My office

Kerckhoff Carriage House
725 W. 27th Street


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(West of Fig, north side of street, almost all the way toward the end of the street. The Early Childhood Development Center is located next door.)
Street parking.
Ring the bell at the door for entry. My office is at the top of the stairs, room 201.
My phone number is on the syllabus.

Tools for the final project

Free, hosted online forum tools:

InvisionFree

ProBoards

ForumsPlace

The following also support forums, as well additional, social-networking-style functions:

Ning

Yuku

Online comments, ratings and polls:

Haloscan

Embedded online polls:

Twiigs

Flash photo galleries and photo storage:

Picasa

Online video hosting:

Blip.tv

YouTube

Mapping:

Google Maps

Reading and assignment: Career advice for journalists

Five reading assignments, for those folks who missed today's class discussion:

Keeping your job in journalism

Encourage entrepreneurship in your newsroom; don't kill it

Buying in, not selling out

Go to the Web, young journalist!

How to make money on your news content website

Of course, if you were there today, these make for good reading, as well.

The assignment for this week is not for your blog, but for the class e-mail list. Post to the list by Sunday a note describing your strategy for getting work and pursuing your career after graduation. You are invited to respond to the list with your thoughts about other classmates' strategies, as well.

(I'll be reading all the e-mails, and will return comments and grades on Tuesday.)

Next blog assignment

Here is the cheat sheet with the step-by-step instructions on how to find, sort, group and report top campaign contributors, using Microsoft Access.

Your blog assignment for this week is to find the top 10 individual contributors to federal political campaigns during the current election cycle in either:

your home zip code, or

a profession related to your blog.

If you select the second option, you should also restrict your report to people within a certain geographic area, such as California.

Post the results to your blog, and attribute the data. Write the post up as a blog brief; don't just post the data without context or explanation. If the top contributor is someone that you suspect I haven't heard of before, do a little research and write in the entry a sentence or two explaining who that person is.

Assignments for 2/19

Since the lab has limited hours over the weekend, the video blog assignment will be due at class time, on Tuesday, Feb. 19, at 9 a.m.

Here are the reading assignments for next week's class:

www.robertniles.com/stats

Snopes.com

Here is the OJR guide to shooting video for the Web.

And here are the two multimedia packages we looked at in class today: Not Just a Number and Everest: Beyond the Limit

Uploading to YouTube

Here is the USC Annenberg Digital Lab's instructions on configuring Avid to export a video for upload to YouTube.

Also, here are several sites you can use to create embedded Flash photo galleries for your blog:

Photobucket

Slide

SnapFish

Webshots

Your call on which service works best for you.

Week two reading assignment

Your reading assignments for this week provide an introduction to Hypertext Markup Language [HTML].

http://www.robertniles.com/html/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Overview.html
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style.html