I just found via Twitter (of course) that a friend and former colleague at the BBC, Bill McKenna, has won White House News Photographers Association ‘Editor of the Year’ award. Bill is more of an artist than an editor, and it’s great to see his skills recognised like this. Watch this piece and you’ll get just a small sense of what an incredible video editor can do. His ability to tell a story in pictures is amazing, and he also breaks the mold of television news editing. Most of the time, news video is simply a disjointed collage of pieces to camera, a couple of poorly framed shots and agency footage. He uses pictures to make you stop and pay attention to something that might otherwise have passed too quickly.
Bill is also a musician, and it shows not only in the way that he uses music in his editing, how he starts, stops and slows the action to the beat of the soundtrack he’s chosen but also how he uses music to bring an emotion to news video that usually isn’t there. He works with the excellent camera men and women at the BBC bureau in Washington and creates stunning pieces that are a joy to watch. He spends hour after hour in the edit suites producing these pieces. I’ll let Bill and this small sample of his work speak for itself. I just wanted to say congratulations to a great friend! Bill, it’s so glad to see your talent and dedication recognised.
Daily Archives: June 2, 2009
How well is the third sector using social media?
It’s always hard to work out in the open, because it means exposing unfinished thoughts and expressions to public scrutiny, something which is, quite frankly intimidating. We are much more used to gathering up our information, hammering it into shape and producing, in the end, a nicely polished piece of work. But that’s not necessarily the best way to do things.
Not only do I not have the luxury of the time it would take me to properly go through that process, but I believe that the end product will be better if I, as my maths teacher used to say, show my workings. But it’s not without trepidation and caveats that I give you the first draft of my assessment of a small sample of third sector websites.
After the jump, you’ll find a description of what I did and what I found, and I’d very much like to know what questions it throws up for you. I know that it poses quite a few more questions than it answers for me, but I shan’t prejudice your reaction by stating them here.
To put it in context, this is only part of my assessment of the current state of play with third sector use of social tools. My survey is still open, and if you are in the third sector, please do take a look at it (or pass it on to anyone you know who might be able to fill it in). I’ll also be doing a literature review (so please send me links to anything you think I should be reading).
These are preliminary results – I can’t stress that enough. Please don’t start reporting these or writing blog post about them (not that I’m assuming you want to!), not only because in the course of refining the report things may change, but also because they are lifted out of the context of the rest of the report. But please do feel free to critique my work as extensively as you like, in the comments or on email if you want.
I want to do a little bit more research for this section, but I’d like that to be directed not just by my own judgement, but also by yours. What else do you want to know? What questions does it make you ask? I can’t promise to be able to find all the answers, but I will do my best. (And don’t worry so much about typos, but please do point out anywhere where my maths doesn’t add up!)
Right. *gulp* Have at it!
links for 2009-06-02
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Kevin: As the post says: "50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter."
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Kevin: Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class of 2009 on May 16. "We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history – as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily – just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.
But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we – journalists – we can't stop doing what we do."
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent observation in his latest Guardian column: "We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall."
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Kevin: Grim reading for newspapers in the US as advertising revenue sees a record drop in the first quarter of 2009, falling "by an unprecedented 28.3%", blogs Alan Mutter. What is even more grim reading for US newspapers is that while the first three months of 2009 saw advertising revenue fall off of a cliff, the decline has started in 2006 and has been almost unabated since. That decline started long before the US went into recession, indicating that not all of the decline can be attributed to the economic downturn.