Friday was the last day of my extended internship with The Miami Herald. I will miss working with such forward-thinking journalists, so many people who, whether they understand the intricacies of the digital world, really want to know how to make things work.

It’s amazing how close people can become in just a few short months. I feel like I have a family at the Herald: the people I worked with were kind, supportive and enthusiastic.

The most important thing I learned has nothing to do with skill set or journalism in particular. It was learning to work with people who believed in me from the start, who saw what I could do and let me do my job. It’s a heady feeling.

I also learned that, no matter where you are, there are always those silly bureaucratic things that get in the way of progress. I ran into these at The Alligator, but the Herald is no different. Another important lesson.

At The Miami Herald I was given the opportunities to work on projects on my own and in a team. I was able to help people tell stories online. I got to write a little bit. I was even given point on a huge project: building a new Flash package for a video project in AS3.

My internship is over, and I’m starting a new life in New York City. It’s exciting and scary, but with my experience and the people who believe in me, I know I can make it all come together.

Skills

English/Spanish bilingual
CSS, HTML, beginning ActionScript, PHP and JavaScript
Dreamweaver, Flash, Microsoft Office
Audio editing
Windows, Mac OS
AP Style

Positioning

Using the position, margin, padding and width properties in CSS, you can perfectly align divs in a Web site. The biggest problem with this assignment was that Internet Explorer and Firefox handle these properties differently. In order to meet the deadline of the assignment, I used an IE hack that allows conditional statements to accommodate those differences. I later learned how to position the divs without using the hack.

Colors and Navigation

The blue and grey screenshot is the file given to us by the professor. The green screenshot is my modification. Here we learned how to control color with CSS, design links and navigation. While the light green I used for the content background in this example looked fine on my monitor at home, I have since learned that large blocks of text are more easily read against even lighter colors across all monitors.

Style Text with CSS

This was an exercise in using CSS to control the appearence of text by manipulating font families, sizes, weights, line height, letter-spacing and other text properties. General rules for online text: lines of text are easier to read between 50 and 60 characters long, sans-serif is easier to read than serif.

Creative Commons Gainesville

This was the culmination of my first semester of CSS. This project required some research and reporting. For my topic I chose Creative Commons licenses and their application in Gainesville. On the Web site I give a brief overview of the licenses and a number of interviews with people and services who use them.

I spend a lot of time hanging out with my professors and some really cool grad students. It sounds weird, but they are my greatest resources for stuff like, “What’s the best video camera that you can pull stills off of?”, “Why isn’t [insert reference to code here] working?” and other questions.

On Friday, the topic of conversation, while 2 out of the four of us ate lunch, turned to the j-school curriculum. Currently, there are 4 online journalism courses: a CSS/HTML course, an introduction to multimedia course, a Flash course and the capstone, Applied Interactive Newspapers.

Here’s the problem: the CSS/HTML course is required for the Flash course. The intro to multimedia course is not required at all. Given how turned off a lot of students can be by the idea of programming, shouldn’t a) the beginner’s multimedia class be offered first (its a 4000-level class, the other is a 3000) and b) that course be required?

With people like Rob Curley and Howard Owens complaining about close-minded graduates, journalism students need to be exposed to the mindset behind online journalism. This course takes a brief look at many aspects of online journalism, plus the students learn Soundslides, Google Maps, blogging and audio.

I’m just sayin’.

Jared Novack and Mike Swartz talking about taking a print publication online.

“How to make an extra $10,000 at your first job and not get laid off 3 years later” is the title of their presentation.

First step is to establish a Web identity. Look at the flags from established, important newspapers and then check out their online representations. Ew. You already have a print identity. Use the same logo, carry your brand over isntead of creating a new one.

WEB DESIGN IS NOT PRINT DESIGN ON A COMPUTER. amen.

Remember:
hierarchy content placement
teasers and reefers more important
columns and grids
design fundamentals
ads are content too
scannability (provide a buffet of info..I’m hungry!)

Forget:
large amounts of real-estate
large amounts of copy
overdesigned logos

Design it once: modular design

Online typography: Only a few typefaces to work with. Make the best of it with CSS. Check out A List Apart. Typography is what users interact with most on your Web site.

Three tips:
Play with letter-spacing
Play with line-height (approx 130% of font size)
Use font size for hierarchy

Newspaper Sins:
Flashturbation: Hell to make and update, hell to link. But, Flash can do the work for templated packages.
Blog Jammin’: Why are so many newspaper Web sites inundated with blogs? Rife with: non-information, uninteresting and mundane, not current or neglected, leftover stories. When they are extremely targeted, have organized information and are used as an easy portal to content, they can be good. Good idea: crime blog.
Podcasts: enhance content by providing a primary source, don’t just read the headlines.
Video: YOU ARE NOT TV and that’s a good thing.

Use Google Analytics. Use SEO.

Advanced online media was one of my favorite classes, because it finally hit my level of geek. I was honing my CSS skills, learning Flash, and talking about online journalism…all the things that make me excited. Even better, the famous Mindy McAdams was our professor.

I was really nervous about Flash at first, because I can’t draw. One of the things I have difficulty getting my head around is that I don’t have to be able to do everything. Not only is it easy to create basic shapes in Flash, but most newspapers have graphic design artists. I got a lot more comfortable when we hit ActionScript. Even though my programming is at an elementary level, I still recognize the properties of the languages. That made ActionScript fairly easy to understand, even if implementing it still gets buggy now and then.

Our projects involved basic animations which became more involved as we learned the different things Flash can do. Motion, buttons, slide shows, until we had to put together a slide show with audio. The culmination was a web portfolio to be graded on design and scripting practices.

Classes in Review series:

Applied Fact Finding
Reporting
Advanced Editing pt3
Advanced Editing pt2
Advanced Editing
Preview

One of my favorite discussions was about topics that seem not to get the coverage they should.

Some things to think about from my abstract on this discussion:

In political coverage of candidates, journalists are likely to focus on the big dogs, ignoring the puppies. In doing this, the story becomes more about who wins than about the issues being addressed by the various candidates.

Journalists want to give readers what they want to read. That’s not our job though. Our job is to find the flowers and the dog turd, and tell the reader about all of it.

It all goes back to the same idea. No matter how uncomfortable you are with a topic, there’s always someone with a story to tell, someone who will explain to you the angles and issues at hand. Yes, with newsrooms cutting employees all over the country, that means more work for the individual reporters. But papers everywhere are trying to win their audiences back from the blogs and personal Web sites that address the issues that mainstream media can’t seem to grasp. If they are going to succeed, they’d better start hiring people back on, cause they need to cover all of those topics and more.

At least once a day I hear a student in the College of Journalism say somethings along the lines of “I’m going to be a journalist because I can’t do math.”

It makes me shudder, especially when I then read an article that required double-checking figures.

Math and I aren’t friends. I can do just about enough math to keep my margins and padding in CSS from going nuts, and manage my budget. But I know people who can do math and I’m never afraid to make a phone call to find out how to work something out.
And I have a slight advantage: I took 4 years of psychology, which included some intense statistics. (Stats ain’t math.) Check through your local newspaper, and you’ll notice that the majority of articles use just that - and often, badly.

So how do we solve the math problem? I made a cheat sheet of oft-forgotten formulas and rules. It currently exists only in hand-written format, so I can’t share it (writing out formulas on a keyboard is obnoxious). But I recommend that every j-student identify what’s necessary and their own weaknesses and make up something similar. Mine is taped to the wall next to my monitor for easy access.

Classes in Review Series
Preview
Advanced Editing pt 1