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Public Relations
In Hudson River Landing, PR Pros Were Not First Responders
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important -- and increasingly complicated -- role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type of media that will report on a crisis is often as unforeseen as...
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MediaShift Innovation Spotlight
Big Pictures Help Tell Big Stories at Boston.com
The Big Picture is a large-format photo-blog operated by the Boston Globe. Each entry focuses on one topic and presents around 30 images related to that topic: Recent posts have covered the 2008 Greek riots, the Hajj and Eid al-Adha, and scenes from Guantanamo Bay. The photos are collected from wire services and presented with captions at 990 pixels wide.
more »NewspaperShift
Photography Training and Doing More with Less in El Paso
It's now Day 3 in the marathon week-long multimedia boot camp at UC Berkeley run by the Knight Digital Media Center. We have broken into groups to create various multimedia stories, and later today we'll go out to do our primary interviews and video shoots. My group will be meeting with Robert Full, a professor who studies robotics based on animal movements.
more »PhotoShift
Cheap Editing Tools a Boon for Media Makers
Video, photo and music editing used to be only accessible through complicated and expensive hardware, and software programs such as Avid for video, Photoshop for images and ProTools for audio. But now a vast array of online tools and cheaper software are letting amateurs and pros polish up their work without spending any money. In addition to being free,...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Flickr Changes Lives, Launches Photog Careers
With the plethora of social networking sites, it's easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites -- chatting up strangers, lurking on people's profiles, spying on friends -- is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr is a...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Orkut, Friendster Get Second Chance Overseas
What do Brazilian and Indian Internet users have in common? A favorite social networking site called Orkut, a Google web property which, when it was launched in 2004 was meant to put its parent company on the social networking map in the U.S. Orkut may not have taken off stateside, but it has exploded in these two countries, and...
more »Your Take Roundup
Photojournalists Will Survive in Era of Citizen Photogs
Newspapers will die. Radio will kick the bucket. The packaged music CD is on death's doorstep. There is an irresistible urge to declare one medium dead because of the rise of the new. And so it is when we consider the plight of photojournalists after the proliferation of cameraphones and digital cameras in the hands of the masses, who can now capture breaking news in every corner of the world.
more »Digging Deeper
Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos
When I was writing a blog post about Mark Cuban and his ShareSleuth site, I wanted to illustrate it with a good photo of Cuban but didn't like the photo he sent me. So I turned to an invaluable source of photography for a non-commercial blog like MediaShift -- the Flickr Creative Commons pool. On that site, you can search through 22 million photos for shots that are being legally shared by photographers, under flexible copyrights licensed through Creative Commons (CC).
more »Your Take
Skepticism Rampant Over War 'Fauxtography'
Most people trust that the photos they see of war in their daily newspaper shot by a professional photographer are accurate. The photographer risked his or her life to get the shot, snapped the picture, sent it to a photo editor, who then vetted it for publication.
more »Your Take
Do you trust photographs from war zones?
Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about a Reuters photographer who used Photoshop to double the amount of smoke in a photo of Beirut. The photo was scrutinized by conservative bloggers, starting with Little Green Footballs, and eventually Reuters admitted to the fakery and fired the freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj. The British press has been defending its photos against attack from conservative blog EU Referendum as well. It's very easy for photographers to add Photoshop touches to make a shot more dramatic or to stage photos by asking people to pose in them. However, most media organizations have strict rules against these types of manipulation. As a news watcher and reader, what do you think about the professional photos you have seen from war zones such as Lebanon, Israel and Iraq? Do you trust them or have questions? Do you feel like the photographer has a political bias? Would you rather see photos taken by amateurs at the scene? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Your Take Roundup
Flickr Rules as Photo-Sharing Community
With the rise of cameraphones and cheap digital cameras, we as a society are taking more photos than ever before. But what do we do with all these snapshots? There have been websites devoted to personal photo pages for years, but which ones make photo-sharing and organizing easy?
more »Your Take
What's your favorite site for finding and sharing photos?
Digital technology has changed forever the way we take photos, share them, and print them out. Before, we had to buy 35mm film and pay to get the film developed. Now we can use powerful digital cameras that have no film and allow us to print only the best photos with our own photo printers. