Submitted by Keri Sculland on Thursday, May 7, 2009 - 14:21

E-Journalism

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Reality sinks in… today marked the first day of the downhill slope to the end of this program. Being introduced to the publication project took quite some time. After being handed multiple sheets covering the next five weeks in this program, it is easy to see that they are going to be a very busy five weeks.

Getting into the publications project was fun to start. Throwing ideas around helps gain a handle on what is coming up. Knowing the direction to take for the publications project brings peace to mind.

Practicing and honing journalistic skills provides methodology, much like a doctor. Journalism practices are based off of principles, standards, normality, and ideology.

Changing the traditional journalism mindset from informing, explaining and interpreting news, to educating, empowering, and engaging is not difficult, since it has already been in practice for five weeks now.
Learning about content management systems, and how they work, was very helpful and gave insight as to what might be dealt with in the next few weeks.

Using simple databases can be easy to use, and are highly mobile, since they are activated and continue to work and upload from a server. There are different types of CMS’s, but only two were spoken of in class. Open source and freeware are software systems, which can be accessed and altered for free on the Internet.

Reviewing where everything is and what it is called, such as headers, footers, core, and navigation bars (which are divided into blocks), was simple to grasp, and easy to go over.

The newest, freshest information delivered today is what is called a LAMP server, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These are all different types of software used to upload websites to servers.

The second half of the day was spent uploading numerous stories to a newly introduced web site.

First, stories without links were published. Then, moving on to links and extra tidbits of information, publishing stories was just as easy, but three times as time-consuming.

It is important for journalists to be able to upload stories to the web… you can obviously imagine why. Uploading stories allows for readers to view it. Communicating the news online is an important part of today’s society. The easiest way to access information these days is from in front of a computer screen.

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