Main pages    Course Communication    Documents    Handouts    Reham Al Farra    Police contacts 2005 Related links     Core Skills site    Media2    Media Guide    Google search    Useful links    How to Blog    Online Resources    Online Glossary    World Journalism Federation     Leaks    Debka.com Styles    Styleguides    Harvard Reference System Bourne Free    News Instructions

Production Project Handbook - 2009 The project lasts eight weeks from the start of term. Ideas: Read books and articles on writing features and investigative journalism, to gain insights and techniques. Refine your ideas. Look for the unusual angles and implications in current news, and bear in mind that much good journalism is about injustice, conflicting ideas, controversy, and revelation. The project must be critical and incisive, factual but watchable or readable. Location can be UK national, or overseas, or local to Bournemouth, Poole or Dorset. The target audience should be English speaking. Target audience Although the web is global by default, think hard who you may be writing for - a minority, a country, a region, an age group, a specific interest group, women or men or both. You can emulate a particular publication if you wish. The audience choice affects how far you can assume knowledge in users, and how they expect you to address them. You must identify your target audience when you submit your work. Writing text Remember all the style points from Online Journalism Core Skills and Core Skills Digital Broadcast - titles, ages, attribution, acknowledgment of third party sources, balance, and so on. Your own 'comment' has to be clearly identified as such. Punctuate properly and consistently. Up to ten percent of marks can be lost by poor grammar and style. Captioning in video must be clear . Core skills still carry 40 percent of the whole mark. Planning IT hardly needs saying that you must plan ahead, both interviews and editing. You will need to edit or write certain parts as you proceed. This must be so if you are to sense the pace and impact of your project. There will therefore be a balance to be struck between forward planning, interviews, writing, and editing. You will have to decide on this for yourselves. There may also be a process with some creativity and imagination and experiment. This is linked to the fusion of media into a website. Will you want certain audio or video sequences to be followed? Will they be optional, or compulsory - such as a piece of movie you want viewed at a definite moment. If so, how will you set this up for the viewer? This will be your decision but remember that the quality of the work will be judged on its effectiveness as journalism. Divide time carefully between processing, and the skills of finding and developing a story. The marking ultimately rests upon the quality, clarity, and depth of the journalism, rather than superficial effects. Graphics and other multi media formats should always be an aid to communication. N.B. You should edit your work exceptionally carefully. Design: Most literature on web design highlights simplicity as the key to user friendliness. Much design now follows a familiar pattern - navigation on the left, content centre, and links on the right. Look at sites and borrow ideas, shapes and structures. It is commonly believed that extensive scrolling is unpopular. There may be times when you feel this needs to be ignored. It is usual to use a sans serif type on the web (Helvitica, Arial). Remember too that different browsers show work differently and readers have choices on their browsers. Preview your work in Explorer to see how pages work out and find design compromises where needed. Marking will be in Internet Explorer. Be sure not to use colour backgrounds or coloured texts that are hard to read. Black on white is quite acceptable. Remember too that colours give out messages. One caveat: The project does look ahead to faster broadband internet connections. Some compromises made by current designers need not apply to your site, especially where video and audio are concerned. Even so, you may think that packages are not always appropriate - clips of audio and video may work better because you can use words to do the explanations. The reporter/presenter may not be necessary. However HALF of your broadcast work must be done as packages - ie not simply as clips or pieces to camera or whatever. Some general design advice can be found on www.webmonkey.com and in www.useit.com. The most quoted design person is Nieslen, JDesigning Web Usability. It is in the library. It can be boring just listening to audio. Think about putting stills pictures behind the audio of speakers. Eight seconds is said to be the maximum time a user will wait for a download. Graphics use a lot of time so, if you were planning for a site today, use small pictures and graphics or click to larger files on a separate page. Simple is best. Don't be carried away by effects. Use a template to give your site the same style all over. Lastly, get a workable, original story. Your site should have a narrative and development. One danger is to swamp the reader or audience with information. Consider using graphics to impart. Avoid encyclopaedia effects. This is not 'all you need to know about surfing' or 'child protection'. Wikipaedia is not what we are after though some of their linking is first class and could be emulated. The art of web journalism is to keep work pithy and to the point. Test on each page should have an intro, and development. If it's not readable, it's not working. 200-300 words is quite acceptable. We've had long scrolling pages working well too. Some kind of standfirst for these would be an idea. A user can hit a website at any page. It is therefore always at least advisable to link every page to the home page. Give people somewhere to go at the foot of each page too. NEWS In each of the final four weeks you must write a 200 word news story. This should be topical and in your site's subject area. It might be a government announcement, or even a rewrite of a story elsewhere. Or it could be material you have found exclusively. It should not be a repeat of other material going into your site, but it could form the basis for a page in your site that develops the ideas, implications, and facts. The total word count will be 600-800 for these four stories. This wordcount is over and above the wordcount formulae given below. It is an extra - an add-on. The news story should be published on your website. We will assess it on the Dreamweaver page in preview mode, on the home page of the site. Once it is published it can be archived or moved from the home page. Thery are OUTSIDE the word count. Supervision: You have .3 of an hour per week total . If you miss a session you lose the time. Your supervisor will look at work in development though be careful to realise that until your work is seen as a whole, some aspects will be difficult to comment upon