Harvey’s internet suppression case: LATEST

Well as a result of a bit of looking around and investigating and some frantic work today, I managed to get to this.

This looks like a real implication of the August 25 order. But it’s a shame the whole service had to come down to fix because online news is my (and possibly your) favourite source.

News companies automating their web-bound issues will need to modify articles regarding this topic by hand it seems.

From the NZ Herald digital edition link on their website today:

“This link normally takes you to a digital replica of the newspaper provided by an external company. However, we are unable to bring you this service at this stage due to a court order related to the publication of details from an Auckland court case. We are seeking further legal advise (sic) and are unable to advise at this stage when the service can resume.”

Challenge to Judge Harvey

I debated with myself whether I should link to these posts hence adding to the ‘viral’ spread that I believe the Judge wants to avoid.

I do not intend to repeat the names, but people appear to have named them on blogs.

What happens now?

Judge Harvey’s net blackout

Apparently bloggers are already challenging the internet suppression order laid down by Judge Harvey on Monday.

The raging beast that is the blogosphere is buzzing with debate over this decision to ban internet media from publishing the names of two men.

A large portion of news readers are online, and almost all of them know how to google. So if someone puts it on their site, and that site starts to get traffic, it will skyrocket up search ranks, quite likely to the top fold of search results. This is probably enough bait for someone to test it alone. Huge publicity for printing a couple of names.

It does have a sense of experiment to it and apparently we will soon have willing test subjects.

Now that the case has built up some media reef-fish I’m sure it will become common knowledge soon enough. I’m sure print and broadcast mediums will reach most of New Zealand.

Once those names hit the press tomorrow, it will only be a matter of how long until someone posts them. And from there…? What’s the penalty?

It is said that this Judge is particularly web-savvy and that he wrote the main book on internet law in NZ. So he knows what he’s talking about. Now, I’m about the furthest thing from an expert as you can get, but I think a certain Chinese gymnast may be the butterfly on the other side of the world that started a web whirlwind in NZ.

I think the logic behind it is that the case would be biased if jurors accessed material which was cached during the time before the trial. The true power of cached files were shown to us recently in spectacular fashion by an American hacker. Wow. Brave guy for doing that.

The jurors could be you and I.

It’s a lot easier to google a name than go down and scour through records. So unless you personally read, saw or recorded the coverage or was told in depth about the accused, or kept the paper clippings, the only other avenues are the internet and records.

I don’t think many jurors would go out of their way to check out the accused if there was actually nothing about it on the net.

So it would theoretically discourage people from biasing themselves through super-easy access to surrounding material and curiosity. We are curious creatures. If the buttons right there, the chances are we’ll push it. If its a huge research mission to find the button in a public place, we might not.

That’s a recipe for a higher chance of justice for a defendant with a side order of media law for us news fiends.

And maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.. but I’m always interested to see people trying out new things. Thanks for the precedent case, how long until someone will be game enough to play for keeps?

D.I.Y video conversion for free

Continuing on with my DIY theme, I’m focusing on video conversion - something every journalist is going to need in the future. By no means a comprehensive source, but should be enough. Stop me if you’ve heard this.

There are far too many video and audio formats which modern electronics spit out, and getting them into a usable format for your editing programs can be tricky at the best of times.

Ok, first, the example.mpg is called the file extension or format. Just so you know.

Now go download a copy of Quick Media Converter from Cocoonsoft, install and learn to use it. This one is free, passed web and my own virus and spy-ware scans, and can convert to and from most formats (all that you’ll need) and is relatively easy to use.

There are a host of other crap programs on the net where you can convert perhaps a couple of formats and almost all of them are ridiculously priced for what they do. I think I finally found a decent free program.

Of course there may be issues on various operating systems, hopefully not yours. I’m running Windows Vista with 1gb ram and centrino duo processor and I haven’t had any trouble with it - maybe an occasional crash.

