Spokesman-Review Video Journal

Photojournalist Colin Mulvany covers life in the Inland Northwest for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. For the past several months, Colin has been creating online slide shows and short video stories for the paper's website. He's done a variety of digital stories, and they're very good examples of applied media convergence. Check out Colin's Video Journal for a new look at storytelling.

Catholic Media Journal

Nine weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, I was part of a small group of Catholic Journalists who travelled to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans to see and report on the continuing effects of the storm. We experienced devastation beyond our imaginations - and we met many people serving others and the Church under incredible circumstances.

They need our prayers and our support.

We've posted some of our initial impressions at Catholic Media Journal. More links and information can be found at CatholicsRespond.org.

Being at World Youth Day

It's the day before Pope Benedict XVI arrives at World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, and I'm home in Steubenville, Ohio. But I've spent the past hour or two listening to Fr. Roderick podcasting from World Youth Day on the Catholic Insider. I've also been reading posts from World Youth Day by Tim Drake on his blog, Young and Catholic.

Through these two "new media" forms, I have relatively intimate connections with the events in Germany. In a way, I feel as if friends are taking me with them. I'm not confused - I know I'm still in Ohio - but there's a new dimension of communication going on.

It's very cool!

Art Speaks

In late September, 2001, I participated in Visual Edge, a week-long hands on seminar on New Media reporting and production at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. We were divided into 2-person teams and assigned to cover stories in the Tampa Bay area. Using digital photography, digital audio recording and Macromedia Flash, my teammate and I created a story called Art Speaks.

I've remembered our story several times these past two weeks while working on projects for Catholic NGO Voice and wanted to share it. It's a little over two minutes long.

"Art Speaks"

"Current" Thoughts

Last week the new network Current made its debut. Regardless of your political views (Al Gore is arguably the most visible co-founder of Current), this new network is a showcase of new directions for journalism and media. As Steven Rosenbaum wrote in morph, the blog of The Media Center,

Al Gore’s “Current” vision is relevant and important both in its use of content and technology. We need to look past the network’s opening day difficulties. Three years ago, Al Gore looked out on the media landscape and saw a change. As he explained it back then, there were two forces on the horizon that would impact media deeply and profoundly. The first was technology; the tools to make media were going from specialized and expensive to ubiquitous and cheap. The second was an uneasy sense that more and more people were being disenfranchised by media organizations that were talking to themselves rather than to their audiences.

How do I know this is what Gore was thinking? Because he said so - to me and others working in the emerging areas of user-contributed content and audience-empowered media...

For media professionals interested in understanding where media is going, watching the evolution of Current is instructive, maybe even essential. For the staff of Current, embracing the production realities of the nascent user-content universe will be frustrating and at times will seem impossible. But they'll do it, because the alternative is to become another me-too network. Al didn't commit himself to making something average - he's shooting for extraordinary. In today’s media environment, you can't say that about many people.

My vote on Current: Stay Tuned for sure.

I first heard about Current this Spring in a podcast. If you're interested in our media future, at least read Steven Rosenbaum's whole post, then go and look for Current.

Rebuilding Media

Rebuilding Media is a "new blog on the disruptive changes afoot in media by Vin Croildingsbie and Bob Cauthorn," two of the new-media industry's leading thinkers and provocateurs. (Thanks to the Poynter Institute for this link.) While initial postings are spotty (like this blog), it's worth checking out.

EPIC Updated

Journalists Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson have updated their dynamic and intriguing Flash movie looking (back) at the radical changes in journalism between 2004 and 2014, now adding a year - and new/now technologies to their vision. Experience EPIC 2015 to catch a glimpse of our future information environment.

You can find out about the genesis and later development of EPIC in the online article EPIC 2014: The Future is Now from the Poynter Institute.

