Live coverage with Ustream

Last week the Westboro Baptist Church came to town. Although we were reticent about giving any more attention to Fred Phelps and his message of hate than absolutely necessary, we had to acknowledge that the Spokane community was planning to turn out in numbers to protest. We had to be there. And in the end, we produced out some solid coverage.

With Westboro’s well-publicized schedule of appearances, it seemed an easy opportunity to try something new with our live coverage at spokesman.com. Drawing from advice I got from Danny Gawlowski at the Northwest Video Workshop, I decided to try Ustream to shoot some live video.

For a trial effort, it went well. I shot live feeds of the counterprotests at Gonzaga University, Whitworth University and Eastern Washington University. Below you can check out the (choppy) replay of the EWU counter demonstration, easily the biggest of the day, then read on for some specs, tips and observations about using Ustream with an iPhone.

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Making timelines with Time Glider

Last week a reporter working on a story about the past and future of Spokane’s downtown YMCA building wandered over to my desk. He wanted to do an online timeline to accompany it. I said sure. (Short attention span? Check out my new Showroom page to see the finished product.)

I had planned to use Dipity, which I’ve heard good things about. But when I created an account, I didn’t see how to manually build a timeline. At least with the free account. I saw a lot of auto-update ability tied into other media accounts (YouTube, Flickr, RSS feeds). But I wanted to add bullets as far back as 1890. I didn’t have a Google account back then.

The reporter had learned about Time Glider while at a Knight Digital Media Center multimedia seminar, so I decided to try it. Check out the result, then let’s go to the bullet points.

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Helpful links about Twitter Lists

If you’re reading this, then, like me, you have been procrastinating on doing your Twitter Lists homework.

It’s not like there’s much to do. Anyone who has figured out Twitter’s web interface will quickly get the hang of making a list.

But because I’ve been tasked with integrating this feature with my workplace account, @spokesmanreview, I thought I’d read up a bit. I saved the best of what I found using Publish2 so that I could easily share the links in this post with the handy WordPress plugin.

My biggest question was about how a journalist could make better use of Lists. I hope you find these links helpful.


Trying out Publish2′s WordPress plugin

publish2I’ve been using the collaborative journalism tools from Publish2 more frequently at work. So when I saw Daniel Bachhuber at Publish2 had authored a WordPress plugin, I wanted to try it. Below are links and tweets that other journalists and I saved today relating to MSNBC’s acquisition of the EveryBlock project.

MSNBC.com Likely Will Add EveryBlock Feeds To Its Local Section In ‘Next Few Months’
paidContent | August 17, 2009

ryansholin: Over at Publishing2.0, I’ve gathered my EveryBlock and YCombinator notes just for you: http://bit.ly/2yArEy
Twitter | August 17, 2009

onemoreryan: Good grief, maybe @everyblock didn’t WANT to be acquired by a newspaper co! Why would they? Even a chain limits locales. MSNBC offers scale.
Twitter | August 17, 2009

michael_duvall: RT @chicagonow Twitter gives props to EveryBlock – Breaking Tweets Chicago http://bit.ly/44ioW
Twitter | August 17, 2009

MSNBC.com Buys EveryBlock as Interest in Local Content Grows | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
All Things Digital | August 17, 2009

Reflections of a Newsosaur: How did newspapers lose Everyblock?
newsosaur.blogspot.com | August 17, 2009

MSNBC.com acquires EveryBlock
blog.everyblock.com | August 17, 2009

EveryBlock acquisition and me
Holovaty.com | August 17, 2009

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Go ahead, embed

July 1, 2009 update: I’m aware that the spokesman.com videos I’ve embedded aren’t playing. I’m in touch with the admin to see what’s happening.

We (as co-workers other than me) debuted a new feature on spokesman.com videos today: video embedding.

If you check out my previous post, you’ll note that the video player looks identical to the one on spokesman.com. Thanks to Brian Immel, it is!

To grab the code on any Spokesman-Review video, just click the <> button in the lower right of the player, click “copy code,” then paste on your blog or elsewhere.

This is a great step forward in sharing the multimedia talents of Spokesman-Review photographers and videographers. We get our content out there, and we get the clicks. But why should you care? Well…

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Visualizing Obama’s speech with Many Eyes

I confess. I only watched President Obama’s address to Congress with half my attention Tuesday night.

The rest went to updating spokesman.com plugging his speech into a website called Many Eyes, an IBM-owned tool that lets you upload data and create visualizations at no cost.

I posted this tag cloud to spokesman.com, but later at home I went back and played some more. This time, I created a word tree showing the context in which Obama used the pronoun “I”. Below you will see Obama’s promises and most personal of statements stand out in stark relief. Recognizing that these events are heavy on rhetoric and light on accountability, I look forward to rereading these in a few months.


Links for December 15th through December 16th

Links for December 15th through December 16th:


Links for November 6th through December 2nd

Links for November 6th through December 2nd:


Links for November 3rd through November 6th

Links for November 3rd through November 6th:


Links for October 29th through November 3rd

Links for October 29th through November 3rd: