http://www.aaronspencer.com Aaron Spencer is a multimedia journalist with a bias toward Web video and an ambition for better digital storytelling. Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:09:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently I've found myself distressed about the hyperlocal dictum of journalism. The argument (today at Jessica DaSilva) over whether hyperlocal is successful has me wondering if newspapers are just grasping at straws — covering the only thing we can cover in the Internet age — or if readers have really ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/hyperlocal-successes/ Meranda Watling has a good post about newspaper.coms' online databases: There are hundreds of useful databases on news Web sites today. But what’s increasingly sad — almost as sad as the tendency to create and dump unrelated databases without any context into data ghettos — is the increasing tendency to create ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/newspapers-online-database-ghettos/ My heart dropped a little bit when I read this at Rogue Columnist. It's an opinion by Jon Talton on a recent WSJ piece on the so-called demise of LoudounExtra.com. HT to Pat and ehelm on Twitter. Loudoun, which covers a small affluent Virginian community, is the hyperlocal Web brain child ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/hyperlocal-flop/ Some discussion has developed over at News Videographer about music copyright in Web videos. This issue is pretty hard to pin down. As I've said before, if I use copyrighted music, I only use 15 seconds. Gannet lawyers recommend this but say under fair use there is no time percentage, only ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/music-copyright-in-web-video/ My alma mater's newspaper, The Daily Reveille (LSU) has won the EPpy for for best college newspaper Web site. Editor Justin Fritscher has been pushing breaking news updates and multimedia for a while now. In April, they pushed to have eight updates a day, and in March, individual page views had ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/best-college-newspaper/ Music performance pieces are always challenging to edit. Even performances that only involve music are pesky. Take a children's ballet recital: I was pretty satisfied with this piece. The project's director provided details and the girls provided emotion. The piece had music and a variety of interesting shots, so it was ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/video-sequencing-with-music-performaces/ I can't count the number of times I've wanted to do this and wondered if it were even possible. Well, it seems it wasn't — until now. Now you can embed Google Maps in Flash applications thanks to the Google Maps Flash API. HT to Google LatLong via Journerdism. I'm kind of ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/google-maps-flash/ I've twice been on assignment to shoot town hall meetings, special gatherings where residents can voice concerns about targeted issues. These are some situations where the video could be good, say if everyone goes mad and chaos ensues. But they also have the propensity to be pretty average. In such ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/town-hall-dilemma/ So newspapers are going ker-plunk. But magazines are doing dandy. This is odd to me because I think most newspaper writing styles show a magazine envy. You'd think newspapers would just follow their noses. That's what Pat Thornton thinks will happen anyway: Print can be a great medium when it concentrates ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/newspapers-magazines/ Now your Web design 101 notes are even more outdated. Turns out people don't mind scrolling anymore (at least vertically, I'd venture to say). This from Polish researcher Michal Pryslopski via this E-Media Tidbits post at Poynter Online: Eyetrack research showed that conventional wisdom was changing -- his audience ... http://www.aaronspencer.com/dont-worry-its-ok-to-scroll/