Fortunately at DW Akademie we have access to professional equipment for training courses and are very well supported by our technical staff.

But along with bringing training equipment such as VJ camcorders, laptops or audio recorders, packing a few travel-size gadgets can help trouble-shoot problems you might encounter during courses and help your participants.

For onMedia, journalism trainer Guy Degen opens up his grab bag of gadgets to make training and life a little bit easier on the road.

The Basics

Each training course is different. I usually add or swap items to suit conditions in different countries. For example, adapters for different power sockets, or a shortwave radio or a torch.

But what you see below forms the basic kit of gadgets I take with me for most training workshops.

Category 5 ethernet cable

Ethernet cables are great when they work. But think how often you’ve stared at either a broken cable in your training room or the cable in your hotel room looks like a dog has chewed it. Oh, and of course, hotel reception says another cable is not available and there’s no WiFi.

So whether it’s a short or a long cable, having a length of standard category 5 ethernet cable can get you or your participants online quickly. A longer cable is useful for stringing up a mosquito net, too!

WiFi mini-router

I always bring a small router with me to create a WiFi network. This one from TP Link can connect several devices simultaneously and has literally saved online or mobile journalism workshops when our internet connection has died. You can create a WiFi network either by plugging-in a 3G/4G USB dongle with a local SIM card to access mobile internet, or you can plug in a LAN ethernet cable.

It draws power from a standard USB cable so you can plug it into a computer or phone charger.

I also use a portable MiFi hotspot but the TP Link can also be used on the go with a portable battery pack.

To find out more about this mini-router read an earlier onMedia blog post.

Portable speaker

Speakers come in all shapes and sizes. Lately I’ve settled on the Bang from Nokia. It’s compact, runs for hours, charges up from a micro-USB cable and the volume fills a big room sufficiently. (HT @chippy).

Audio splitter

I bring a few of these with me for training workshops. They’re cheap. If you have participants working in pairs, an audio splitter comes in handy for them to review/log recordings together.

Rechargeable power pack

A small rechargeable power pack is great for traveling to charge up phones and gadgets on the go. I usually take the PowerMonkey Explorer with me. It will recharge a mobile phone to about 75%. It comes with loads of adapters to fit almost any type of phone and other small electronic devices. If you’re going really off the beaten track, but at least somewhere sunny, the Explorer also comes with a solar panel to (slowly) recharge the power pack.

Multi-card reader

SD, micro-SD or compact flash card? If training participants bring their own equipment, who knows what sort of card they are using for storage? A multi-card reader is always good to have with you.

Pocket tripod

I quite often record video with my smartphone or a small point and shoot camera during a workshop. It might be to record an invited guest who offers a press conference style Q&A, or it might be to film a roleplaying exercise with participants.

Having a pocket-size tripod like the Joby Micro helps make recording a lot easier.

Tripod mount adapter

Of course if you want to record video with a smartphone you need a tripod and a tripod mount adapter. Check out an earlier post that reviewed the Glif (pictured here) and the Shoulderpod S1. Both are excellent, but the slender Glif takes up less room in the kit bag.

Power surge protector

Power supply can be erratic in many countries. A surge protector is an inexpensive way to help prevent important equipment such as a laptop getting fried when the power suddenly comes back on.

Travel coffee press

I’ll gladly swap my double-espresso for a pot of Arabic-style coffee or Vietnamese drip-filter brew, but I draw the line at getting my caffeine fix from a tin of instant coffee. You can find a number small travel coffee presses online. This one is getting on in years, but was the best 10 euros I ever spent. Combined with some fresh-roasted coffee, your co-trainers will thank you for ever. I guarantee it!

Extras

If you’ve worked with me then you’ll know that I have literally every cable known to man. But here are a few extra cables and adapters that I usually bring with me.

VGA & HDMI adapters

I use my iPhone a lot as a training tool – both for screening examples and demonstrating photo and video skills. These adapters are excellent for plugging my iPhone into a large screen TV via HDMI or into a projector via a VGA connection.

If my computer crashes, it’s always good to know I can still screen examples and presentations saved on my iPhone or Dropbox account.

Micro-USB cable

I normally have a standard USB cable on hand, but there’s always one participant who forgets to bring their micro-USB cable to charge their mobile phone. Having one of these is an easy way to make a participant very happy.

3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been given a set of computer speakers from a partner organization to use in training only to find the audio cable is broken or not working very well. Bring your own as a back-up.

The Bag

And finally, you need a bag for all of the gadgets, cables and adapters. I use tough and transparent nylon mesh bags from Muji. They are very robust and security people at airports can see what’s inside without having to unpack everything.

Author: Guy Degen, edited by Kyle James

Here’s what I mean. An article in the Economist magazine back in 2007 spoke of a boom in journalism training in developing countries. The article raised a number of points that should grab the attention of any journalism trainer or project manager:

 “The need for basic reporting skills is still central.”

