Megan Taylor

Combination personality profile/how to? This one needed a little more work.

Gainesville resident finds a hobby in blogging, by Megan Taylor.

My first attempt at a personality profile: The Boss is just like you and me.

A discussion between Newsies members about funding for athletics vs. academics. Led by yours truly. This experiment didn't go as well for me as for some other groups, so check out the blog for more discussions.

I'd really like to see more from the Gainesville Sun.

As RSS feed of community events.

Hyper-local coverage. The next time I see a homeless person while walking home from school, I'm going to interview him (or her, but they tend to be male, I wonder why that is, someone should do a study or write an article about that) and write an article for the Newsies.

There is so much about Gainesville that I don't know because I am fully immersed in the college scene.

I live literally one block east of campus. I go to restaurants, stores and events that are within walking distance (1-2 miles). I only know about The Fest (an annual, mostly punk-rock show that turns Downtown Gainesville into a roiling mass of people, mosh pits and noise for three days in November, and yet no one seems to notice) because I hung out with a music journalist.

I want to know about the holes-in-the-walls, the hidden deli, the place with the best burgers, the cheapest food. What bar suits what personality and which serves the cheapest drinks?

I want to know the town characters. I want a Web site where people post about odd things they've seen or done in Gville. So far, none of the mainstream sites that supposedly cater to this have caught on here.

I've lived here for three years, and I know none of these things.

Have a seat Gainesville, and tell me about yourself.

My profile of the Society of Women Engineers club at the University of Florida.

Another compilation article, this time targeting Spring Break.

Yup, the UF Newsies are no longer on The Undertone. The Gainesville Sun gave us a blog instead.

by Megan Taylor

The UF Newsies are moving from The Undertone to our own blog on the Gainesville Sun site.

This is great, because the site will be geared towards what we write about rather than just filling in space.

However, I'm already seeing some problems with the CMS (content management system).

Rather than uploading a full-sized image into the blog post, the best you seem to be able to do is add a thumbnail to the post which people have to click on to see the full sized image. While videos, podcasts, and photos can be uploaded to the blog, they are not
integrated well with the blog posts themselves.

The photos at least, show up nice and big in the RSS feed. (That's right, we have an RSS feed now!)

I don't know what program is powering the site.

I've seen this a few times now, where the CMS that a company is using just doesn't lend itself to facilitating the use of multimedia. It makes me want to go back to old-school HTML editing. (Not just because it would increase my own marketability.)

I even have trouble with WordPress occasionally, though to be honest some of that is because I haven't had a chance to go through my CSS and PHP with a microscope yet.

Is there a favorite CMS among media companies that makes this easy?

The Pink Plague by Megan Taylor

Whoops, totally forgot this one was already up.

Valentine's Day Gift Ideas by Megan Taylor

Dating Ideas by Megan Taylor

I created a map using Atlas for this article. Due to some limitations of the CMS, the map is kinda small and you have to scroll through it. Here's a better version:

Edit: OK, this is pretty cool. The article I wrote for The Undertone just showed up in my Gainesville Sun rss feed.

Yet another edit: Got the map fixed.

My editor has been pushing hard to get photos along with our stories for The Undertone. And rightly so.

When I was assigned to write an article, (which won't appear for a couple of weeks) the first thing that popped into my head was to use Atlas and embed it on the Web site. It appeared we might have some trouble with the content management system that we're using, so I sent her the code along with some still pictures just in case. I haven't heard back from her yet. But if all goes well, mine might be the second use of Atlas in college media.

Bryan at Innovation in College Media wrote today about the first (as far as he knows) use of the Atlas mapping tool.

What NOT to do with your Computer by Megan Taylor

Last week I was made on-call photographer as well as an editor for the UF Newsies.

This weekend I released my new Web site and blog.

Tomorrow I'll learn how to create graphic type in Photoshop. I'll be writing about that as well as any interesting tidbits that dive-bomb into my lap.

Where were you when UF became National Champions in football?

Megan Taylor: I was enjoying a self-absorbed evening at home until my father called to tell me that the Gators were losing. He was watching the game on TV at the gym. Shrug. I'm the first to say that I'm not a fan of American football. A little later, a friend of the family called to tell me the Gators were winning. Darn. Now I'll be up all night listening to fireworks, car horns and yahoos, instead of getting some desperately needed sleep before my 7:25 a.m. class. Around midnight, I knew the Gators had indeed won the game. Well done. Now shut up out there so I can sleep!

The UF Newsies are officially published to The Undertone, a segment of the Gainesville Sun online. Look for our accounts of the National Championship, plus feature stories about life at the University of Florida.

Edit: UF Newsies now publish on a Gainesville Sun blog.

Last night, one of the topics discussed at the UF Newsies meeting was the future of journalism and newspapers. The obvious concern is that I'll have worked my butt off through college and not be able to get a job when I graduate.

So, what will save the newspaper business? The fogies will always prefer the printed page. But my generation has gotten used to the constant eye-fatigue that comes from reading long documents off a computer screen. We like the pretty pictures and moving images and click-y things. The ability to interact with an environment while sprawled in the comfort of my leather desk chair, where just the slight movement of my index finger can transport me...OK, personally, I miss books.

A new feature that the Newsies will have to accommodate to is multimedia. The editor is actually in my Communications for the Internet class, so she and I toss words like "package," "format," and "multi-media" over the heads of some of the others.

I have to write three articles over Winter Break, to have as stock at the beginning of the semester. These will be accompanied by photos, video and audio where applicable. I could even make a Google Map for one of them.

So the transition from print to Internet doesn't seem like a problem in terms of accommodating stories to a new medium. The problem appears to be in making money off of it. I'm a writer, an observer, a reporter, a dreamer. A business woman I'm not. But I might have to learn to be that, too.

What are you doing that's new and exciting? What ideas do you have for the business of journalism?

5/4/2009 Update: I think it's really funny that I realized the need for business skills three years ago. Not that I bothered to do anything about it. And only now are j-schools adding business/entrepreneurial classes to the curriculum.

After this semester, I'll have finished most of the hardcore writing classes for my journalism major.
After this semester, I won't be writing on a weekly basis anymore.

As soon as those two thoughts slid through the grey matter between my ears, I panicked. I sat down in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the journalism building and tried not to think about the sleepless nights, the incessant butterflies, the paranoia (does that comma need to be there?!), and the feeling of supreme satisfaction at the churning sound of the printer spitting out a decent bit of wordsmithing.

And so I made a decision. I joined the UF Newsies. It appears that it was a decision well-made. The small group produces campus-oriented articles, and as of January will be hooking up with the Gainesville Sun, where I'll get to implement my newly hard-earned AP Style while maintaining my own voice.

After this semester, the writing don't stop.

P.S. I swear the A-grafs were unintentional.

5/4/2009 Update: I wrote for the UF Newsies for a semester and then started working at The Independent Florida Alligator, where I was new media staff and eventually online managing editor. The writing slowed to a molasses crawl, except for on this blog.