report
CS8803 - Computational Journalism
Assignment-1
Ellie Harmon & Roma Kane
Reflection paper on the experience
New technology such as mobile phones equipped with video cameras have changed the way news are collected and reported. These devices are easy to use and ubiquitous resulting in digitally documented breaking stories. Also most of the people are constantly connected through their mobile phones and laptops, resulting in immediate uploading of photos, videos and breaking news to news organization websites. News organizations such as CNN and MSNBC have recognized the importance of this technology and the role of "Citizen Journalism" in reporting news stories. However, when citizens are responsible for reporting, there is always the question of validation. When blogs are used for reporting, validation is done by people who are regular visitors to the blog. This can be seen from the Wikipedia, individual pages are validated by people who visit the website for information. However, with the increasing number of blogs, one positive point is the different independent views, which result in more accurate and relevant information. But when news are uploaded to news organization websites, they need to be validated by the organization, since, for example, CNN is held accountable at a higher level than an individual reporting the story. An advantage of citizen journalism is that people tend to report on events or news they are close to or find relevant to themselves and the local community, events which normally would not have been reported or covered. Also, there is lack of experience as a journalist, which is something that we were faced with during this assignment.
One of the hardest part of the assignment was selection of the topic to report on. The assignment did not call for breaking news, which would have been in fact very difficult to prepare for, hence we decided to do a report on one of the marches scheduled in the Atlanta downtown area. However, the scheduled march did not attract large number of volunteers and hence proved to be less exciting to report. Our next idea was to do a story linked to the campus, however we did not find a suitable story on which a good multimedia report could be generated and also something that would affect a significant percentage of the student population. Finally, we decided to do a report on the Atlanta BeltLine. Since this was a story that has lately been in the news and would significantly affect the Atlanta community, and a story that would generate a good multimedia report, the BeltLine project was finalized. Hence one of the hardest part was deciding a report-worthy story.
On the other hand, one of the easiest part of the assignment would definitely be collecting (not reporting) the relevant information. Ellie has been an Atlantan for sometime now and was hence familiar with all the future "BeltLine Activity Centers". Hence navigating around the area to collect current images of the BeltLine areas was easy. Also the BeltLine Partnership organization, partly responsible for the project, responded to our emails and we had the opportunity to interview the "Project Director". However, as citizen journalists, we did not have the knowledge or access to interview other people. The BeltLine partnership was somewhat lucky with respect to our project. Because they are in the business of generating publicity and awareness of the project, and are looking for volunteers to get involved, they were excited to talk to college students who might be interested in continued work with the project and who would be sharing what they learned with other people. We did not, however, know how to go about finding someone to interview about the BeltLine who was less excited. We spoke to one employee of the bike store near Piedmont Park, but we were unable to talk to many people who might disagree with the TAD or new zoning overlays. In particular, this development could threaten the residents and business owners in Atlanta's poorer communities, although their voice is not well heard in this report. Developing the kinds of social networks and contacts to allow for more thorough reporting probably requires more time than a few weeks, as suggested by the speakers from CNN when they talked about knowing who in Baghdad they could trust with bringing them new "insider" and "local" information.
The easier part of collecting some of or information can also be attributed to the fact that we had decided beforehand on how we would generate and present the report. Since the BeltLine circles the city center, we decided it would be a good idea to represent the BeltLine and the associated current images that we took, on a Google map. This would give the audience a clear idea of the BeltLine, regarding its location, the train stops and also a feel of the current condition of the "activity centers". Also associated with the images, some quotes from Rob Brawner, the "Project Director" interview were also presented on Google Maps, so that the audience can associate the quotes with the area and visualize the location.
Assembling this data proved more challenging. We had a large number of pictures and a lengthy interview to combine into a coherent story. While we did record the interview, we decided that adding audio clips of the interview itself did not add much to the story, as Mr. Brawner spoke very quietly and the interview did not proceed in an order that matched our geography-oriented presentation. We are both amateurs in the web development field. We did not have the expertise to put together a flash website, but we were able to work with the well-documented Google Maps API and incorporate the LightBox javascript to make an interactive site with integrated images that would not have been possible with static HTML. Displaying simple tags on the Google Map proved relatively easy, although getting the images to work was a bit more difficult. For example, because of the way Google Maps works, generating the info windows on demand, the LightBox javascript that we wanted to use for the images did not work as it is supposed to. This took a lot of trial and error to understand, and many Google searches for help, because as a novice to web design, I didn't know what the problem actually was until finally finding a mailing list post about the issue. Thus the simple task took several hours even though in the end a simple fix - adding the onclick event to each image link ourselves rather than letting the script search through and find them - was all that was required.
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