“Participants in the courses praise the results, while complaining about the lack of focus and co-ordination among some providers.”

“More is not always better. Quality varies wildly.”

“Some courses aspire loftily to build democratic societies through a free press.”

Seven years on, some of those points might sound familiar to you or even appear on your course evaluation forms. So whether you’re training journalists or working in other areas related to media development such as press freedom, community media, access to information or digital innovation, it would be worth reading the recently published research papers below.

Perhaps just as important, we can continue to ask ourselves: what’s working?, what’s not working?, and what more needs to be done in this field?

UNESCO

World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development

This recently published UNESCO study is the summary report on the global state of press freedom and the safety of journalists, presented to the UNESCO Member States in 2013. It takes a look at evolutions in media freedom, independence, pluralism and journalist safety.

If you’re a newly minted trainer, this study would be recommended reading to get a sense of global media trends. The WAN-IFRA blog has also curated a “list of the top ten trends identified in the UNESCO report”. A useful starting point, too.  

Center for International Media Assistance

Journalism Training in the Digital Era: Views From the Field

This is a timely study that should give a lot of trainers and project managers pause for thought – especially if you’re involved in training projects where there is a focus on developing new digital skills and platforms.

The report looks at the rise of digital media training and some of “the pitfalls in the rush” to it. It considers a number of cautionary questions such as: “are we being dazzled by the ‘shiny toys’ of digital media”; and, “are we mistakenly assuming that the problems Western media have faced are the same ones facing the media elsewhere?”

DW Akademie

Media Freedom Indices: What They Tell Us – And What They Don’t

The next time you talk about press freedom rankings in a training workshop, consider this: are those rankings objective? Media researcher Laura Schneider has taken a close look at how organizations such as Freedom House and Reporters without Borders produce their ratings. Schneider’s biggest criticism is that the ratings aren’t objective. She argues that they’re often being carried out by a handful of academics or media experts who are mostly from western countries. This inevitably results in bias, especially as the majority of the ranking organizations fail to state their exact definition of media freedom.

Media Freedom Indices is a practical guidebook and provides an overview of the most important details we should keep in mind when using or evaluating existing media freedom indicators. The infographic on page 11 that neatly summarizes how organizations determine their rankings is an excellent resource, too.

You can also read more about Laura Schneider’s extensive research into media freedom indices in a previous onMedia blog post.  

Knight Foundation

Knight News Challenge: A look at what we’ve learned

Since it started in 2006, the Knight News Challenge has provided more than US$37 million to fund 111 projects in the United States and around the world. The Challenge has funded projects such as FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi’s Swift River. This study examines what contributes to successful media innovation projects.

It identifies 8 Lessons Learned including:

– “Measure success based on how funding improves the field, not just on the adoption or impact of individual projects”
– “Provide support, not just money”
– “Target a need you can feel”
– “Be open to ideas”.

If you’re involved in a training or media development project where innovation is the driving force, then this study will offer some essential points for consideration.

Author: Guy Degen

Image credit: Memory Andrew J Young, Noun Project CC BY 3.0

The benefits in training workshops are numerous:

– most blog platforms are free to use and useful for training the basics of writing for the web;
– a blog post can replicate a standard online article;
– a blog is an easy to use, creative digital space;
– trainees can experiment with embedding multimedia and even adjusting html code;
– and, particularly for print journalists moving to digital media, the CMS of a blog often functions in a similar way to the CMS of a news media website.

However, if you’ve ever shown trainees examples of scrolling style stories such as the NYT’s Game of Sharks and Minnows or the Guardian’s Firestorm, you’ll often hear the question: how can we produce the scrolling style, especially for long form writing such as magazine style feature stories?

I usually point out the obvious, explaining that blogs do in fact let you scroll down the page. And depending on the level of experience of the participants, I might also suggest storytelling applications that onMedia has tested such as Creatavist.

But more so these days, particularly if I’m training short workshops, I like to introduce trainees to Medium – the blog platform developed by Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams.

Why Medium for training?

Using Medium, trainees get simple, yet very visually pleasing results, very quickly. And that can be hugely beneficial when trying to get your workshop participants enthusiastic about experimenting with new ways of storytelling.

Medium offers a simple blog design that lends itself to long format writing. Think magazine style features for example. You could say it does one thing very well. If your trainees have a story that observes the basics of good writing for the web and includes at least one strong image, then Medium’s design and layout enables them to produce a visually attractive piece, fast.

Opening an account is free and easy. All trainees need to do is log-in with a Twitter or Facebook account and literally start writing.

If all goes well you’ll usually hear a few “Aha’s!” and see some smiles from participants as they start to add text and images and scroll down their story.

