Interview with Mark Luckie

As I mentioned yesterday, I sent an e-mail to Mark Luckie from 10,000 Words explaining our class simulation to him and asking for his advice for The Atlantic Online. Here's what he wrote back:

I took a look at [The Atlantic] and believe the site has fallen victim to a common problem among magazines making a transition to the web: simply importing print copy and treating multimedia as an afterthought. The site could place multimedia stories side by side with print stories, but label them with small icons (i.e. video, podcasts). Also, the multimedia section has everything labeled as podcasts or slideshows, when in actually a substantial number of stories are actually video. Those users looking for video will appreciate the differentiation.

Most importantly, the Atlantic would benefit from a diversity of media tools. Static graphics could be turned into interactive graphics, photos can be turned into slideshows. It's up to the staff to both learn these new technologies and to decide what technology best presents the story.

Geo-Tagging

As I was reading today's post on 10,000 words about maps and YouTube, I got to thinking about how online newspapers could better utilize tools like Google Maps. A lot of multimedia sites, now, use something called Geo-Tagging. For example, I use Flickr for my photography and I geo-tag some of my photos, placing them on a map exactly where I took them. That way, when anyone wants to browse something like photos I took in Europe, they can literally click on Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum, and all my photos taken there will pop up. Of course, that's just with Flickr, but by making a custom map using Google Maps, you can literally geo-tag anything, even news stories.

In class we were talking about ways to make the Atlantic more relevant locally, and I was thinking that an interactive map (probably relegated to a side-bar somewhere on the site) might be a cool way to get people interacting with the site and finding news that's relevant to them. As it turns out, the Associated Press already has a Google Map, and I'm sure other news resources do as well. Maybe something like this could be incorporated onto The Atlantic's site so that after getting the national headlines, people could literally zoom in on their state (even on their neighborhood) and see what's going on near them.

To get an idea of some of the Google Maps already out there, check out the Google Maps Directory.

10,000 Words

Courtney e-mailed me a link to this great blog called 10,000 Words about multimedia journalism. The author of the blog, Mark Luckie, posts every day about new media and journalism, which is definitely helpful to everyone on The Atlantic team in our class.

I've sent an e-mail to Mr. Luckie and will hopefully be hearing back soon with his ideas which I'll post here.

Citizen News

This is kind of interesting. It's a YouTube channel called Citizen News that's basically a compilation of the best news stories on YouTube from citizen journalists across the country.