Although I didn’t have the chance (or the $$) to go to FOWA (Future of Web Apps), I had a great time last Sunday at BarCampMiami. For those unfamiliar with the concept of BarCamp (and no, it doesn’t involve mixing cocktails for tips), check out the wiki here. They sum it up like this:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Greg Linch (@greglinch), student at the UM School of Communications, worked with BarCampMiami coordinator Alex de Carvalho (@alexdc) to bring specific sessions focused on news innovation tailored for us journos who were in the house. There were quite a few of us. I got to meet Twitter friends Danny Sanchez (@dannysanchez) of the Orlando Sentinel and Journalistopia and Mathilde Piard (@mathildepiard), Columbia J-School grad and web editor at the Palm Beach Post as well as a slew of other tech-minded smart people.

One of my favorite presentations came from Rick Martinez (@digx) of FIU about evolving news. “There is not a newspaper industry. There is a news industry” rang very true. Not sure why we cling to the print product with our cold, dead hands. That’s a different post.

Rick Martinez of FIU and Greg Linch of the University of Miami

I spent yesterday and today (Wednesday and Thursday) as a fellow at the WeMedia Conference at the University of Miami. My job as a volunteer was to twitter the breakout sessions with the #wemedia hashtag as a way for people who couldn’t make it to track all the good ideas being tossed about. If you follow me on Twitter (@malcolli), you can see a rundown of a few of the breakout sessions.

It’s amazing to see people from so many different types of organizations (Journalism, non-profits, startups) collaborating on how to use media to innovate and better their futures. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

Brian Storm of MediaStorm

David Liu, CEO of TheKnot.com

The #WeMedia buzz began almost instantly around the Twitterverse in the morning intro session as awards were given to Game Changers in the realm of advancing media. As a political nerd, I was a tad (ok, maybe more than a tad) devastated that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe wasn’t in physical attendance to accept his award. Twitter, ZeFrank and others were honored. Go to the web site for a better rundown.  The twitterers in the room started to slowly emerge and the convo took off.

Because I was there as a volunteer twitterer who was encouraged not just to tweet a play-by-play but to add my voice to the mix, I made a point not to hold back. Granted, the caliber of participants was very high and I wasn’t sure how much value they would see in tweets from a 22-year-old recent college grad 3 months into her first newspaper gig, but I found that the presenters appreciated the instant feedback and honesty.

During a social media session with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit), formerly of AOL and Yahoo Personals and fellow Twitter-holic, she was using her BlackBerry to scan our tweets since she knew that some of us were actively tweeting the session. Hats off to her. Perfect example of a how Twitter is a tool and not just a silly site for sharing what you had for lunch. I sent out a tweet saying I thought the session was a little too basic and she jumped right in and got the ball rolling to get to the higher-level stuff (like Facebook Connect, which I’m trying to get really familiar with).

Susan Mernit (left) and Rebecca Watson of Real Girls Media (right)

On the downside, I had over 200 tweets over the two-day event, which wouldn’t normally be on the downside except that I do have some followers who I bet were completely overwhelmed and annoyed by a long stream of #wemedia, #wemedia, #wemedia.

This makes me rethink an issue that came up a few months ago about whether or not to split up my tweets into two accounts; one for Mallory Colliflower, the conference-attending working professional and one for Mallory Colliflower, the chick who checks icanhazcheezburger multiple times a day, swears from time to time, likes to share music and stay in touch with friends.

More importantly, because of the buzz and conversation about the WeMedia conference we were able to generate on Twitter, #WeMedia trended in the #2 spot twice during the conference. Quite a feat if you want people to be talking about what you are doing and saying.  I managed to be the top trendsetter for the #WeMedia hashtag and had the second-highest number of retweeted posts, behind Tom Kennedy (@tomkennedy), multimedia editor and consultant from Arlington, Virginia.  More stats here.

Was my mission accomplished?  I give a confident ‘yes.’ Between Greg, Mathilde and another Columbia graduate Veronica Zaragovia (@verozaragovia), we managed to provide a service to the media-minded who couldn’t make it to the conference as well as meet and connect with people who had similar and differing thoughts on what was going on in front of all of us. In regards to that, the bloggers over at the WeMedia page have done an excellent job summarizing and analyzing all of the discussion that took place. I won’t try to duplicate what they’ve already done so well, so head there for more.

Big ‘thank you’ to the organizers of the event, particularly Chad Capellman (@chadrem), WeMedia’s web producer and to Greg Linch for inviting me to join the team. I was thrilled to meet all of the people that I did and hope to hear more from and about them in the future.

After a long and patient wait spent folding clothes at Banana Republic, ladies and gentlemen, I have landed a job. Actually, I’ve been at said job for about a month now and every week gets more and more exciting and challenging. You know all the stories and photos and videos that are posted on your favorite newspaper’s Web site? Well there isn’t some robot there posting all that content.  Computers aren’t doing it either. Producers who monitor, edit and select content make sure things on those Web sites are fresh and newsworthy. Luckily, in the state of this economy and the state of the industry of journalism as a whole I can be proud, thankful and relieved to call myself an online producer at the Miami Herald. Gotta give mad props to my classmate and good buddy Adrian Ruhi who also works there who recruited me for the spot.