Working in the Medium editor is very much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). You immediately see what your story is going to look like. There’s no going back and forth between edit and preview/publish modes as I’m doing right now writing this post on WordPress.

Embedding images or other shareable media such as video, audio, tweets or ThingLink images is straightforward – just a quick cut and paste of the hyperlink or html code into the desired location marked with a ⊕ will bring up the embed options.

Saving is automated (see top left of page in editing mode) which hopefully should mean no tears in class because someone has lost their work.

Medium also uses fonts that are well suited to reading on the web and mobile displays: FF Meta Serif and Myriad. Some might argue that’s a limitation, but it does mean you’re less likely to have a workshop participant publish their story in something completely inappropriate such as ComicSans!

Once you’ve published your story, you can group stories together under collections. For workshops, this is a useful function as you can make a collection of everyone’s stories. Don’t forget to add tags which make it easier for a story to be discovered and read by other users on Medium. It is after all a community of users that appreciate good writing.

And, Medium stories can be embedded into other websites and most blogs. Click on the example below and scroll down to find the embed option “…”at the bottom right of the story.

Keeping it simple

Medium is not a blog platform that you can customize with all the bells and whistles such as WordPress.

It’s not going to appeal to everyone, nor will it lend itself to every type of story.

But what Medium excels at doing is providing a simple editing interface and publishing platform. For more advanced trainees (there’s always one!) with a good knowledge of HMTL, Svblte might be appealing as an alternative blog platform to Medium that offers a similar clean magazine style of design and layout.

As with all free to use platforms, it’s worth reminding your trainees that a change in ownership or lack of funding could result in the service being discontinued and their precious work disappearing. (It does happen – Posterous was a popular blog site that had its demise in 2013). From the settings, you can export Medium stories as a zip file.

Author: Guy Degen

CC image courtesy of victoriapeckham on Flickr

Many traditional newspaper publishers have completely restructured their newsrooms so that their print and online departments now work together. The way that they have done though varies enormously. In some, print and online journalists work side by side; in others, there is no distinction between the two departments at all.

Klaus Meier is a German media expert who has been closely observing exactly how media organizations are integrating their newsrooms. Together with researchers from Spain and Austria, Meier first published a detailed analysis of newsroom convergence in 2008. The team have done a follow up study this year.

DW Akademie’s Steffen Leidel talked to Klaus Meier about what newsrooms look like today and what these changes mean for the journalism of the future.

What are the main differences you found in how newsrooms are converging?

The fully integrated newsroom model completely brings together print and online as well as other digital platforms. It is also very strongly section orientated which means the sections determine the content for the various platforms. As such, the sections function as a type of central desk – they control the work flow, produce content across the various media and determine what goes online. An additional central desk is only for breaking news and news prioritizing.

In the cross-media model, online and print are strictly separated but cooperate closely. This cooperation is ultimately controlled by a highly integrated unit – which has various names such as the newsdesk, the multimedia manager or the multimedia editor. Their function is to see where and print and online can work together and how can they benefit from each other.

Social media tends to be used differently in the two models and this can help understand the difference. In the integrated model, it is the journalists themselves who use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to distribute their stories, collect comments and start discussions. In the cross-media model, it is very much the social media editor who coordinates this. Online journalists will be more likely to use social media and print journalists less likely but it is the social media editors who will have more say in this area.

In this day and age, does it make any sense to still differentiate between print and online journalists?

In the fully integrated model, distinctions between print and online are deliberately avoided and all journalists produce content for all platforms. That means journalists have to keep all of the possible platforms in mind when they are doing their stories and some of this content is then used to for the newspaper.

However, there are also good arguments for keeping a distinction between print and online. Online is a new medium that is rapidly developing and these developments require continuous innovation. It can be difficult to innovate though if staff are tied to meeting daily multiple deadlines. And therefore you could argue that you need to have online journalists who are not only on top of the latest developments but also have the time to stay on top of them so it is better for them to be able to act independently. If a newsroom doesn’t have an online unit, it at least should set up a research and development unit.

What skills do journalists need so that converged newsrooms function well?

It really depends on what kind of newsroom model you have. In the integrated model, ideally all journalists should know how to tell stories online, how to use all of the digital platforms and be proficient in using social media. In addition, journalists also need to be familiar with new technologies and software – for example, print journalists need to know how to use a video camera or how to tell stories using slideshows. In practice though, not all journalists have to be able do everything. Really what is important is finding a team that can cooperate to produce such stories.

So an integrated newsroom means more cooperation and more teamwork?

It’s been obvious for a long time that these new newsrooms require more teamwork. Previously, journalists were so-called “lonely riders” who researched stories and published them under their own byline. This idea of individual authorship is now being superseded by the idea of teamwork and openness. Newsrooms are becoming transparent in that journalists put all their materials into story folders that can be accessed by every other journalist in the newsroom. This idea that it’s a team which researches and exchanges ideas about stories is changing the work culture of journalism.