Converting video files can consume quite a lot of your computers resources as it needs to buffer (cache (remember)) the file as it converts it, plus run it through. Your computer will slow down a lot during conversion. If your computer sucks don’t think it’s going to run nicely.

Windows Movie Maker is not as great as industry standard programs, but I’m doing this on a student budget. Sometimes free tools are all you need. Speaking of free tools - you should get Audacity and train up on that. It’s essential to know how to use that when your making video. Do it. Do it now.

Different devices record video in different formats. My camera spits out .mov (or Quicktime) files, and my phone .3gp videos, both unacceptable to WMM. Using QMC they can both be turned into WMM friendly file types, pretty quick.

From what I can see WMM doesn’t mind .mpg .mpeg and .wmv so go for those. With a bit of experimenting you’ll see which formats work best. You will never use half of the formats on QMC unless you have iphone, nintendo wii, ipod touch, psp, ipod or xbox - handy to have if you need them I guess.

Other devices record to .3g2 (in phones), .mpg or .mpeg (mostly in cameras) or possibly even .avi video or .mp4 video. Why can’t they all be the same? I wish I knew.Theres a hell of a lot of formats out there, more than any journo needs.

Converting between certain file types can produce results ranging from terrible to fantastic - but you will normally lose a bit of quality each time it is converted. Just experiment with the different formats and see how they come out.

Youtube videos are in .flv (Flash Video) format. You can download those, but be careful with the copyright etc. Tip: Once the flash video has downloaded, rename the file with .flv appended to it then convert with QMC. Works a charm.

Got that?

100th post to NewsWire - Well done everyone!

Just felt like crowing a bit about our school news website; http://www.newswire.co.nz, as we have now reached our 100th article posted. I know we’ve all put a lot of work in to it.

From the seeds planted by Dave Lee have grown an interesting student journalism project for us. Although most of our stories are generally print and image based, Jim, the web team and I will endeavour to give the site more multimedia as time goes along. The site is looking good with a broad range of stories covering the Greater Wellington region, opinion pieces, some multimedia and polls.

Not all stories are suitable for multimedia, but if students know what we are capable of putting up (sound slides, movies, audio, graphics, links, as well as print and images) they should start to plan their coverage accordingly to provide the material that we need.

Dave has helped me get a full version of Soundslides Plus, an awesome tool for web journos. Great program, really simple to use and the resulting flash applet looks so nice and professional. So thanks to Soundslides for letting us use your software to blaze new trails in Internet journalism.

Myself and two others have taken on peer tutoring roles to help Jim with certain aspects of the Web which he is unfamiliar with, so hopefully as time goes on we will be able to provide more MM content. We can’t have the site looking too ‘flat’ (yes Dave, I’m doing my best!).

More and more of our students are now entering the blogosphere, and they are producing some excellent stuff. Check out Reesh Lyon’s political blog, Sandra Dickson’s luddite journal, Jonothan McKeown’s sport blog, Malia Sio’s Pacific Island journalism blog, Paul McBeth’s media commentary blog and our newest entry, our tutor Kuini Rikihana’s Maori affairs blog. Pretty diverse range of stuff there.

It’s weird how the wordpress spellchecker doesn’t even know the word ‘blogosphere’. Come on guys, it’s pretty much in the lexicon now isn’t it?

Anyway, if you haven’t already, give the site a look over, give us some feedback and comments and help us to improve this site and ourselves as journos.

D.I.Y flash diffusion

Seeing as it’s photography week for us at Whitireia, I decided to research cheap and easy ways of improving photos when using a pop-up (built in) flash using a light diffuser.

The relevance to journalism? Getting nice looking shots in dark situations with less red-eye and better tonal quality. Oh, and it makes you look like you know what your doing.

You may be thinking ‘Why should I bother with diffusing my flash?’. Well.. The normal light emitted from a standard pop-up flash is so unflattering it’s like firing a headlight at someones face.

This is because the light source comes from a very small surface area, and doesn’t spread out into a nice soft light. The bigger the light source, the better. So using a flash diffuser, you pass the flash through an object which will soften the light and remove that glare.

