Choosing a Content Management System in 2011

Posted on September 7, 2011 by andrew

Technology is changing so rapidly that choosing what new media tools to teach in J-school is no easy task. This is even tougher with publishing software, where a whole semester’s work hinges on selecting the correct content management system. It used to be that raw HTML, Dreamweaver and FTP were the only tools you needed, but everything has changed with the advent of many top notch open source content management systems.

So the question is, what CMS should I teach in the journalism classroom?

I’ve used the “big three” of Drupal, WordPress and Joomla in the classroom setting and each one has its positives. My brief take: the more you think you need to “graduate” from WordPress to something more sophisticated, it keeps getting better and more impressive. Drupal’s best for its community plumbing and customization, while Joomla has sophisticated and mature front-page layout features. Decide which one’s the most important for your project.

At the University of Southern California, for beginning and advanced classes, I’ve stuck with WordPress for most projects, with many of the plugins and themes suitable for most tasks. This is not to say Drupal and Joomla don’t have their appropriate roles, but WordPress is the Willys Jeep of the CMS world — you keep finding it does more and more things well.

But for those who want to dive deeper, there are lots of reasons to consider Drupal and Joomla:

Usability. From an administration viewpoint, WordPress has practically obviated the need for FTP and requiring shell/command line access for maintenance and customization. This is no small feat, as this makes training much easier, while keeping systems more secure. Don’t underestimate the headache in having to teach folks FTP and UNIX basics.

Scalability. Joomla and Drupal were built from the ground up with the ability to gracefully degrade their performance. That is, if the load on a server gets too much, they can automatically shut off intensive features so visitors can at least read the site quickly. If you think that you may need this capability, take a long look at these two.

Community plumbing. This is where Drupal shines, in that it’s a flexible system for building community-oriented features, like collaborative filtering, and even e-commerce. With little effort, you can create policies that allow your audience to each have their own blog streams and allow folks to collaboratively rank content up/down. Think DailyKOS or Digg. In 2004, I taught a class with Dan Gillmor and used Drupal to have get students to create a community blog site to gather contributions from the community. Only Drupal could have done it so easily.
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/chatter-garden-new-hong-kong-online-community-news-site/

Layout and Customization. Joomla has some nice “front page” features right out of the box. I used it in a 2005 project where students covered the WTO Ministerial conference in Hong Kong. You could reshuffle and re-rank stories quickly that re-flowed the front page 3-column layout in a snap.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_print.asp?art_id=8309&sid=5982453

User roles and workflow. Joomla and Drupal have better support for “workflow” and multiple user roles if you need to have a draft-review-publish cycle with different type of editors. (In recent years, though, WordPress MU and other extensions have made WordPress similarly capable in this area).

Themes and extensions. It’s hard to out-do WordPress in this area which has perhaps *too* many to choose from. Drupal sports a number of firms that specialize in customization and programming. In terms of numbers, Joomla is more popular that Drupal though there are many high-end, high-profile sites out there that help boost Drupal’s profile beyond the raw numbers.

We are spoiled for choice and that’s a good thing. Eager to hear how other schools have used these CMS’es.

[This post originally appeared as a response to the ONA Educators group on Facebook.]

WORKSHOP: Video for Reporters (Hong Kong)

Posted on July 13, 2011 by andrew

This Saturday in Hong Kong, I’m running a workshop with Lam Vo, award-winning reporter of the Wall Street Journal, on video storytelling for reporters on the go.

This builds on a session earlier this year on “Backpack Journalism” we did with the Asian American Journalists Association. The goal: in three hours, we turn any newbie into an effective video storyteller who can start creating pieces right away.

Feel free to pass this along to any reporters or editors in Hong Kong who are interested, as slots are filling up.

Video for Reporters: Adding the Visual Dimension
Date: Saturday, July 16, 2011
Time: 10am – 1pm

Venue: Global Lounge, G/F Swire Building, The University of Hong Kong
Fee: HK $200 (or HK $100 for AAJA members, FCC members and JMSC alumni)
Instructors: Andrew Lih, University of Southern California and Lam Vo, Wall Street Journal
Registration and payment can be made online:
http://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/e?c_regform.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=17?108.

