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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As a research project, I’ve been studying news values on Daily Kos. Kossacks have a culture of sourcing. They provide links to all the facts in their posts and replies, or risk being called out by other community members. DK isn’t a news outlet, but in that respect, the community operates a lot like [...]

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) [...]

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, [...]

You hear quite a bit these days about the huge impact of new media. Blogs have apparently brought down the careers of successful politicians and media stars like Trent Lott and Dan Rather. They’re reflowing Internet traffic and hitting traditional newspapers in the pocketbook. Well, a few blogs are doing those things. The [...]

Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody is at once highly readable and a massive undertaking. He sets out to explain, as many recent authors have done, how new communication technologies and the people who use them are changing the world we live in. This is a task so large that, to my [...]

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 [...]

[...] tinkering over there.  But it will make it easier (hopefully effortless) [...] Josh BraunSelected Content From 30 Journalism & New Media Blogs in One RSS FeedMay 30, 2008So, at this point who knows if this portal will turn into anything interesting?  In the [...]

Very cool! Did you find that the camera got in the way? Or that you could only use it for certain kinds of columns? Re: Doing more with less. I think there's also a difference between being forced to do more with less and desiring to do more on any terms. My friend mentions that a lot of younger journalists are being thrown into video and other online specialties, but a lot of younger folks are also seeking it out. It's a growth area, and I think a lot of entry-level people are taking advantage of it to build their careers. At the places I worked when I was a full-time journalist, the Internet was always wide open, and the online division would immediately post anything you wrote, whereas the evening news program or the magazine always had a much higher barrier to entry. I have a number of other friends who've recently graduated J-school, and most of them have said that the people who are being churned out now by Berkeley, Columbia, Mizzoo, and all the rest are pretty comfortable with, if not excited by, the prospect of diversifying their media skills, doing what they do with the Internet in mind. I worked in television awhile, interned in TV news, and finally went to work for a magazine, before jumping ship to go back to school. I was always a lowly fly on the wall, but in my humble opinion, each has a very different workstyle. It'd be tough to shoot a <em>Nightline</em>-style interview while working on a print story. But what's interesting to me is that people are probably coming to expect a different aesthetic from newspapers than from ABC News. And, between YouTube and <em>The Amazing Race</em>, people are taking a much kinder view of even shaky video these days.

Interesting discussion. I was doing video with my newspaper column before I went on sabbatical last year. Basically every other week or so I would shoot 5 or 10 minutes of B-roll, plus some interviews, and give the raw tape and a shot sheet to an editor at our web site who would then cut it together to about 2 minutes. It would accompany my column and I'd key to it from the paper. I think the results weren't bad. Now I'm fussing around with iMovie, trying to learn to edit. The key of course is that the more you do the better you get. And watching shaky video is even worse than reading bad prose. Is it ideal having wordsmiths doing double-duty as videosmiths? Probably not, but I think we're entering a time when we all have to do more with less.

Interesting and ambitious... I like it :) and will try yo contribute... Good luck!