Obviously these are just experimental ideas gathered from the web, and professional products would make for better shots, but at a much higher cost.

Idea 1: The milk bottle diffuser.

This one is very simple. Just cut out the tubular handle section of a milk bottle, cut it length ways and you have a handy little diffuser which will cling over your flash. Simple, cheap, compact.

Idea 2: The film canister.

A milky white film canister can be easily modified with a pocket knife to sit over your pop-up flash to diffuse the light. Cheap (probably free) and easy, this little beauty fits into the tiniest camera bag.

 

Idea 3: The cigarette box trick.

Crafted from an old cigarette box, the gold or silver foil inside the box is removed and turned inside out, sitting inside the box and lid. It sits over the flash and can aim your light at various angles. The idea of this one is to bounce the light off a low white ceiling and onto the target, but different angles can produce interesting results.

The silver foil gives a nice reproduction of the flash light - cool white. The gold foil tends to give a much more warm yellowy light to the shot.

Idea 4: The mini panel diffuser.

I constructed this one from 5 layers of opaque overhead projector film which I cut from two sheets at a cost of about $3 from an art shop. 

There’s blue tack at the corners between each layer to space them out a bit. A bit of insulation tape around the edges and it’s done.

There are two ways to wield this puppy, hand held in front of your flash (about an inch or so away), or mounted onto your camera using whatever means you can fashion.

My camera, a Panasonic FZ8, has a lens extension and a sun visor which allowed reasonably easy and damage free mounting. It sits on there held between the sun visor and the camera body with a large hair-tie around the lens, Macgyver style (although his mullet was never tamed by a hair-tie).

This is my personal favourite and works quite well.

Try them out and see for yourself.

Ian Thorpe vs. L’Equipe defamation case

Ian Thorpe has apparently decided to sue a French newspaper, L’Equipe, for defamation over an article which they published last year.

This goes nicely with the media law unit we are currently doing at school. I’d be interested to hear what all you journos think. Defamatory? Injurious falsehood? Is it reported accurately?

 

Young journalist blog ring

Once again Dave Lee is throwing around experimental ideas - I think this one could turn out to be a goodie with time.

It’s a young journalist blog ring to be hosted by journalism.co.uk, a big name in the online journalism field, where journalism bloggers under 30 will post and so create an online knowledge and opinion base for the younger demographic in journalism.

As a J student I think this is a very interesting idea, which could lead to an excellent resource, so I signed up. The last I heard he said there was 15 already, I hope we cover a wide variety of locations, roles, and expertise.

I’m looking forward to hearing the details. After seeing what he did with NewsWire, I have every reason to think this will be up and running in no time.

Back to J school

Our second term began yesterday, with an introduction to teeline shorthand by Fay Harrison, our shorthand tutor. She seems to be a really good teacher.

I think it will be pretty useful, especially in covering myself in any arising lawsuits (touch wood) and will be really fast once I master it, but at this stage I think we all feel like 5 year olds learning to write on the first day of school. Practice makes perfect I guess.

I hope the media employers out there recognise and reward our efforts to become well-rounded and flexible journalists.

Paul Bradshaw opened up an interesting debate in which Jim has commented on whether J students should be trained for an industry which at this stage looks like it may not want us.

Papers are in decline and the Internet is on the rise. Many major papers are cutting jobs as the industry responds to the market shift. The rivers of gold were diverted through the TradeMe dam, and Fairfax bought them out. They recognised that on-line classifieds were becoming increasingly competitive to their market share. But advertising aside the shift to the net will include all kinds of changes.

I personally feel that net journalism is the way of the future, but that’s not to say that newspapers will end up in museums. I believe community newspapers are doing quite well. I think as technology decreases in price, gets smaller and more readily available it may simply be easier to get the news on your phone or computer using the net. And it will probably be a matter of time before most stories go from research to final copy using nothing but a handset.