Overview:
In the digital age, reporters are increasingly asked to construct video and multimedia stories on top of their print work. How can one become an effective visual journalist while navigating this new work load? Learn how to manage reporting in the field with this quick introduction to visual storytelling using simple and professional equipment. Instructors Andrew Lih and Lam Vo, have worked with reporters and students in the US and Asia on quick, effective strategies for visual storytelling.

1. Overview of visual storytelling
2. Why video: examples and case studies
3. Live demo: shooting a video story in five steps
4. Transfer and management of media
5. Strategies and checklists for the field
6. Practical tips on gear and kits

Who Should Attend:
Experienced reporters, but beginners in video. Even those with some video experience but looking for streamlining and becoming more efficient will find the session useful.

Outcomes:
Attendees will understand the basics of visual literacy and be able to effectively shoot, report and script short videos stories using the BBC Five Shot method. Takeaways include a field checklist of how to produce these stories in the field.

What to Bring:
Attendees are encouraged to bring any existing audio-visual equipment and kits (amateur or professional) for advice and hints on how to use them.

Egypt: Crowdsourcing Speak2Tweet Transcription

Posted on February 2, 2011 by andrew

With the Internet and mobile blackout in Egypt, a lot of attention has been drawn to the Google project Speak2Tweet, which allows people to call a phone number and leave a message. That audio file is then put up on SayNow, and the page is Tweeted out as @Speak2Tweet.

I’ve collected 1070+ of these messages since it started, and plotted how often they occur on a chart.

What’s fascinating is that onlookers decided it wasn’t enough. So as a grassroots project, Twitter user @BaghdadBrian started a public Google Spreadsheet, and asked for volunteers to catalog all the audio messages, and transcribe them. His request got tweeted, and retweeted.

People came, to the tune of 50 or so simultaneously reading, listening and writing entries. It was so popular, it overwhelmed the limits of Google Docs. (I know, I helped to automate the importation of Speak2Text entries, and things got very sluggish.).

Other volunteers then translated those messages into English (and French, among others). After moving to more restricted access, the results of this crowdsourcing is now served up on http://egypt.alive.in.

Transcripted message from @Speak2Tweet on egypt.alive.in

Appreciate for a moment the chain of software and human effort that has been slapped together within two days to accomplish this:

Egyptian -> plain old telephone line -> voice message -> digital recording -> SayNow web site -> @Speak2Tweet twitter feed -> scraper -> Google Spreadsheet -> human transcription -> human translation -> human double checking -> exported to CMS -> appears on web site.

Open source software, APIs and free tools have made this possible. But even more important, crowdsourcing and collaboration are now part of the standard toolkit, and it’s amazing to see how quickly this has become part of our “new media literacy,” such that within hours, it can be harnessed for human rights and crisis response.

(For more on this ongoing trend, please do visit the awesome CrisisCommons project)

Rutgers Student Suicide

Posted on October 7, 2010 by andrew

I’m on the board of the Student Press Law Center, and this excellent commentary from its executive director was published in USA Today in response to the Rutgers University student suicide.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/letters/2010-10-06-letters06_ST_N.htm

The tragic loss of an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, driven to suicide by a voyeuristic online video, has the nation clamoring for new methods of teaching online civility.

But there is already a highly successful program that trains young people to differentiate between fact and rumor, verify information before they repeat it, take responsibility for the consequences of their words, respect opposing points of view, and weigh the legal and ethical considerations before damaging a person’s reputation. That program is called “journalism.”

When everyone with Internet access is a publisher, school authorities should be stampeding to ensure that all students are taught the journalistic fundamentals to publish responsibly. Far too many are doing the opposite.

Journalism teachers are being driven from the classroom — fired, demoted or transferred in retaliation for their students’ uncomfortably candid journalistic work. Administrators who value the PR illusion of a controversy-free school over the quality of education are creating a hostile climate that makes participation in journalism intolerable for all but the meekest and most compliant students — just when the values conveyed by journalism education are desperately needed.

State officials in Kansas are defunding scholastic journalism programs on the grounds that newsgathering is not a marketable career. They are right. Ethics, responsibility, accuracy and fairness are not résumé credentials; they are essential life skills for membership in a civilized society, which journalism teaches effectively.

–
Frank D. LoMonte, Esq.
Executive Director
Student Press Law Center

What Hath Wikipedia Wrought?

Posted on August 6, 2010 by andrew

At Wikisym 2010, I delivered the closing keynote to a great set of academics and researchers from around the world.

