Journalism 2.0 ebook

Journalist and recovering sportswriter Mark Briggs recently posted a free, downloadable version of his 132-page book, Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive: A Digital Literacy Guide for the Information Age. 

Though not explictly aimed at librarians or educators, this is a cool resource for filling technology knowledge gaps and for preparing inservices and handouts. It is also an excellent resource for high school journalism teachers, newspaper sponsors, and teachers of media literacy, made even more usable because it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License<!–

–>.

With more and more of us–both students and teachers–functioning as citizen journalists, Briggs’ advice resonates.  He offers advice for new concepts like crowdsourcing, advice for how to shift reporting strategies for the Web, in addition to detailed, step-by-step lessons covering such skills as basic video editing using iMovie. 

From the table of contents:

Chapter 1: FTP, MB, RSS, Oh My
    • Introduction: Today’s special? Acronym soup
    • Digital information: Megabytes, Gigabytes and Terabytes
    • How the Internet works
    • About Web browsers
    • RSS readers and feeds
    • RSS basics
    • Instant messaging
    • File Transfer Protocol

Chapter 2: Web 2.0
    • Welcome to Web 2.0
    • Web 2.0 is all about openness, organization and community
    • Tags and folksonomy: New ways to organize content
    • Can you Digg it?
    • What does this mean for journalism?
    • Don’t know where this is heading?

Chapter 3: Tools and Toys
    • Introduction
    • Tools you should be using
    • Mobile 2.0
    • iPod: The slim, sleek 800-pound gorilla
    • ‘Other’ wireless

Chapter 4: New Reporting Methods
    • Introduction
    • Spreadsheets and storing data
    • Your ‘so-called digital life’
    • Crowdsourcing
    • Distributed, collaborative or open-source reporting
    • Summary

Chapter 5: How to Blog
    • Introduction
    • What is a blog?
    • Getting started
    • Terminology
    • Mechanics
    • Frequency and handling comments
    • Using photos and screenshots
    • Love it or leave it

Chapter 6: How to Report News for the Web
    • Introduction

Chapter 7: Digital Audio and Podcasting
    • Introduction
    • The basics: Audio formats
    • Identifying opportunities
    • Buying a recorder
    • Using a microphone
    • Recording with your computer
    • Editing your audio
    • Using time points for speed

Chapter 8: Shooting and Managing Digital Photos
    • Introduction
    • The basics
    • Shooting basic photos with a digital camera
    • Editing photographs digitally
    • Summary

Chapter 9: Shooting Video for News and Feature Stories
    • Introduction
    • Digital video cameras
    • Tapes, batteries and other accessories
    • Zooming, focusing and exposure
    • Get good audio
    • Shooting the video
    • As simple as it gets
    • Do a trial run

Chapter 10: Basic Video Editing
    • Introduction
    • For Mac users: iMovie
    • For PC users: Windows Movie Maker

Chapter 11: Writing Scripts, Doing Voice-overs
    • Introduction
    • Interviewing while recording
    • Voice-overs

Also consider adding Journalism 2.0 blog at J-Learning.org to your RSS feeds!

Filed under: Uncategorized