A week ago, I was assigned the task of building the story package for a series on mortgage fraud. This had been in the works at The Miami Herald for quite some time, and the investigative team was finally ready.

When we found out that Congress was working on legislation relevant to the series, the package was fast-tracked. I had one week to build this thing.

It launched yesterday morning and if I do say so myself, it’s wicked cool. We have profiles and documentation for 4 major offenders, a flash graphic, a couple of static graphics, a slide show and a video, in addition to all the stories.

I even got a credit line in the footer!

I learned a lot about coding fast - quick and dirty sounds good, but it pays to take just a few extra minutes to do it right. It was also a good team experience. It’s so much harder to put things together when no one know what anyone else is doing, it almost justifies meetings! (Except that’s why we have instant messenger and Twitter.)

And guys, I forgive you the millions of revisions and changes. Everything turned out great.

Check out how they did the story.

So what’s next? I have a bunch of different projects on my plate, but I’ll give you a few hints: Video, Flash, ActionScript 3, XML, Twitter, database, Django, Python. Not another word! You can’t drag it out of me!

Miami Herald ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos asked readers “what content the paper should emphasize in an era of staff cuts.”

Yesterday the Herald published selected responses.

Some of my favorites:

The Miami Herald has almost no local content. The paper gets my highest marks for its recent excellent coverage of housing, public transportation and other major issues. I continue to subscribe because of The Herald’s investigative journalism. But there has been almost no coverage of Hallandale where I live and work, nor of many other cities in South Florida.

I realize that my website, Business Buzz, is all about covering an old-fashioned beat — in this case, chambers of commerce meetings. But I actually get out of the office and go to meetings, and talk to a lot of people. The Herald should be covering these meetings — they are your advertisers and potential advertisers.

I’d love to see the company save all the fluff, like that awful People Page or the 5-Minute Herald, for its online version. Just give us the news.

In a community as diverse as the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area, there are many ethnic groups, but The Herald continues to be too Cuba-centric. If you want to develop a future readership, then start appealing more to the other groups. These include Jamaicans, Haitians, Central Americans, Colombians, Venezuelans, other South Americans and the white middle class that continues to move into the area.

These are things I’ve been hearing about the Herald since before I cared about journalism or the news.

One of the good things is that a lot of the responses mentioned in-depth investigative stories. These can be the hardest to do under budget and staff cuts, but they are also the best stories.

I should also note that only 2 or 3 of the published responses mentioned the Web site. What does that mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe the sample is bad. Maybe I should go find Mr. Schumacher-Matos and ask to dig through all ~175 responses.

Well, my first project is live! The Health section of the Miami Herald’s Web site has been redesigned.

My contribution is that slick-looking sidebar on the right. I had some help from Stephanie Rosenblatt for the graphics, and of course she put together the Doctor Sleuth. (They are using Caspio and I have been too busy for training!) The tabs on the results pages are mine though.

There’s some more projects on the table for the Health section, so hopefully I’ll get to be more involved over the next few weeks.

I finished working on a little PHP script today, with Rob Barry’s help, that queries, parses and geocodes some data. Hopefully we’ll have that into the DataSleuth system soon.

So last week I got one of my projects to the “show it to the boss” point. Supposedly it’s going live tomorrow. I will link then.

My story has been postponed until “official action has been taken” whatever that means. Oh, well.

I have 2 other projects to finish this week, plus a couple of long-term data projects, and the grapevine tells me I’m getting a new assignment today. This is good, cause I’m used to high-pressure deadlines and that hasn’t been the case so far.

Over the weekend I purchased Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson by UF’s very own Bill McKeen, as well as The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right, by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

I can’t wait for these to come in. I really want to continue to learn different programming languages and frameworks. My internet access at home right now consists of finding an open wireless network on my street and sitting outside with the mosquitoes, so some books will be really helpful.

If anyone wants to recommend other books or online resources, please do!

I gave my impressions from the first day or so of work, but a full (sort of) week has given me more time to get acquainted with my new job.