It was also the first public venue where I described a new project I’m starting called WikiFactCheck, which attempts to bring the culture of reliable sources, verifiability and citations set by Wikipedia to the task of fact checking news outlets and sources. This will start with focusing on the US “Sunday Morning talk show” circuit, a cause taken up prominently by Jay Rosen and projects such as PolitiFact and Meet The Facts. But the effort can be extended to other domains, such as political debates, speeches and briefings, and I look forward to seeing the brainstorming around this.

See the following for the complete presentation, and feel free to visit the wiki above and contribute your ideas. I will be giving a brief talk at AEJMC in Denver, Colorado about the WikiFactCheck project.

What Hath Wikipedia Wrought? Crowds remaking the news

View more presentations from fuzheado.

Google Cheeky in China?

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Andrew

Today, Google made a cheeky move on its China site (Google.cn) in order to preserve its domain name and ability to operate in the PRC.

As you may recall, in January Google decided they no longer wanted to comply with censorship guidelines in China and started to redirect visitors to their China “content” sites to servers in HK, where there are no censorship restrictions. In that move, the search, photo and news sites became hosted on unfettered servers at google.com.hk, while others like music and maps kept their locations on mainland servers.

On the Official Google Blog, Chief Legal Officer David Drummond was rather frank about their recent move:

…it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.

Now it’s important to note that until this move, Google.cn traffic has been a “redirect,” meaning visitors to www.google.cn were sent automatically to www.google.com.hk en masse. Clicks in Google’s top bar to music and maps would go back to google.cn, but it was by default an HK site. That is likely what Drummond was referring to as being “unacceptable” to the PRC authorities.

Today, Google changed how this works in order to comply with the “letter” of what the authorities wanted, even if it wasn’t keeping in the spirit:

…instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking … them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

A number of folks have asked whether this is a backtrack by Google on their January announcement.

Not really.

It shows Google is interested in keeping their presence in China, especially when there is much potential profit in entertainment and tool-orientedinformation services (translation, mapping) that don’t run afoul of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra.

But it is not much of a change from their earlier stance, and all Google is willing to do is to put up an intermediate landing page as a facade. And when I say facade, it truly is one.

Google.cn facade

The front page of Google.cn may look like a normal search page, but it’s actually a large button. Once you click on any portion of the screen it brings you to the old redirected page at Google.com.hk.

It’s hardly going to make PRC authorities happy, even though Google.cn is no longer just a redirect, and does technically return a page from a PRC server to the web surfer.

In fact, it can be seen as the least amount Google could do to comply with ICP guidelines. It will be interesting to see if it gets renewed.

Grand Canyon Pay Phone

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Andrew

Curiously enough, in the last day more people have inquired about my using a pay phone from the Grand Canyon to do a public radio interview than about the fate of Wikipedia.

The background: I got a call from LA’s public radio station KCRW on Thursday asking if I could participate in discussion about Wikipedia’s pending changes feature. This was while I was on a five day getaway, and just a few hours before driving into the cell phone blackout void known as northern Arizona. Everything from Fredonia (near the Utah border) down to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is pretty much a cell phone black hole for AT&T, and I suspect pretty much every carrier. Also, radio producers crave land lines for their reliability and general quality over mobiles.

Locals confirmed there was no telecom whatsoever (wired or wireless) between where I was at Jacob Lake (a small outpost/lodge) and the precious pay phones run by the National Park Service 44 miles away. I had to cover that distance in an hour, half of which I could go 70 mph, but the rest a curvy and hilly affair that featured deer and cow crossing warnings.

View Grand Canyon North in a larger map

Driving slightly on the edge of responsibility, I made that distance in roughly 50 minutes. We pulled into the parking lot of the Grand Lodge, grabbed any staff member I could find and asked if they had pay phones that could receive calls. They didn’t know, but pointed to a bank of phone booths.

It was 20 minutes to show time, and I didn’t know how I’d get on air.

AT&T, to their credit, had at the very least a weak circle of cell coverage around the lodge, but it would have been awful for radio broadcasting.

I went into the phone booth, noted the 928 area code number on the pay phone, dialed it from my cell phone and voila — it rang. I texted the number to the KCRW producer, and 15 minutes later, there was a ringback and I was on the radio show.

It worked. And after a spirited discussion on Wikipedia, I took twenty paces and had this beautiful view from the lodge.

