Immersive videos

I wonder if online journalists are investigating the possibilities of this kind of innovative videos. These videos make it possible to pan across the 360° view. Not only useful for sports coverage, but in my opnion for almost every story that deserves a video. Until today, the multimedia features of the online news stay rather traditional. If online news want to be really innovative, they can start using this feature. Wonder which online news medium will be the first to use this kind of videos and how long it will take.

Ps. the picture is the camera used for the immersive videos. Looks expensive to me!

JOSTA: Journalism Studies Antwerp

Few days ago, we opened the JOSTA research platform at the Lessius University College. JOSTA, which stands for JOurnalism STudies Antwerp, is the research group of the Master in Journalism. One of the interesting things at JOSTA is the JOSTA-lab which makes it possible to study and analyse the production and reception of traditional and online news media. I'm looking forward to use this lab for all kinds of studies..

Visited the Netherlands

Three weeks ago, I visited the Netherlands for three days. On the first day, I gave three guest courses at the University of Leiden in the bachelor and master of the department of linguistics (option: journalism and new media). One of the three was a seminar about my Ph.D., more precisely about how we should consider and study the internet. It was a pleasure for me visiting this university and giving these three lectures, especially because the students seemed to be very interested and kept on asking questions afterwords. I don't want to speak in stereotypes, but this experience learned me that students in the Netherlands are totally different (read: more assertive) from those in Flanders. I also want to thank the collegues for giving me a pleasant stay. Funny detail: I slept in this hotel, which is the same hotel where Mark Deuze stays when visiting Leiden for his courses.

The day after, I travelled to Groningen where I gave two parallel workshops about CAR (Computer Assisted reporting) at the VVOJ Conference. The subject of my workshop was 'finding people with the use of social media' (download powerpoint here). Both workshops where 'sold out' which made it extra pleasant. The day after, I sat for about 8 hours on a train from Groningen to Antwerp, which wasn't pleasant at all ;-)

What's another message?

Today, one can read two messages about the same subject on HLN.be about the fact that a desk job increases the risk to get cancer. Not only the fact that the two messages tell more or less the same story based on the same study of prof. Hamilton, also the fact that these two messages are located near each other on the website surprises me. Indeed, it happens sometimes that in a print paper, two messages about the same subject are presented, but most of the times, this happens when a short message about for example a transfer of a soccer player is announced on the general sports pages and the same transfer is covered on the regional pages with more background and an interview. But in this specefic case, or the webmaster, or the journalist(s) should have seen that the (same) story was already on the news website and that it would be better to delete one of the messages. The fact that this didn't happened is perhaps because of the stories are written by tho different journalists (bf) and (edp) and that maybe the two stories were uploaded at the same moment. Does this also mean that two different journalists are paid to tell the same story?

UPDATE: during the writing of this blogpost, HLN.be has deleted one of the messages. And no, I didn't call them ;-)

The risk of using Youtube movies

Using Youtube movies to illustrate or cover a news story online, can be of great value ... except when the movie isn't available anymore like in this example. The problem with online movies is that the control over content is no longer with the journalists but in the hands of the user who can choose to withdraw his/her movie from the youtube platform.