Here are some dumpster locations I found on the freegan.info dumpster directory. This is part of a final project that will be posted by next week.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Q&A with Aaron Lewis, a Video Journalist for SBS Dateline Australia
Aaron Lewis reports and shoots video documentaries from around the world for the Australian news outlet SBS Dateline. Since joining the team at Dateline in 2005, he has covered important news events such as Hurricane Katrina and the funeral of the first American soldiers killed in Iraq.
Lewis says that how he got started doing work in journalism was “sort of by accident.” Lewis started working with a hand held video camera and making films when he was only 14. After studying cinematography and politics, he started his career as a filmmaker in Toronto, Canada where he also dabbled in making music videos before switching to making journalistic documentaries.
His work as a filmmaker for both fiction and documentary films have gained international acclaim. Right now he is a finalist for the Walkley Award for excellence in Social Equity Journalism for a chilling documentary aired last April on the skin trade in Tanzania.
In this interview Lewis talks about the changes he's seen in the industry, such as the increase of backpack journalism and the ethical issues at the heart of video journalism.
Q&AHow has the industry changed since you started working as a journalist?
The industry has changed enormously in the last eight or nine years. The development of broadcast quality small cameras has really altered how a lot work is done and certainly the traditional, especially in current affairs television which is what I do a lot my work in.
The days of having a producer, a reporter, a cameraman and a sound person, that’s increasingly rare at this point. And the development of quite hi-quality small cameras from originally the PD150 sort of in the late 90’s which was the first Sony prosumer, as it was called, video camera and to now being able to shoot with full HD cameras like the EX1 has changed dramatically and there’s been a growing acceptance of the one-man-band style of production.
That has both benefits and costs I think that in terms of the kinds of stories that are done there when it’s a single-person crew there’s an intimacy to it, but you also have a corresponding loss of production quality which I think effects everybody. I think in some ways everyone mourns the loss a little bit of higher budget four-person crews doing works and as single-person crews have taken over, budgets have been cut back and more has been done for less and I think that there have been losses in a sense.
But having said that there’s a real intimacy and increased access when its just one person. One person can go in quietly and get to know the subjects, be unobtrusive and really get to the heart of the story in a way that I think larger crews would struggle to do.
How do you do your job differently?
I like my independence quite a lot and I like being able to work on my own. There is the advantage that I grew up doing everything myself so I didn’t have to acquire those skills. I think it’s more difficult for somebody who, for instance lets say a news producer that works with on hand on the camera and all of sudden put them in the field as a shooter as well.
I think that’s a real challenge and I think that doesn’t work as well as one might like. But personally it’s a mode of production that I’ve always worked in. I really like the independence I have and the freedom I have to tell the story how I want to tell it.
So it was a more smooth transition for you then other people in the industry?
There really was no transition for me I’ve always made both fiction films and documentary films in the same mode since I was very young you know, with a hand-held camera and some basic editing software. For me it was a very natural thing to do. I was lucky that the industry sort of grew up around something I was already doing.
What ethical issues have you encountered getting footage but also producing it for television and the Web?
There are all kinds of ethical issues. The biggest ethical issue of making documentary film is balancing the needs of the story and the truth of the story with the reality that the characters while participating are real people with real lives and that your work will have consequence their life. And trying to make sure in the process of selecting only a few grabs, only a few interview moments and contrasting them with other characters that you do justice to the people who are participating in your work.
I think that is always the biggest ethical challenge all the way through.
Photo Courtesy of SBS Dateline Australia.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Blog for possible Andy Award videos - Watch Em'
Okay, so I want to steer you in the direction of a blog called Andy Potential. It's basically a daily updated reel of video advertisements freshly put out by all kinds of brands such as Adidas, Audi, and the Vancouver Int. Film Festival to name a few.
Rob Schwartz is the creator and also a nominee for the Andy Awards 2010. His blog uses very little text, just a few snappy taglines about each video, and pools together some of the best advertisements I've seen. In a superficial way they touch on some things we've talked about in my online journalism class.
This is the first video I saw and also how I discovered the blog. I embedded it off Youtube, but I there's links to videos on his blog which range from the Denny's Nannerpus to an ad for the new Augmented Reality Smart Grid (Check it out!).
What does this have to do with my online journalism class? Three things:
1) Video is always a good element to a journalism story
2) Separate PR from your journalistic endeavors
3) Keep text concise and to the point
Rob Schwartz is the creator and also a nominee for the Andy Awards 2010. His blog uses very little text, just a few snappy taglines about each video, and pools together some of the best advertisements I've seen. In a superficial way they touch on some things we've talked about in my online journalism class.
This is the first video I saw and also how I discovered the blog. I embedded it off Youtube, but I there's links to videos on his blog which range from the Denny's Nannerpus to an ad for the new Augmented Reality Smart Grid (Check it out!).
What does this have to do with my online journalism class? Three things:
1) Video is always a good element to a journalism story
2) Separate PR from your journalistic endeavors
3) Keep text concise and to the point
Friday, October 2, 2009
2016 Rio Olympic Reaction
The moment when the winner of the 2016 Olympics was announced. Scenes of Rio celebrating gives a taste of what their Olympic slogan "Time To Light Olympic Cauldron In A Tropical Country," promises for 2016.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
2016 Olympic Bid Announcement: Media Coverage in Chicago
Chicago news media will be covering the 2016 Olympic bid decision and posting stories from national and international outlets, as well as Chicago based media and social media sites today.
Coverage of 2016 Olympic bid will be updated throughout the day. Check back later for more stories and updates.
The Washington Post - Morning Fix: An Olympic Boom or Bust?
