you might have to click):

As you can see the article page allows for several layers of digesting the story. The top layer allows the reader to skim just the hed, sub hed, and the story highlights. If that interests the reader they can continue down into the article page.

The box next to the art lists all aspects of the story upfront. The multimedia is listed in bullet points so if the reader is not in the mood to read, they can cherry pick the video. There are also relevant links, because after all, this IS the internet.

The article is separated into tabs so the reader can pick and choose the part of the article they feel is the most interesting/relevant. Of course, at the bottom of each tab there is navigation so if the reader wants to read it in the traditional fashion they can. Within the article we also inked via lightbox the videos and pictures so the reader is not interrupted when they read the story (Warning: the video lightbox seems not to work on Firefox Macs…Im working on it.)

Essentially the crux of the storytelling is choice. The reader can chose what they want to read in a non-linear fashion. We try to visibly separate each aspect of the story much like a newspaper article would with sub heds within the story. We try to be very visual playing heavy on pictures and videos.

Is it perfect? No. But its a testing ground for some of the theories on young readers. Do they read long stories? Do they prefer a video to text? Do they just skim?

The Tech Side

While I have dabbled in HTML and CSS I have never done anything to this scale. I also know absolutely no javascript and only a little bit of Flash. I relied heavily on free tools such as Lightbox, Tabifier, and JS-kit comments. I can’t emphasize enough how grateful I am that these people put out their work for free. I also used the very cheap monoslideshow for the Flash rotator.

I took the easy route and did the whole site in tables. While I did have a working CSS-built article page, it rendered too differently in various browsers (Alas, my CSS skills are still a work in progress).

The worst part about the page is that I have to enter every article in by hand. I have to FTP all of the pictures and copy the URLS. It really makes you miss a WordPress or a College Publisher.

That’s it!

So, there you have it. Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments. Constructive criticism encouraged! (Sorry for all the spelling errors, I typed this in a hurry)