You’ve been involved in teaching journalism at university for many years. What do all these changes mean for journalism education and training?

That is something we’ve been discussing for many years. In the 1990s, for example, journalism students learned how to do radio and television but they learned these as two separate skills and not in cross-media projects. I think at the very beginning it is still necessary to learn the basic skills of each platform independently from other platforms. But then journalism training needs to incorporate a second step where students practice using these skills cross-medially – for example by telling a complex story in different ways. Because it is only by actually doing it that they get a sense of how to tell a story on various platforms and what type of content is appropriate for each platform.

Journalism schools seem to offer everything though at the moment, from data journalism and VJ training to social media management and community management. Do you have any tips for young journalists trying to decide what they should study?

I think students should know how to do a bit of everything but they have to decide for themselves what they would like to specialize in. There are still students out there who only want to work in TV. If that is the case, then we should make sure that they also know to write a good story for online and radio. So my advice would be to generalize at the beginning of your studies, have a go at everything and try to be proficient in all areas. But then decide where your speciality is and go deeper in story-telling for one platform.

What direction do you think the media is going to take in the future?

I think mobile journalism will develop rapidly in the next two to four years. For example, in Germany, one in five Internet users now has a tablet computer and two out of three have either a smartphone or a tablet, or both. This is an enormous potential market for innovative journalism products. And perhaps this will lead to new business models where users are prepared to pay more for media content. At the moment I am still skeptical about the apps on the market because most of them don’t offer a great deal of additional benefit to users compared to the open web. But I think there is great potential and we’ll see many new technical developments for new kinds of devices that are even easier to use, cheaper and more suitable for the mass market.

Technology is becoming increasingly important but media organizations are finding it difficult to have these kind of technology skills in house. What kind of difference is this making?

Newspaper publishers always used to have their technology – the printing press – under their roof. Now technology is outsourced and it’s the Internet providers and computer companies that are earning money with technology. That is a huge problem and I don’t have a solution. But newsrooms should have some kind of innovation or development department which is removed from the daily production schedule and which spends its time exploring the new devices coming out on the market and the kind of technology these devices use. So my advice is to bring journalists and technical developers together. And secondly, media organizations need to redevelop or renew their content management system so that they can use new media and diverse publication channels in a more flexible way.

Dr Klaus Meier holds the chair for “journalism studies I” at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany. His research explores editorial management, innovations in newsrooms, convergence, online journalism, science journalism and journalism education.

Add extra layers of information to images by adding links.

Thinglink lets you embed “tags” – hyperlinks and text – into images. If you have a great photograph or image you can add a link to another photo, or a website, or video clip, or audio clip – literally anything. It’s a very useful tool for creating simple pieces of interactive media to compliment a story or to use as a basic story platform. This tool is always a winner with participants in online journalism workshops. As we roll our mouse over a “tag” revealing a link to another piece of media, there is usually a collective “Aha!” from participants. And if you’re a regular reader of onMedia, you’ve probably noticed that we like to use this tool a lot.

In a much cited example here in Germany, the Berliner Morgenpost used ThingLink very effectively with a photograph of the White House Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. The icons identify who was in the room and provide relevant links.

ThingLink is used by a number of leading media houses in different ways. For example, take a look at how the Washington Post uses ThingLink for interactive frontpages.

How can journalists use ThingLink?

Open up a newspaper or magazine and you’ll often see that print media uses the classic technique of pointing to objects within an image to identify them for readers, or to perhaps offer a brief explanation of their purpose.

With ThingLink you can do the same, and more. Simply press “Create” and upload an image to the site in JPEG or PNG format.

Once an image is uploaded, the ThingLink “Editor” dashboard opens and allows you to add an “icon” to the image for users to roll over or click on. You can simply add text the “Description” box and/or add a hyperlink to more content.

There is also “Search” bar to find relevant links to media hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Amazon and Etsy.

Take a look at the example below we produced for a blog post on mobile journalism equipment.

Earlier this year ThingLink released a free iPhone application making an interesting app for journalists to produce interactive media on the road.

Within your account, ThingLink also provides useful statistics for your image.

What else should journalists know about ThingLink?

Image sizes: ThingLink scales images down to 1024px. The largest file you can upload is 25MB. If you upload an image less than 130x130px then the editor will not open.

And don’t forget, you can also upload GIFs.

Cost: Free. Publishers can opt for an upgrade version.

Sharing: You can embed ThingLink images and there are options to share to blogs and social media networks including: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Edmodo, Google+, Pinterest. This blog post from ThingLink also lets you see how tags from a range of media will display on an image.

ThingLink images also play directly in Twitter and Facebook timelines.

Languages: According to their FAQ’s, ThingLink is available several languages including: English, Finnish, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Hindi.

Author: Guy Degen