Another twenty paces, and I had this panorama.

As I told Warren Olney on the show: “Never underestimate the value of a landline,” especially in Northern Arizona.

Wikipedia Debate on KCRW

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Andrew

On Friday, I was on Los Angeles KCRW’s To The Point radio show talking about Wikipedia’s latest “Pending Changes” move and what it means for the encyclopedia’s future. Joining me were Julia Angwin of the WSJ, William Beutler who writes The Wikipedian blog, and Lee Siegel cultural critic.

The short story: pending changes for English Wikipedia is a modified version for a what has been known as “flagged revisions.” The latter is a technical feature where not all edits to Wikipedia show up immediately, and requires a more experienced user (autoconfirmed, administrator, or otherwise) to approve an edit before it is displayed to the “public” of casual, not-logged-in users. This has already been turned on for all of German Wikipedia for over a year now with considerable success on their side. However, de.wikipedia.org is also a different beast with much more stringent standards (dare I say, academic bent) for articles. While English Wikipedia has over 3 million articles, German has just over 1 million. As a collective, the German Wikipedians have decided not to include the reams of virtual pages dedicated to contemporary pop culture, borderline celebrity and the minutiae about science fiction characters you see in English Wikipedia. For the German speakers, flagged revisions works for them, as it has upped their quality to engage with governmental and academic institutions. The English Wikipedia does not have such a sterling reputation, though folks like Liam Wyatt, Wikipedian in Residence at the British Museum, are starting to change this.

English Wikipedians, being a more diverse and rancorous bunch, could not come to consensus on a big sweeping move like flagged revisions. Instead, a smaller two month trial was approved which will allow certain articles to be treated in the “flagged revisions” way. Originally called “flagged protection” and perhaps too confusing for outsiders, it was relabeled “pending changes.” In the trial period, no more than 2000 articles will be designated to use the feature, and the results will be evaluated.

In brief: my view is that the characterization of “pending changes” is relative. Julia Angwin, who I think is a great tech journalist, is of the opinion it represents an overall more closing-off of Wikipedia, and the move is an affirmation of a more conventional process that created traditional encyclopedias. On the other hand, folks like Jimmy Wales have regarded this as opening up — instead of having articles locked completely using full-protection, or to limit editing to existing registered and “aged” users by semi-protection, pending changes gives a way for anyone and everyone to participate, even if those edits are not completely viewable until later. Relative to full protection, it’s more open. Relative to the Wild West wiki way, it’s more closed. It will be interesting to watch this experiment in action, even if folks involved don’t know exactly how to measure success or failure.

In addition to talking about the new feature, there is a rather vigorous debate between Beutler and myself with Mr. Siegel.

You can listen to the show at KCRW’s site.

Crowds, Collaboration, Content and Curation Remaking the News

Posted on May 22, 2010 by andrew

Here’s my presentation at Columbia Business School’s Transitioned Media conference where I talk about “The Wikipedia Revolution:Crowds, Collaboration, Content and Curation Remaking the News.”

Transitioned Media

The new concept I’m introducing is a new way to look at content and curation, and this graphic attempts to distinguish between roles done by the mainstream media outlets/government, and the “crowd” at large. Hope to followup with a post soon with more details.

Understanding Content and Curation

NPR’s advanced HTML Beta

Posted on April 24, 2010 by andrew

This week I’m at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at Univ. of Texas-Austin, an event that’s been a great source of professional and academic dialogue regarding digital journalism.

One of the neat demos was from NPR’s Kinsey Wilson, who showed their iPad-specific web site. If you visit npr.org with the iPad Safari browser, you’ll get redirected to their beta site created with “HTML5″ – npr.org/tablet (though Dave Stanton of U of Florida points it it’s really XHTML 1.0 Transitional. You don’t need an iPad to see it: use Safari for Mac/Windows or Firefox 3.5+ to visit that URL directly)

Without plugins, they’ve added an audio clip playlist manager that’s pegged to the bottom of the screen. On a landscape laptop screen, it looks a bit big and intrusive.

On a portrait-screen iPad with high pixel density, it’s very nicely sized and placed.

Wilson said the NPR team took about three weeks to finish the project. When the iPhone first launched, Steve Jobs famously said you don’t need apps, since rich web content is all you need. We know now Jobs changed his mind, but NPR is showing how you can make a web page feel very “app-ian” with some simple HTML additions.