In the interest of getting a post online sometime this year, here are a few quotations and tidbits, along with audio recordings from seven sessions I attended:

It would’ve been helpful if I had a code.

- Roxana Saberi, a journalist imprisoned in Iran on espionage charges. She said just after her arrest, her captors allowed her a supervised phone call where she was not allowed to tell her boyfriend where she was or why she didn’t make it home that night.

It’s a feeling you have. There’s no one there to tell you what to do.

- AP photographer Julie Jacobson, on how she reacted when she and the soldiers she was embedded with in Afghanistan came under fire.

Just about everybody in this room can do their job on a laptop, which means just about everybody else could. If we can’t do it shorter and sooner, someone else will and should.

- Mike Allen of Politico, on how online journalists must be driven to produce quality content.

Session: “Diversity in new media”

Panelists: Jocelyn Wang (8asians.com) Jen Wang and Diana Nguyen (Disgrasian.com) Phil Yu (angryasianman.com)

Moderator: Gil Asakawa, freelancer and consultant.

Everybody can take a day off, but sometimes you feel like you can’t.

- Jen Wang, on the high-speed nature of blogging. She said at first, she and Nguyen would post seven to eight posts a day and were “burning out really fast.”

Session: “Hyperlocal news”

Panelists: Andrew Pergam (J-Lab), David Boardman (Seattle Times), Marcia Parker (Patch.com), David Cohn (Spot.us)

Moderator: Thomas Lee (Medcity News)

Content is king, and content will always be king, but collaboration is queen. If this is a chess board, the king is the most important piece that you have to guard, but the queen – let’s be honest – is the most powerful.

- David Cohn, on the mission of Spot.us.

Session: “Beginning Interactive Narrative”

Panelist: Wasim Ahmad (Stonybrook University)

Giving them space to put their work on the web will help you in the long run.

- Wasim Ahmad, on collaboration with readers.

Links discussed during this session, as well as some others, courtesy of Ahmad:
Wal-Mart’s Growth:
http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/

Social Media Revolution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

Look, Listen, Vote:
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2007/aug/14/look_listen_vote/
http://www.naplesnews.com/search/?q=Idol+hopeful%3A&t=news&s=video_ellington

Revisiting the NY Times’ 2001 “Year in Ideas”
http://www.mediaite.com/online/revisiting-the-new-york-times-2001-year-in-ideas/

Common Knowledge: CJR
http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/common_knowledge.php?page=all

Fifty People One Question
http://fiftypeopleonequestion.com/

Joe McNally’s blog on lighting contest
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2009/09/03/mystery-photorevealed/

Married to Chocolate
http://www.married2chocolate.com

Old Spice Twitter ad campaign:
http://twitter.com/oldspice
http://oldspicevoicemail.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWCVhGzrAT0

NPR on KFC Double Down
http://www.npr.org/blogs/waitwait/2010/04/kfc_double_down_live_blog.html

Knight Rider Live Blog
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/17/knight-rider-the-liveblog/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2Yw0DVGRKQ

Washington Post’s On Being
http://specials.washingtonpost.com/video/onbeing/

Interactive Maps:
http://sarahatwork.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-does-elimination-of-hofstra.html

Session: “Print meets airwaves”

Panelists: Laura Yuen (Minnesota Public Radio), Meena Thiruvengadam (Dow Jones Newswire), Akiko Fujita (freelance web video)

Session: “Platform portability”

Panelists: Franz Strasser (BBC World News America), Victor Kong (CNN Radio), Melissa Mecija (KCBS/KCAL)

Moderator: Christine Lee (KPNX Phoenix)

If I do this for one more day I’m going to drive off the road and take all the equipment with me.

- Franz Strasser, recalling a plea to his editors to give him a day off. He said young journalists in multi-platform jobs have a tendency to overwork themselves and be afraid to ask for time off.

Session: “Advanced interactive narrative”

Panelist: Shazna Nessa (AP)

Links discussed during the session, and some others Nessa says she didn’t have time to show:
Portfolio.com, Interactive features
http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/06/salary_comparison
http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2008/02/New-Five
http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/12/cdo/
http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2008/01/Twilight-of-the-SIVs

World Cup
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_sports/worldcup_10/index.html
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_sports/world_cup_goal/index.html

Tiger Woods Apologizes
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_sports/tiger_apologies/

Gulf Oil
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/oil_spill/index.html

Vatican Letter
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/vatican_letter/index.html

West Wing 3D
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/wdc/west_wing/

Motown at 50
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/motown50/

Iraq Elections
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/iraq_election2010/

AP Stress Index map
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/stress_index/index.html

Session: “Documentary filmmaking”

Panelists: Bill Kubota (KDN Films), Chi Tung (dGenerate Films), Abe Ferrer (Visual Communications), Marissa Aroy (Media Factory), Jonathan Reinert, Christopher Wong

Moderator: Emil Guillermo

I grew up in a town where I was pretty much the only Asian American person in a six-mile radius.

- Jonathan Reinert, who was adopted, on his hometown of Kirkwood, Mo.