Chicago Blogs and Social Media
Windy Citizen - Watch the Live Stream of the Olympic Decision in Copenhagen
Chicagoist - Today's Weather: Olympian
BreakingTweets - Support for 2016 Olympic varies in each bid city
Mashups: A Journalist's Web Tool
Journalists nowadays can save some time doing research with clever web tools like mashups. What does a mashup site do? What kind of information can you find on them? And how is it helpful for journalists?
First I’ll tell you briefly how they work. Websites use software that goes out and “scraps” other websites for truckloads of any kind of information you can find on the Web. A good example of where content might come from would be the immeasurable amounts of data generated by government run research sites. Next that data, collected from many different sources, databases, web pages etc., is quite literally “mashed” together and archived so that users can then go in and do a simple search for particular kinds of information. This is a quicker more direct alternative to a Google search if you know what kind of info you’re looking for.
Ever wonder how active your city is politically on a national level? Okay, that’s not a simple question to answer or measure, but mashup sites are helpful in finding pieces of evidence to help journalists write a more complete story.
I visited the popular mashup site, This We Know and in about two minutes, I found out that the city of Chicago has introduced 16 bills since 1993 from 16 different members of Congress. Apparently a lot more than my hometown, San Francisco has with 10 bills introduced since 1993 from 5 members of Congress.
This We Know collects, organizes and makes freely available all information that the government collects about your community. Statemaster, another site, has a similar idea, scrapping together all information about the US organized by state. That might give you a clue to what information you can find on these sites and how they can be used by journalists.
Another useful tool to use is Datamasher, a site that actually enables users to do the mashing themselves. On their site you can visualize through interactive maps how the 50 states compare on important issues such as taxation, health, education, you get to choose.
For example here is a mashup map called "Driving Us to Drink" that was created by a user then posted on the site, comparing tax revenue per capita and alcohol consumption/binge drinking.
It’s interesting to see how mashups have contributed to political journalism. I think these sites are a very powerful tool because they equip individual people, whether they are journalists or not, to be fact-checkers.
Influential mashup site, Politifact, won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and public service for coverage of the 2008 elections. A main feature on the site are truth-o-meters displayed next to statements made by politicians indicating whether they are “true,” “mostly-true,” “barely true,” all the way to “false.” This is a new twist on journalism, but most definitely a good one.
First I’ll tell you briefly how they work. Websites use software that goes out and “scraps” other websites for truckloads of any kind of information you can find on the Web. A good example of where content might come from would be the immeasurable amounts of data generated by government run research sites. Next that data, collected from many different sources, databases, web pages etc., is quite literally “mashed” together and archived so that users can then go in and do a simple search for particular kinds of information. This is a quicker more direct alternative to a Google search if you know what kind of info you’re looking for.
Ever wonder how active your city is politically on a national level? Okay, that’s not a simple question to answer or measure, but mashup sites are helpful in finding pieces of evidence to help journalists write a more complete story.
I visited the popular mashup site, This We Know and in about two minutes, I found out that the city of Chicago has introduced 16 bills since 1993 from 16 different members of Congress. Apparently a lot more than my hometown, San Francisco has with 10 bills introduced since 1993 from 5 members of Congress.
This We Know collects, organizes and makes freely available all information that the government collects about your community. Statemaster, another site, has a similar idea, scrapping together all information about the US organized by state. That might give you a clue to what information you can find on these sites and how they can be used by journalists.
Another useful tool to use is Datamasher, a site that actually enables users to do the mashing themselves. On their site you can visualize through interactive maps how the 50 states compare on important issues such as taxation, health, education, you get to choose.
For example here is a mashup map called "Driving Us to Drink" that was created by a user then posted on the site, comparing tax revenue per capita and alcohol consumption/binge drinking.
It’s interesting to see how mashups have contributed to political journalism. I think these sites are a very powerful tool because they equip individual people, whether they are journalists or not, to be fact-checkers.
Influential mashup site, Politifact, won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and public service for coverage of the 2008 elections. A main feature on the site are truth-o-meters displayed next to statements made by politicians indicating whether they are “true,” “mostly-true,” “barely true,” all the way to “false.” This is a new twist on journalism, but most definitely a good one.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Recent Lincoln Park Muggings
Think twice about walking home to save money after going to the bars if you live in Lincoln Park or Lakeview. You'd better take a cab. A recent string of violent muggings, leaving two victims hospitalized have drawn a lot of attention to the usually low-crime neighborhood.
Police believe four of the attacks are linked. All the victims were on men in there early to mid-20's walking alone. The first of these attacks took place July 30 at the 600 Block of Fullerton Pkwy at 2am only a few blocks from Depaul University student housing. The men were approached from behind by at least four attackers also all men in their early 20's. Victims were asked for their wallet then severely beaten in the head and face.
Police are investigating a few other incidences in the area to see if they are related as well.
Check out the map below of the last seven attacks taken place in the Lincoln Park area in late July and early August.
If your interested in finding out more about the attacks and what police have said, try looking at some of Chicago's hyperlocal news sites linked in this site.
Police believe four of the attacks are linked. All the victims were on men in there early to mid-20's walking alone. The first of these attacks took place July 30 at the 600 Block of Fullerton Pkwy at 2am only a few blocks from Depaul University student housing. The men were approached from behind by at least four attackers also all men in their early 20's. Victims were asked for their wallet then severely beaten in the head and face.
Police are investigating a few other incidences in the area to see if they are related as well.
Check out the map below of the last seven attacks taken place in the Lincoln Park area in late July and early August.
If your interested in finding out more about the attacks and what police have said, try looking at some of Chicago's hyperlocal news sites linked in this site.
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