I’ve worked on several projects, thought none of them are quite ready to go live yet. I’ll link to them when they do. But so far the work has been pretty easy and well within my skills. I was surprised at how much Flash I remember, even though I haven’t touched the program in over a year.

I’m also working on a story for next week! I pitched this one myself, and while its nothing big, I’m happy to be writing. My greatest fear is being pigeonholed into the programming room.

I’m supposed to see about some database work in the next week or so, which will be something new to add to my arsenal. I know how databases work and how to work with them, but I’ve never actually built one.

On the side, I’m continuing to work through Django tutorials and plan on buying some books soon. I’m also in the market for a job after my internship is over.

I’ve got a couple of posts coming up that should be more stimulating, but I’ve been too busy to really organize my thoughts yet. Here’s hoping I can get one or two out next week.

So I’m a day and a half into my internship at The Miami Herald. I am a “multimedia intern.”

It’s a little gloomy around here, but most of that is rain. People are starting to make jokes about the cuts and motivation still seems high. Then again, I didn’t see much of the newsroom before Monday, so I don’t really have any basis for comparison.

I was afraid of the changes I would face in moving from a managerial position at a small paper to a flunky at a huge paper. I shouldn’t have worried. Even though the newsroom here is enormous, the online group is pretty small. I’m a medium-sized fish in this room.

Yesterday I built a little sidebar for a page on the site and today I’m working on a page for a series of stories. So far I’m being handed assignments and then pretty much left to myself to get them done. Just the way I like to work.

My plans for this summer just got more interesting.

I got an e-mail yesterday notifying me that I could do a photojournalism study abroad program in Berlin! I’ve wanted to go on this trip for some time, but it was always full when I got around to checking on it. This time I got lucky; it was my last chance because I am graduating this semester.

I’ve been to Spain and Costa Rica, and my parents took me to Japan when I was 1. Here’s to another ridiculously long flight.

During the week after I get back from Berlin, I’m moving back to Miami. Hopefully, the people my parents leased the house to when they moved to Costa Rica will be out by then. I’ll be attending the IRE Conference and then starting my internship at The Miami Herald.

After that, who knows? But life after college is looking better and better.

In a game of “pass the quote,” I heard that my friend Stephanie Rosenblatt, from the Miami Herald, said this:

The success of the online communicating with the public, serving the public and becoming successful, will succeed or fail based wholly on how well people inside the newsroom communicate with one another (paraphrased)

Too true. The problem is that in my experience, communication in the newsroom sucks. We’re journalists, it’s our job to communicate, but we can’t do it with each other.

And the burden falls on the online departments to communicate and to be visible in everything they do, because the rest of the newsroom doesn’t really understand what it’s all about.

Just something to think about. How can online journalists make themselves a part of the newsroom society? How do you show progress and achievement? If you do not make your work visible, how will your colleagues know what is possible?

Classes end next week. That means I have 8 days to shoot a video, edit 3 videos, put together a Soundslides project, write two papers, and take 2 exams. Whew!

So why am I wasting time blogging?

Well, I’m really excited because I’m going to do a 12-week multimedia internship at The Miami Herald this summer. I’m very happy, but very nervous. Will they ask me to stop blogging? Will I do a good job? Will moving back in with my parents be a bad idea?

More thoughts on this after the rush. Winter break is going to be wonderful.

…thank you for curing my insomnia.

Check out this awesome turkey video from onBeing.

This was my first real Thanksgiving since I moved to Gainesville. Lovely. Good company and good food, since I didn’t have to cook. :) Got sent back with pounds of leftovers.

It was accompanied by a trip to The Miami Herald. Black Friday makes for a slow news day, but it was kinda cool to be there on the anniversary of Jose Varela’s breakdown. Security was hardcore.

The Herald is working on some really fantastic projects and Rick Hirsch, multimedia editor, gave me a tour of the near-empty newsroom. I sat in on a budget meeting as well: How many different ways can you write the same Black Friday story? A good trip.