A Taste of the Future of News

Today the Poynter Institute posted a short article about the future of news - using BBC News' website coverage of last week's bombings in London as an example. The BBC Web coverage included reports from both professional journalists and "citizen journalists" - complete with text reports and photos from both. The author, Steve Outing, concludes:

The point for me is that this combined pro/amateur coverage was better than professional coverage alone. I think this is the future of journalism: a collaboration between paid reporters, and citizens who are intimately involved in a story having the tools to tell their personal stories. Done right -- and BBC News is as close as I've seen to doing it right -- this represents better coverage of a big story.

Citizen Journalism is growing, and one of the good resources about C-J is the weblog I, Reporter.

Our New Media Work at the United Nations

We've taken new media on the road. We're in New York City, attending the second week of the Unted Nations Conference on the Status of Women ("Beijing + 10"). 4 Franciscan University of Steubenville students and I are creating and posting "New Media" reports on the conference, as well as the United Nations General Assembly's vote yesterday to ban all human cloning.

With our audio recorders, laptops and a high-speed internet connection, the team has been busy. designed a Web site - Catholic NGO Voice - as a resource for conference participants and others involved in human rights concerns. Our first "podcast" from the UN conference was posted yesterday, with three more added so far. In addition to links through Catholic NGO Voice, the podcasts are online at the new Voices of Comm Arts Website.

And we've been updating the blog for the UN trip. If we can ever get all our team members and our laptops into our NY "headquarters" at the same time, we'll snap a few pictures to share with you.

Jim Coyle

Podcasting from the Heart of the Roman Catholic Church

Catholic Insider is a podcast by Father Roderick Vonhögen, Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Utrecht, The Netherlands. It's new - but so is podcasting. The first podcast as posted February 23 during a trip to the Vatican. Check out the site at CatholicInsider.com

Blog for UN Trip

In a couple of days about two dozen students and three faculty members from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio will be traveling to New York City to participate in the United Nations Conference on Women: "Beijing + 10." You can catch highlights of the experience at UN Beijing + 10: A Franciscan Perspective.

Home of "Homicide: Life on the Street" in Baltimore. The versatility of this location in Fells Point gave the producers a great choice of settings within and close to the building and harbor. Something like this would be fabulous for our students and faculty! "Homicide..." was an exceptional NBC television series not enough of us watched in the 1990s. It ran for about 6 seasons.

Catholic Radio Art

"Podcasting" is an effective new (about 6 months old) way to distribute audio programs as MP3 files. Using personal computers, people can become their own podcast producers. A small but growing group of people are discussing podcasting as a way to bring Catholic truth to the public in a powerful new way. Here's a message - visionary and encouraging - posted by one of the group's leaders:

As we forge ahead, I think it's important to remind everyone that the Catholic media landscape is littered with the gravesites of former print publications, former TV/radio shows, old Catholic networks (remember the one started by Fr. Fessio several years ago?), etc. The reason why I bring this up is that people are busy today. The secular media has the money and the platforms to get people's attention. They also rely on the most-up-to-date equipment and a great understanding of craft and technique. Hit shows on television and the radio are hits because something about them either appeals to the culture or are really, really well-done or really well-written or well-produced.

As the Catholic media gravesites attest, just having wonderful, well-meaning faithful Catholics who are sincere in spreading the faith is not enough to make their shows/products survive.

How does this relate to podcasting? Tremendously. On the one hand, what podcasting does is make anybody a broadcaster. There is a certain rawness/charm in that that is appealing. However, not everyone is interesting or has the imagination to make a lively, interesting broadcast. A figure I've heard is that there are about 8,000 different podcasts out there. My challenge to all the people from our group who want to podcast is this: radio is the most creative medium. Let's make every one of our podcasts be the most lively, interesting, and creative ones out there. (It goes without saying that they will be faith-filled; that's a given.) If all that occurs, other podcasts will pale in comparison. In other words, what an opportunity to make our faith shine.

So having said all that, how do we make lively, creative podcasts? There are dozens and dozens of ways. Since everyone has different personalities, everyone's way will be different. My role, as I have felt it since first receiving this call about five years ago, is to try to influence future broadcasters to realize that storytelling and using sound in creative ways and crafting segments are keys to making radio more creative and livelier. It's not enough to just talk about the faith because lectures tend to be boring. My role is to expand the boxes that everyone is thinking in so that everyone understands that podcasting doesn't have to be just another version of a typical Catholic radio segment -- a lecture or an unimaginative, impersonal discussion about faith.

