Thanks to VSL (Very Short List) for suggesting What I Keep, a fascinating series of portraits of people holding a single object they carry with them through life. Photographer Susan Mullally has been collecting these images and stories from attendees at the Church Under the Bridge which has been meeting for 16 years under Interstate 35 in Waco, Texas.

The Church attracts current and formerly homeless people, folks who have struggled with drug addiction, incarceration, mental illness and deep poverty. The portraits are arresting, balancing hope and despair. The people in them are holding on to something they treasure, something that reminds them of their humanity, their identity, their connection to others, their memories. It can be everything from a watch to a family photo, a stuffed animal to a crucifix.

Mullally writes, "This works explores ideas of class, race, ownership, value, cultural identification and faith." So far, she's taken 60 photos over three years. It's an impressive collection.  read more »

If Lu Olkowski's In Verse doesn't garner a slew of media awards this year, I'll be surprised and disappointed.

It's true that Lu's MQ2 project isn't the first to blend powerful images and visceral poetry to tackle a tough social issue. LiveHopeLove, from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, about HIV in Jamaica, has won several honors - a People's Voice Webby and an Emmy for News & Docs. It's an awesome, beautiful and haunting multimedia project by photographer Josh Cogan, who also worked on In Verse.

But Lu's project just got into Harvard, so to speak. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has named In Verse a "Notable Narrative." Nieman just published in-depth coverage of In Verse on Nieman Storyboard, a site dedicated to "highlighting outstanding print narratives" and featuring "the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting."   read more »

When my multimedia training group at the Knight Digital Media Center was assigned to cover the East Bay Center for Creative Reuse, I knew it was going to be a fun ride. An obsessive recycler and passionate thrift store shopper, I've always been allergic to waste. 

Even the word stuff is juicy to me. I think of George Carlin's hysterically funny routine about how Americans need ever-bigger houses to store all of our stuff. A refrain from a poem I heard 25 ago by Ntozake Shange resurfaces: "Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff." And lately, that clever viral video called The Story of Stuff comes to mind.

Well, at last week's training, I was teamed up with a group of serious journalists: Folks who usually cover hard "stuff" like murders and complex environmental stories. It was a relief for many to take on a lighter topic than usual.  read more »

For those of you interested in keeping up with the latest debates on the future of journalism, I recommend reading Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at Buzzmachine.com. The author of What Would Google Do?, Jarvis is a prof at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he tries to infect students with the spirit of entrepreneurism (and some practical business sense.) This is not just smart; it's a sign of sanity. Students with a journo degree can't rationally expect to graduate into the welcoming arms of whatever media is still alive at the moment.

The message to emerging (and established) journalists is simple: It's time to Be the Media You Wish to See in the World. Jarvis' New Business Models for News Project is keeping track of a range of experiments in sustainable journalism. Jarvis spoke to Bob Garfield of On the Media about journalism education in this changing economy. It's an interview worth 6 minutes of your time.  read more »

My week at the Knight Digital Media Center multimedia training has come to an end. But my brain is still buzzing, and in my mind, I'm still editing images and audio and text.

Over six very long days, punctuated by the world's most delicious food, and haunted by the stream of horrors from Haiti, a stellar training team downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes of information on to the hard drives in our heads. 

We learned how to storyboard, how to shoot video, how to use digital cameras, how to transfer and organize content, how to use Photoshop, Garage Band, Final Cut Pro, SoundSlides, Adobe Flash. We even learned some Mac basics and fundamentals of web site design. 

Sona Patel of The Seattle Times gave a presentation about using social media in the newsroom. And Joe Ruiz, also of SeattleTimes.com, shared his experience with live mobile video reporting techniques. The legendary voice coach Marilyn Pittman, a favorite at public radio conferences, led a workshop on stand-ups and voice-overs, forcing us all to look into the camera and deliver dull news copy.  read more »

Two weeks into 2010, are you searching for a little inspiration to jump-start the new year?  If so, you should definitely read "We Can Because You Do," AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt's latest column in the January edition of AIRBlast.

She writes about the importance of having a producer-driven culture in public media, how change in our industry is happening at the level of craft, how long-time radio producers are developing digital strategies, and younger producers - those not haunted by the ghosts of public radio past - are inventing new formats. These producers, veterans and newbies, many of them AIR members, are leading the tranformation of public radio into public media.

Ultimately, Sue's advice is to stay positive, to focus on the opportunities unleashed in this new world order, to do the work that you are passionate about. In this time of economic uncertainty, it's a message I think we can't hear often enough.

This week, I'm taking a crash course in multimedia at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.  The program is a fellowship sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which supports week-long boot-camps designed to help traditional journalists adapt to the evolving world of digital media. If you have some time this week, you can join me by checking out the agenda or streaming webcasts of some sessions here. 

The workshop kicked off Sunday with an introduction by Lanita Pace Hinton, the director of the Knight Digital Media Center.  "A year ago, all of the participants were employed at institutions, now over half of you are independent, entrepreneurs, or working exclusively online," she told us. In this "16-week course distilled into six days," we will learn the basics of creating content that is "persistent, discoverable, embeddable, shareable and updateable."  That's what is required to survive in the online world.  read more »

If you want to find some incisive analysis of the issues facing public media, I suggest you read Jessica Clark's latest blog post (and practically everything else she writes, too.) Jessica is a journalist and academic who seems to always be where the action is, listening carefully to all of the conversations at conferences and online, gleaning the lessons and posing tough questions about the future of public media. She's able to cut through a lot of noise. And she gives good Twitter tweets along the way.   read more »

Journalist/blogger Mark Briggs has a new book out that could open many of us up new ways of thinking about and doing media production. It's called Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Editing and Reporting.

According to his publisher, "Journalism Next is required reading for both seasoned journalists seeking a digital roadmap and digital natives looking to connect their digital know-how to the profession's best practices."  

My introduction to Mark, a pioneer in interactive news, came though his book Journalism 2.0 which was edited and published by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. It's been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. You can find the link here.

Journalism Next is the updated and expanded version, the next generation, if you will. With the rapid pace of technological change and social media developments, it is hard to create a training manual that isn't outdated the moment it goes to print. J2.0 came out before the explosion of Facebook and Twitter and iPhones (and other innovations, to be sure). In that sense, it might seem quaint, but it's still a helpful guide to the many of the fundamentals.   read more »

A whopping 100,000 apps are in the iPhone app store, just waiting for you to download. I'm not sure what percentage of them are free or how many of them are porny, although I can tell you that x-rated sites do seem to pop up everytime I'm searching through the list of top 50 free apps in various categories. Like the web itself, the world of apps is always in need of good curation. To help weed out the dreck, and zoom in on some good stuff, Mashable recently aggregated its reviews of 700 apps in a range of categories.  Check out their impressive list of lists here. And please, if you stumble upon any truly terrific apps (especially freebies), spread the good news right here.