Understudy

Since this site has been mothballed until the relaunch, user registration and blog creation have been disabled.  For updates on the relaunch, please visit the development blog at the site’s new URL, http://unevenlydistributed.net.

Thanks!

Here’s the link.  The site won’t be live for several weeks, but in the interim I’ve erected a development blog at the new domain that you can check for updates on the site’s construction.  It’s already got a couple updates, so feel free to hop on over!

The news is good.  I put this site out there as an experiment, to solicit feedback and see what interest there was for something like it.  And I’m happy to say it worked.  I got both interest and feedback.  Some really awesome bloggers have agreed to be a part of this site.  I look forward to seeing what they contribute.  That said, if this site is going to be as cool as it can be, I also need to respond to the feedback I’ve gotten.  That means realizing that it needs a better infrastructure than it’s got right now.  And I need time to build it.

So, here’s the latest.  I’m mothballing Understudy for the time being and will relaunch it at the end of the summer.  At that time, you can look forward to a better interface and some cool new participants.  During the downtime, the RSS roundup of journalism and new media blogs (link|description) will remain active.  I rather enjoy updating it, and I think it’s a worthy project in its own right.  When the relaunch nears, I’ll also use it to send out occasional updates on the site overhaul, so please sign up if you haven’t already.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing from me, you can catch me on my own website or on Twitter.  I also plan on remaining an active participant in the journo corner of the blogosphere, so plan on seeing me around!

Thanks immensely for everything. =)

—Josh

I recently had an email discussion about the future of video on newspaper websites with a print-journalist friend of mine. I thought it was interesting and wanted to pass it along. So here it is, in Q&A format. I've anonymized everything, as the person offers some fairly candid opinions, and would prefer they not get in the way of good work relationships. Anyhow, what say you?

Note: If you're reading this on the front page of Understudy, click through the permalink to bring up the comment-enabled version of this post.

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Friend: Newspapers are getting big on video—really big—which I am not convinced on, because people look at news sites during the day, when they're at work. And it's pretty hard to look busy while watching video at work. This is why video hasn't gotten huge traction yet and I'm not sure how much of an audience there is for video news in the off hours. And if it's going to be done, I suspect it will be by people who specialize in video, either out of TV or Hollywood. (This is the same reason NPR's podcasts are successful and so many newspaper podcasts are unbearable failures.)

Right now, newspaper websites are confusing technology with talent. I mean, producing, filming, scripting and editing (not to mention, say, interviewing and thinking) are all actual skills people have, for years and years, gone to school and learned and practiced in a several marketplaces. But we act like the ability to put it on the Internet automatically produces people who can do that stuff and do it well. It's as if we had page designers or printers write the stories.

Me: Do you think the next generation of journalists, many of whom seem to be cross-training in different media, will do a better job of this stuff?

Friend: Well, probably, but I don't know how good the video programs at the J-schools are. That's not code for "I'm suspicious of them." I mean, I honestly don't know.

I mean, print and radio and video are all pretty different from each other, right? So while I think you'll get a few people who are good at all three (like athletes who can play baseball and basketball and football), mostly people will do one thing. And there's the real problem—that some newspapers now expect you to do text, audio and video for the same story, which is not such a hot idea. I mean, it's possible to be a tri-athlete but it's impossible to run, bike and swim simultaneously.

Me: Okay, if we take your premise, might we see a few outlets that allocate different resources to different stories, though? Lots of TV news organizations, for instance, run wire stories for most of their print articles, and produce their own video. With varying levels of success, of course. Not everyone likes the end product.

Friend: In my ideal world, the same place would employ people to do audio, video and print. I mean, we're already comfortable employing both photographers and reporters.

It's just that right now newspapers have the peculiar idea that before the Internet such things as audio and video didn't exist, and therefore we don't have to hire outside of our narrow industry.

Plus, there's the youth thing. Editors both don't understand young people, and simultaneously crave them as totems of relevance. Ditto for the Internet. So they assume that all young people "get" the Internet and are good at it—and since they assume audio and video are Internet things, the young must also be good at audio and video. Never mind that your shiny new videographer is a film school reject.

Me: What about newspaper sites that do seem to have put together some high quality video, like the Washington Post? Their animated editorial cartoons and their illustrator series on "drawing the candidates," for instance, have both been both well-done—and apparently very popular.