Internet journalism is by far the most comprehensive form of reporting.  It can combine audio, video, diagrams and charts, links to relevant articles and resources, with the full copy you expect. There are few space constraints. It can be updated. It can even record the readers opinions or comments on the matter to be shared. It’s fast, interactive, and available anywhere there is Internet access.

But I think we must be flexible and well-rounded, rolling all the other main skills into one. The internet will not be the only medium for delivery. This will surely guarantee us  a very high rate of job placement.

From what I can see these are the skills we should have from print and broadcast:

Research, photography, video recording, shorthand, interviewing, writing, subbing, audio recording, good inter-personal skills, broadcasting.

These should be combined with the online journalism prerequisites like a good understanding of computers and data such as file types, conversion, image re-touching and resizing, infrared/wireless/flash/sd data transfer, html and the internet, digital resources like youtube, soundslides, blogs, del.icio.us, seesmic, social networks, twitter and all the rest.

The basic tenets, of course, will remain: accuracy, ethics, impartiality, meeting deadlines.

Future journos should be able to compile pages to submit to editors, not just documents with a picture, and within an hour it would be checked and live on the site. They might include a slideshow, hyperlinks on key words to related articles and resources, sound bytes of an interview, whichever medium was required to tell the story best. And they may have all the technology to do so built into one handset.

Spock with a tricorder. Looks advanced.

I think it’s an exciting prospect. Technology is improving rapidly. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Star Trek (I only watched a few I swear) you may remember the Tricorder. There was like a medical one, one for scouting around and an engineering one.

I’m thinking J-corders may be closer than we all imagine. 5 years? 10? Since the first generation cell phones began in Japan in 1979 we sure have come a long way. We have turned these “phones” into MFDs (multi function devices) which are advancing exponentially in a competitive market.

Our school had the fortune of being outfitted with Nokia N95’s, and they’re pretty nice. I didn’t buy one personally, I couldn’t justify it considering I already have a decent phone and digital camera, but I see them being used to create some excellent work within my class. The 5mp camera is good quality and it is reasonably quick and easy to use, and integrates well with other technology.

I feel like i’m in pretty safe hands and that what we take away from Whitireia, such as experience in publishing to NewsWire.co.nz, will ensure our employment, so long as we step up to the new challenges and master the basics. I think news outlets want flexible, technology minded, multi-talented and motivated reporters.

I know I would.

Noisy exhausts outlawed

Being a bit of a motor-head, the front page of the Wellingtonian caught my attention this morning.

The limit has been set to 95 dB for car exhausts and cops can now order noisy cars off the road and dish out fines and up to 25 demerits. This chart reckons that’s about as loud as a motor-mower or a newspaper press, far too loud for everyday (and night) driving.

Any cars which have an exhaust louder than the factory one will fail a WOF and the owner will be forced to replace the exhaust system to comply, or risk up to 25 demerit points and fines.

My old 1989 Integra.

Just walking or biking around Wellington I estimate that maybe around 15% of all traffic I see has a modified exhaust. It’s quite a popular thing these days, I like how it sounds on some cars.

I used to own an Integra with a modified exhaust, but I didn’t consider that loud at normal driving revs, just a nice hum (I admit it was a lot noisier when you put your foot down in 1st).

Of course you get the occasional dirty rotary engine in a corolla with a cake-tin sized exhaust which can actually wake people up, I think those are the types of cars the cops really want to stop.

I bet the muffler workshop boys are laughing all the way to the bank. Imagine the number of cars in NZ with modified exhausts, most of which are easily detected as non-factory, which in the next 12 months will be forced to change their exhausts back to standard.

All of these guys and girls who have saved up for years to pay for and modify their GTR’s and WRX’s with custom extractors, mufflers and exhausts (which can easily run into the high thousands for performance parts) will be pretty gutted. I believe they are trying to get around it by putting adjustable exhausts on, which can be changed for the WOF then changed back later. I wonder how long that will carry.

Thankfully this will not affect me, as I have forsaken the way of the car and switched to BMX power. The price of gas was my motoring downfall. Now if I can just get that puncture repaired..