out of their final context. Technology: You should know and understand the software you use, but there are software 'help' sections and tutorials to consult for deeper knowledge. Failing this, and if there are problems, consult the Support Desk (Will, Matt, Guy ) Timeline: Your final work must be submitted eight weeks from your start date . Printouts of written work must be submitted in a folder with your name, at the same time and place. A 1500 word multi-platform news development blueprint and analysis (two copies) must be presented double-spaced in a folder at hand-in on July 2. See below (5 percent) SUBMISSION Leave the competed website on computer. You must give: 1. The computer number your work is on 2. The filename of your site No computer or software failure will be acceptable as a reason for late submission. Ratios: 1,250 online words equals three minutes of radio or two minutes of television. You have to think in terms of six. Your work has to have three media. These are radio, television, and online writing. These must all add to six. Think of six equal shares. If four are chosen for radio, that leaves one share each for television and online writing. If three for radio, then one of the others can have two shares, either television or radio. Here are some examples of the proportions: If you had 4 shares of words, the wordcount would be 4 times 1,250 , which is 5000. Then radio would be one share (three minutes) and television one share (two minutes). Here are examples changing the ratios: R (1) + TV (3) + Words (2) Radio would be three mins, television six mins, (3 x 2) and online 2500 words. (1250 x 2) R (2) + TV (3) + words (1) R (3) + TV (3) + words (0) - disallowed R (3) + TV (2) + words (1) R (3) + TV (1) + words (2) Here are some general rules: Anything (3) leaves the rest 2:1 Anything (2) leaves the rest 2:2 ; or 3:1 Anything (1) leaves the others any division of 5 i.e. 4:1; or 3:2 Here is the full set of ratios of 6 in 3 parts. 1:1:4 1:2:3 1:3:2 1:4:1 2:1:3 2:2:2 2:3:1 3:1:2 3:2:1 4:1:1 Here are the maximum amounts: TV x (4) = 8 mins of TV Radio x (4) = 12 mins of radio Online x (4) = 5000 words Marking criteria: Interest and ambition of the project Investigative scope of the project Accuracy, reliability, and balance (core skills - 30%) Range of sources and interviewees Depth of research Ability to sustain interest Suitability for a defined market (though this market may not be addressed by existing media) Aptness of media used, ie radio, television or words Understanding conventions of video, radio, and writing Imagination in combining media and sources Use of links to other websites and information (NB - link to specific pages) Usabilty (See Neilsen) 30 Percent of the marks go on the overall viability and effectiveness of the site, including the 'feel', navigation, story, and presentation. 70 percent is allocated to the journalism, according to the media proportions you chose. Thus the video will carry most weight on a site using principally video. You can use up to ten percent of material not created by you in any media (eg video footage from another source). If you publish on Youtube it still counts as your video. External server usage does not escape the volume and quantity counts. 70 percent is allocated to the journalism, according to the media proportions you chose. Thus the video will carry most weight on a site using principally video. You can use up to ten percent of material not created by you in any media (eg video footage from another source) Links The content of external links do not count in the wordcount, but the words about the linked pages on your website do count. If you start a blog, this does not count in the wordcount unless you are carrying new information and stories on it. The blog can form an area for comment and opinion of your own (or others) about your site topic which is outside the wordcount. Any comments from outside parties - interactive - is outside the wordcount. The sites will not be marked for two weeks after the submission date. In this time, comment from outside parties and the public will be valid. Links can be in text, or to one side of a page, or both, or on a separate page. There are arguments for each method. The elemental difference between the web and other journalism is its ability to connect - don't waste this resource, use it to advantage if you can. For copyright reasons you may need to link to home pages of external sites. Don't forget that balance can apply as a principle to what external sites you link to, and beware propaganda and bias of outside sites. Any links to relevant other sites must work but their words will not count within your wordcount. There is nothing to stop you linking to other news sites and stories on your topic. Just because regular media do not do so is no reason to follow their example. The web is about links. Presentation formats: You would normally use Dreamweaver to make your site. Your website must be presented online but you should submit two CDs or DVDs of your published website at the time of submission. These may be used to check no alterations are made to the published site after uploading on deadline. Your website must be uploaded to: http://journalism.bournemouth.ac.uk/yourinitial - no dot - your second name. This server can ONLY be accessed from the campus so all final work has to be launched from a computer on the campus network. You must state the number of the computer you use and with your submission, along with the target audience, state the file name of the Dreamweaver site and the folder it is in and the drive. Should there be a server crash, your work can then be marked on the computer of origin. If you upload from your own laptop (this may be possible but no guarantees) you risk a marking problem if CDs and the server fail. N.B. We do not permit work to be uploaded to any other server. It would not be marked if this were the case. Risk assessment The handbook contains the risk assessment policy of the MAMMJ course. If any potential risk is identified it MUST be discussed with a tutor before the action is taken. If markers see a risk has been taken but not raised with a tutor, there could be a severe marking penalty. Risks apply to others you may affect as well as to yourself as a journalist. There are risk assessment forms at the Production Support Desk if you need to fill one in. This covers your back as well as the tutors' so long as you take the advice given by a tutor and have acted reasonably at all time taking account of foreseen and unforeseen circumstances. Do not empower or entice others to take risks on your behalf. Note Experience shows that words dominate a website whatever the proportions of media used. They give direction, navigation and coherence, so great attention should be paid to how they promote the overall sense and interpretation of your project. The sense of authorship, the 'voice' of the site, lives mostly in its verbal content.