Here’s a short story about how to take small tidbits from a broader story and (almost) localize them. The story didn’t turn into anything, but perhaps something can be learned from the process.

Recently, famed painter Thomas Kinkade was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence. At first blush, this is likely nothing but fodder for good water-cooler talk. But the Sacramento Bee story linked above contains a brief mention of his financial troubles, including this passage:

On June 2, his company Pacific Metro, formerly known as Media Arts and the Thomas Kinkade Co., filed for bankruptcy protection in federal court.

…

The company owes 1,000 to 5,000 creditors a total of $10 million to $50 million, according to court documents.

A list of creditors more than 100 pages long was appended to the bankruptcy filing. It included a cardboard-box company in Sacramento, the state Board of Equalization and small art galleries in Folsom, Auburn and Elk Grove.

I work for a newspaper in Elk Grove, so that mention interested staff here. I was asked to look into this to see if anything could come out of it.

The first thing I needed to do was find the name of the local gallery claiming unpaid debts from Kinkade’s corporate arm. I did this by using the public records website used by federal courts (more on the basics of this unique website in a future blog post) to find Pacific Metro’s bankruptcy filing. After looking through documents on that site, I found an art gallery no one in the office had heard of listed with a Folsom address. Two names were also included with the name of the gallery.

Google searches yielded very little information on the gallery (including a disconnected phone number), so I decided on a different approach. I plugged one of the names into pipl.com, and found a couple phone numbers based in Folsom. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with a man who closed his Elk Grove art gallery a couple years ago. He told me Kinkade’s corporate division owed him a grand total of . . . less than $200.

Not much of a headline.

He went on to say the credit came from a painting he overpaid for a few years ago. He said he never got his money back, but wasn’t losing any sleep over it. Then there was this:

“I wasn’t even aware he had filed bankruptcy until another reporter called me yesterday.”

OK, so I wasn’t the first to get to him. I wasn’t the first to report Kinkade’s arrest. I wasn’t the first to . . . well, you get the idea. The important thing about this process was that it showed how all of these tools could be pulled together to gather real information. It’s just in this particular case, that information wasn’t really all that newsworthy.

[BillMecca.com via News Videographer]

Coincidentally, I had a slice of pizza for lunch on the day of California’s June 2010 primary election. Maybe some part of my subconscious was telling me that I couldn’t really do my job without some kind of election-night day pizza. There was no newsroom party at our small, twice-weekly newspaper. Instead of a whole flock of staff members staying at the office late into the night, we had two reporters (myself and my editor) and two photographers bouncing around the two prominent races that were relevant to our area (a county supervisor race and a sheriff contest). I was assigned to the sheriff race, which I had been covering closely.

I would spend the night at two very different campaign parties – one at an upscale bar in midtown Sacramento, and another in the ballroom of a local hotel. I arrived at the first party (the upscale one) a short while after it was scheduled to start, and the candidate was nowhere in sight. I chatted with our photographer for a bit, and noticed there were at least four TV news vans and a photographer from the local metro daily.

I saw a few sources I recognized from previous city meetings, but didn’t see anything too out of the ordinary (the buff guy with a Lakers jersey and no shirt underneath seemed a little out of place, but I’m not one to judge). Eventually, the candidate arrived. I spoke to him briefly and then left to the second event. In the car, I checked my phone and realized the county elections office had released the first round of results sometime after we left the first party. The second candidate was in the lead.

The photographer and I arrived at the second party, and I was struck by how different it was. First, the news coverage was almost non-existent. Two news vans and another photographer from the same metro daily. There was a reporter from a Spanish-speaking TV station, but the other station had (as far as I could tell) sent a solo photographer.

I wasn’t sure if it was because the first party was at a glitzier location or if all the stations had favored the first candidate to win handily, but the difference in attention surprised me.

After several minutes and a couple chats with the second candidate, we headed back to the first party.

Nothing much had changed at the first party, largely because the county elections office was very slow to release results. I stayed until 10:30 p.m., and barely any results had been posted to the county’s website. By the end, I realized I had probably spent too much time at the two parties. Then again, if the election had gone differently and a candidate had been declared a winner (instead, the two top candidates won spots in a November runoff election), there likely would have been much more worth reporting.

But as it ended up, I spent a lot of time at the parties … waiting. I tend to spend way more time at an event than I really need to, but I can’t decide if that’s a good or bad thing. Sure, I could pop in, say hello and then leave, but it seems to have been beneficial to me to stick around for a little longer than I need to. The occasional extra detail I catch seems to make it worth it.

To November!

Any other reporters with interesting stories from this year’s elections? Post them in the comments section below!

(by the way, click here for the story I wrote from this night’s events)

As newspapers everywhere are faced with the challenge of being everything at once and covering everything in completely new ways, reporters with little (or perhaps no) training are being handed a video camera and are sent on their way with little more than an encouraging pat on the back. I’m by no means a sports reporter (or a full-time videographer), but I’ve filmed football, basketball, baseball, softball and boxing for our newspaper. Along the way, I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Here are three common pitfalls to avoid when shooting video for a news organization.