I’ve learned a ton so far working with the McClatchy content management system and tweaking my news judgement, which is what I’m trying my best to work hardest on. My boss, Shelley Acoca, has been coaching me to put myself in people’s shoes. “What are people thinking and talking about today?” That has been helpful so far. I even polled some peeps on Twitter to see if they thought news judgement was learned or innate. Got some confidence-boosting answers that mine could improve over time if I work at it.  I think I just need to find my niche. Having control over something so public and wide-read is a little jarring at first, but networking with other online producers on Twitter and getting to know everyone in the newsroom is making me more comfortable.

So that’s the 4-1-1. It’s likely that if you’re reading this you found it via Twitter, but if you didn’t, you’re much more likely to keep track of my happenings there (@malcolli).

We’re also working to tweet more from our Miami Herald twitter account (@miamiherald) so follow us to stay on top of your South Florida local news.

It’s amazing what can happen when you tell a story different ways. Ben Jervey, reporter for Good Magazine, knows that the United States’ rail system isn’t much to write home about compared to it’s international counterparts. But why? He jumped on the Amtrak for the 3,397-mile journey from New York’s Penn Station to Oakland, California to find out what America’s rails are up to these days. With a mix of still photographs, video footage and a written story that reads like a personal journal, “Train in Vain” shows, at minimum, the dynamic capabilities of a good ol’ American travel story.

(photo by Amy Stein via GoodMagazine.com)

None of us who know Brendan will ever forget the moment when we heard about his accident. The tale of the ricocheting cars colliding on our familiar South Florida highway and the nightmare that began to unfold, and continues to evolve now, three years later.

Most of us remember Brendan this way -

Brendan’s wonderfully loving and dedicated family now cope with rehabilitating a son that is lost inside his own damaged brain, the result of a crash that broke bones in his face and leg and caused one of his lungs to collapse.  Brendan now lives in a nursing home in Ft. Lauderdale and remains in a vegetative state, or “waking coma.”

Sun Sentinel reporter Tom Collie and photographer Susan Stocker documented the day-to-day struggles that Brendan’s family deals with by compiling their information in a multimedia package to accompany the print story that ran as a special report in Sunday’s paper.  The package contained a cleanly edited five-minute video overview of Brendan’s story, with footage of his rehabilitation, home-video of Brendan before his accident and interviews with several friends and family members.  The most touching one comes from his mom, a cherished friend of the community surrounding my high school (everyone loves Mrs. James), who has remained by her son’s side to this day.  Readers can put themselves in her shoes by reading through the archive of e-mails she has sent over the years, providing detailed updates on Brendan’s condition.  They also included a click-through Flash diagram of different ways the brain can be damaged from excessive force from traumatic events like car accidents.

It would be difficult to remain un-biased in a critique of this package.  I was so pleased at the job the Sentinel did with the story of such a beloved friend.  By including the various multimedia features they did Brendan justice by using the right tools to tell his story in the most complete way.

(photos by Susan Stocker)

I haven’t picked apart one of these online packages in a while and I think it is a useful process because it constantly reminds me, as both a user and aspiring creator, what works and what doesn’t.

Today we look at what CNN calls an interactive peice that highlights certain average Joes who have made a name for themselves by using communication technology, social networking and blogging to have a voiced impact on politics. There are seven tabs with the names of people that were interviewed at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on June 23 and 24, and clicking on one of the tabs brings up the person’s videotaped soundbyte on the right, with a pulled quote from that soundbyte in text on the left.

What Works

Let’s start on a positive note. It’s a nice idea that CNN’s i-reporters have the means and equipment to take video cameras to events like this and capture the spirit of the discussions there. It was nice to see what Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com looks like in person, and I thought the best responses came from both him and from Jay Rosen, a journalism professor from NYU and blogger at PressThink.org. I could be biased in that statement, for obvious journalism connections, but the two professors had the least repetitive and most thought-provoking responses.

What Needs Work

From a technical standpoint, the consistency in the video player was absent. Sometimes the “play” button wouldn’t turn into a “pause” button and I wouldn’t see a moving playhead along the progress bar. Personally, I like to know once I hit play how long the video will run, and this sometimes happened and sometimes didn’t. This was a minor problem, probably just a tiny glitch in the button script somewhere, but a tad frustrating nonetheless.

I had a small problem with this section of the peice being called “Interactive.” As we were taught in several online journalism courses by professor Mindy McAdams, interactivity requires input and output. A user can put in some sort of information or query in order to get information in return. Using a database to feed a map on crime in your neighborhood after you input your address is interactive. Seven video clips, while considered multimedia, falls very short of any interactivity. Perhaps their logic was that the i-reporter had to interact with the interviewees in order to record the video, but that would be a stretch. I’m not arguing that the content is bad or unnecessary, just that it’s mislabelled.

Thoughts?