I hope everyone -- especially people interested in podcasting -- listens to the following segment: http://streams.wgbh.org/scripts/player.php?launch=MS010405
This segment is crafted and is personal and has brilliant use of sound. If we can offer podcasts that have this kind of brilliance -- and great use of imagination -- we will make our faith sing! Imagine talking about chastity using the same kind of great charm and craft that the lady in the above WGBH "Morning Story" segment did. That kind of craft and imagination are what I want. That's the bar that I want everyone to reach.

So future podcasters: please forgive me if I prod and challenge each of you. In the end, each podcast will be your own. But please be open to me making suggestions. I usually will just throw something out there that I hope will stimulate thoughts in your minds and expand your radio horizons so that you then can make choices you may have not thought of before. Usually, what I will do is ask you to listen to something so you can hear that radio can be more than just a lecture. It can be art. It can be extremely personal. It can be very moving. It can be a great place for storytelling. To me, it is the best place to talk about God because art is about beauty, and we owe God nothing less than to create beautiful ways of inspiring others to think about Him. Let us be dazzling because God is so dazzling. Let us craft, instead of just talk.

Pope John Paul II: What's the Lead?

One of the best columns I receive in my Inbox is written by Terry Mattingly. Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University and is senior fellow for journalism at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. He writes "On Religion," a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

In this week's column, Mattingly asks several religious and mainstream journalists how they would lead - or start - their report about Pope John Paul II. (The lead is the first sentence of a news story.) If you were a journalist - and perhaps you are - what would your lead be?

Arts & Letters Daily

There are ideas to disagree with and others to cheer on the Website Arts & Letters Daily, a jumping off point to hundreds of online articles, audio and video clips, and thoughtful Websites. As listed on the Masthead, topics include philosphy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, and gossip. That's a tall order - and the site delivers.

New material is added 6 days a week, and past items and links are available in archives. After experiencing a few ownership changes, the site is now "A Service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

Now if I can only find more time to enjoy the site...

How Do They Decide What's In the Paper?

A great source of information about media, ethics and emerging media trends is the Poynter Institite. Earlier today, Steve Outing posted an item in Poynter's "E-Media Tidbits" about a new blog giving a newspaper's readers a look inside the paper's news decision-making process. Here's what he wrote:

A Newspaper Blog for TransparencyHere's another innovation from the Ventura County Star in California: a new blog by assistant managing editor for new media and technology John Moore that offers a daily peek into the decision-making process that goes into story choices for the front page (and the rest) of the paper each day. Moore is writing up the daily news budget -- listing and explaining the top stories for tomorrow's edition -- and inviting readers to give feedback and tips on the yet-to-be-published stories. He explains it to his readers this way: "Here's your chance to sit in on those discussions as we look at the stories that are being discussed to run in tomorrow's paper. So pull up a chair and let us know if you agree or disagree with our choices."(Of course, this is going to tip off competing media to what the Star has planned. While that was a newspaper concern in the early days of newspaper websites, we seem to have reached a point where it no longer matters.)Yet another innovative Star blog involves the opinion page. As new media director Howard Owens explains it, instead of running published letters to the editor on the website each day, letters will be posted to a letters blog as soon as they are edited and approved for publication. Comments will be enabled on each letter.Now that's a concept I like: Not only does the Star's website allow blog-like reader comments at the end of stories (here's an example), but even letters to the editor include comments from other readers.

Mostly Media

Welcome!

As a media prof, I've been looking for a good way to share some current ideas and news about the media to students in many of my classes - all in one place. So here we are. And for those of you reading this who aren't among my students, greetings as well.

As we start, I expect that many of the postings here will be about current events behind the scenes - and out front - in modern media.

Feel free to post your comments about the items you see. I'm looking forward to the dialogue.

Jim Coyle
Steubenville, Ohio USA