1. Showing viewers the most boring part of the game

Unless they’re game-winning shots, nobody cares about free throws. Or extra points. The general consensus with web videos is that the shorter the video, the more people will actually watch it. Usually that means keeping your videos between three and five minutes long. If you film an entire game, you’ll have footage that you want to use, but don’t have time for.

That’s a good thing. That’s how it’s supposed to be. The professors I had for writing classes encouraged me to always be willing to cut from my stories, and the same should be true for video. Don’t show the boring, mundane parts of the game. Edit those out or your viewers won’t stay for the whole video.

2. Only showing the final score

If your goal is to produce a recap of an entire game, it’s important to keep viewers updated on what’s happening at each point in the game. That doesn’t mean Photoshopping up some kind of fancy ESPN-style scoreboard or showing the score for each shot in basketball, but it gets confusing to watch teams trade points back and forth and not know who’s in the lead or how close the game is.

Points to anyone who can tell me what the score is halfway through this game without keeping track on a pad of paper:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkojVl6i46U

The final score only tells one part of the story. Videos that are intended to be full-game recaps should either have on-screen scores or a voiceover.

Here’s an example of how the score can be shown during a basketball game. This video is from staffers at the State Hornet, where I once worked (disclosure: this video was produced after I graduated, but I’ve worked with the person who shot and edited this).

Here’s an example of a great voiceover video (with on-screen scores, too) from the Long Beach Post, although I’m not too sure about the “what up” at the beginning or the generic hip-hop in the background.

3. Missing an important play while filming … and then letting it get to you

We’ve all been guilty of this. Unless you have multiple cameras at the game, this is bound to happen sooner or later. The important thing is to not beat yourself up over it. I’ve missed touchdowns and just barely captured a game-winning run at a baseball game – and I still had a job the next week.

Since many people who shoot video for newspapers have little experience doing so, it can seem a daunting task. Don’t let mistakes bother you. You will make mistakes. Don’t let a simple one discourage you from trying more video in the future.

As an example, here’s a baseball video I shot where I completely missed most of the game-winning play (at 1 minute, 46 seconds in).

The video could have been a lot better if I’d been steady and filming the other runner, but I know it’s not a huge deal.

What do you think? What are your pet peeves when watching online sports videos? What are some techniques that have helped you? Comment below.

My grandfather, who passed a couple years ago (while I was still in j-school), was a former cameraman for NBC. He worked in New York state, Chicago and Burbank, but I don’t know a lot of details about what he did. I was cleaning out a few things at my parents’ house over the weekend and found a big bag with a bunch of random press passes.

There’s something really cool (at least to me) about seeing something that forces me to remember that journalism existed before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

There were way more that I didn’t photograph. Maybe someday I’ll chronicle all of them.

A few more photos after the jump. >>

Sacramento Press staff members were quick to distance themselves from the fliers, writing in a prominently featured post, entitled “Political campaign fliers NOT from The Sacramento Press,”

The Sacramento Press had no part in it. We did not print the mailers. We did not write those words.

The post, written by managing editor Colleen Belcher, goes on to stress that the Sacramento Press “did not write or solicit the article.”

Now, a step back for those not familiar with Sacramento Press. The site has several editorial interns and paid staffers, which it identifies with small icons next to the poster’s name. But the site is based largely on community contributions. That is, anyone can post almost anything on the site – like the opinion piece quoted by the fliers. It’s a bold concept, and the site has received a good deal of attention. In a comment responding to discussion (including comments I posted) on the campaign fliers story, co-founder Ben Ilfield had this to say about the site’s policies:

Sounds nice, but this use makes it seem like this was an editorial or perhaps reporting. It was neither.

This kind of misleading tactic could be used for anyone who supports anything to simply write an opinion piece on the site and then produce a flier that implies we stand behind words we never wrote or solicited.

I know the graphic design of the site makes it look like a newspaper – and that is the easiest way to describe us, but we are new media and we act as a service provider when we allow community contribution through self publishing tools.

Ilfeld says that Sacramento Press provides a service for content creation, like an ISP or a newspaper allowing open comments (federal laws say that service providers can’t be held responsible for possibly libelous comments they allow through). But does saying that drop stories written by unpaid members of the community – the core principle of the site – on a second tier? Should community journalism websites take some kind of ownership of all content they host (assuming it isn’t libelous or inaccurate)? Does holding staff contributions in a higher regard somehow clash with the basic ethos of a citizen journalism website?

Perhaps Sacramento Press sees itself as a service provider, but the majority of casual users visiting the site likely go there for content, not for a service.

Sacramento Press staff members were quick to distance themselves from the campaign fliers, but if the quote had been attributed to “Rhonda Erwin, Sacramento Press contributor,” would it have caused as much heartburn? For the record, I think the fliers are quite deceptive, but as Ilfeld said in the comments, “there is a good debate to be had” about the position citizen journalism websites take on issues like this.

Disclosure: I went to school with some of the staffers at Sacramento Press, and I know Colleen Belcher on a professional level.