Friend: Yeah, some of the video over there was pretty nice. And someday in the future when the Internet replaces both television and newspapers, video will be a very important part of that. But while it makes all sorts of sense to get good at video in advance of that day (you never know when it will arrive), I don't think it should be championed ahead of what works right now and what you'll still need in the future—an organization of your information that is both complete and versatile, i.e., having working digital archives and good search engines, along with some good tags and context linking.

But that stuff frequently gets ignored at newspaper organizations—it doesn't make for sexy PowerPoint presentations.

•••

Further Reading:

Newspaper Video Blog on Blogspot

"Newspapers Find Online Video Niche" on B&C

Newspaper Association of America on Online Video

Comments are not off: If you're reading this on the front page of Understudy, click through the permalink to bring up the comment-enabled version of this post.

I’ve installed a plugin that will automatically repost the content of your personal blog to your Understudy blog.  It’s technically not syncing, since it’s a one-way process.  Nothing you write here will be automatically reflected on your personal blog, unless you do some additional tinkering over there.  But it will make it easier (hopefully effortless) to cross-post items from your home blog to understudy.  No cutting and pasting anymore.

It works by picking up the RSS feed of your home blog and turning it back into a series of blog posts on this site.  You can set it up to repost all the content from another blog, or only what you select.

Because this same “autoblogging” software is a favorite tool of spammers, I haven’t made it available by default upon registration—lest spammers and spambots turn this place into a den of…never mind.  But just drop me a line and I’m happy to enable this functionality on your understudy blog.  If it’s reasonably clear that you’re human and not evil, I’ll just flip a switch on the administrative site and you’ll be ready to go.  It’s easy to set up, and I’m happy to answer questions.

Needless to say, anyone who abuses the plugin by, say, stealing content, mis-attributing content, or posting spam, will immediately be booted from the site, unless I’m reasonably sure an honest mistake was involved.

So, at this point who knows if this portal will turn into anything interesting?  In the meantime, I’ve created a combined RSS feed, not of this site, but of around 30 cool new-media-and-journalism blogs from around the web.  It will send out about 10 to 15 posts per day, and I’ll filter out off-topic posts, so you won’t have to read about career advice for young journalists, or what someone ate for breakfast.

Get the feed by clicking here, or on the image associated with this post.  Depending on your software/web-service settings, you can expect your RSS reader to download a backlog of around a few hundred posts, possibly ordered by author.  My server-side software generated this queue automatically when I set up the combined feed.  You can skim them or delete them as you see fit.  Going forward, you should get a manageable number of posts per day, well-filtered by yours truly.  If you think of a blog you’d like added to the feed, let me know and I’ll take care of it on the back end.  I’ll also remove any sources that people find generally useless or irrelevant.  Even if the site doesn’t take off, I hope the feed will be a valuable tool for bringing more people interested in this topic into conversation.

Hi there. This is a networked site intended to host blogs by people studying the intersections between journalism, new media, and digital culture.  That means scholars who keep research blogs, journalists who are interested in and/or tinkering with new media, citizen-journalists, news-minded Wikipedians, and anyone else who’s fascinated by this topic.

There are a lot of people blogging about these topics already.  The idea behind this site is to group their writings, and thereby put more people in conversation with one another.  With any luck an interesting research group and/or community of practice will be forthcoming.  If it’s sizable, that’s great, but my hope is that even a few bright people in conversation here will make this place worthwhile.

Of course, while that’s the hope, I recognize just how many online projects fail, and that people also like keeping their writings to their own blogs and domains.  So, if you’re interested in this experiment, I encourage you to cross-post anything you like, between here and your own blog.  Any content you author on this site is yours—you own it and can do what you wish with it.  If you like, you’re also encouraged to mark your blog with a Creative Commons or GNU-GPL license to encourage others to share the content.

Lastly, I’ll be hosting this site on my existing webserver until there’s enough interest and continued activity to justify taking out a new site and domain name.  To make things a little easier, I’ve marked this site with a subdomain.  You can get here any time by going to http://understudy.wideaperture.net.  I don’t know if that’s any easier than http://wideaperture.net/understudy/—but if your memory is as bad as mine, I suppose it slightly increases the probability that you’ll land here after wracking your brain for the URL.

In the left sidebar is an RSS-able feed of the latest posts and comments from across the site, and to the right is the roll of research blogs hosted here, with the most recently updated appearing first. Here, front-and-center, on the homepage is the real-estate given to site-development news (and, if people like the idea, for featuring popular posts).

For my own part, and on behalf of any future users, let me say that I look forward to seeing what you write!