Tag Archive for 'flickr'

SND Las Vegas report: Embracing the social narrative

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on September 11, 2008
in Blog, robbmontgomery and workshop
. 0 Comments


Slide from Andrew DeVigal’s SND session in Las Vegas. Andrew is the multimedia editor of The New York Times.

Photo by Ashley Dinges

This photo by San Jose Mercury News designer, Ashley Dinges, is perhaps one of the most compelling statements from among the almost 600 images posted to Flickr and tagged “sndvegas.”

I admit that I haven’t studied every last bowling party photo (Below are more photo galleries from SND staff bloggers) but this one from Ashley is a keeper.

Why? If you want to see where the future is heading - study these intersections closely. Andrew’s graphic is telling on many levels. It is good at focusing on pro journos pushing content out there smartly but I can’t see any evidence of enabling what I call the “Social Narrative” (Community news tips, comments, UGC, ratings, embedding, et all). The narrative elements that I strongly believe also must be integrated in any new thinking regarding integrating newsroom workflows. I talk a little bit more about this after the video segment.

Redesign video report

I filmed a lot of material in Las Vegas with the hopes of editing them into non-deadline pieces. I have interviews, for example with the editor-in-chief of a wildly successful newspaper that is published in Moscow, Russia . . . and an interview with a student who won an internship in the famous SND INTERN competition.

The footage from those upcoming films are cool because they were produced away from the casino. One filmed at Red Rocks Canyon National Park and the other - on the Las Vegas Strip.
So what? Well, I wasn’t planning producing a fast film to Web to report any breaking news.
I wasn’t until some spot news happened. Jonathon Berlin, Design director of the Chicago Tribune splashed a few pages of the redesigned newspaper on screen at the end of a talk he was giving about planning election coverage.

Reporting this breaking news event reminds me of the time when I was sitting next to IFRA guru Dietmar Schantin in the Kremlin in 2006 when a Bolshevik protest erupted 30 feet from me just as Vladmir Putin was about to speak.
In other words, grab your small camera, turn it on and hope for the best. That’s where online video journalism can shine.

Sneak peek at Chicago Tribune redesign

Find more videos like this on Visual Editors

Moscow protest (from June 2006)

Embrace the social narrative

And now more photo galleries from visual editors who photo-documented their experiences from SND Las Vegas. This is a strong visual narrative, but I also trust makes the point that the social narrative (the participation of the audience) must be part of graphic and every future session on the ‘future of journalism.’

Martin Gee

Bridget O’Donnell

Ashley Dinges

Jim Michalowski

Colin Bridge

Scott Goldman

Kenney Marlatt

Matt Erickson

Tyson Evans

Tim Ball

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A million reasons to love the Library of Congress

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on January 20, 2008
in robbmontgomery
. 1 Comment


[Germany Schaefer, Washington AL (baseball)] (LOC)

This digital image represents the millionth item scanned for the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

This photo shows Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer (1877-1919), one of the most entertaining characters in baseball history, trying out the other side of the camera during the Washington Senators visit to play the New York Highlanders in April, 1911.

It is part of two collections the LOC has uploaded to Flickr where the public is invited to comment, share, download and discover thousands of news photos from the 1910s and 1920s as well as earily beautiful color photos from the 1930s and 1940s.

Let the slideshow play - there’s 1,610 photo here taken by photographers for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI). They created the images between 1939 and 1944. Note, Ektachrome and Kodachrome were just invented and the kodachrome emulsion is has always been a particular favorite of photogs because it is a grainless emulsion that offers deeply saturated colors and stellar flesh tones. Here you can see clearly why a love affair with Kodachrome is lifelong. I think i still have some rolls in the fridge somewhere - waiting to go into my F3.

This slide show of 1,500 photos from the daily news scene of almost a hundred years ago, was photographed by the Bain News Service in about 1910-1912.

This is but a slice of the 40,000 glass negatives that the collection preserves.
For more information and to see the rest of the collection

The wisdom of the crowd
The Library of Congress wants to get richer data attached to the photos and that is where opening the collection up on Flickr comes in. Like most photo archives - librarians rely primarily on the identifying information that came with the original photos. .
According to the LOC, “that text can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and also your general reactions.”

Oh there are so many lesson here for news executives . . . I’ll put them in bullet form (The language of CEOs)

  1. Post content that can be embedded.
  2. Openly engage and empower your audience.
  3. Focus on your local expertise.
  4. Create a viral marketing buzz.
  5. Simply do something remarkable and profound with free, open social media sharing tools like Flickr.

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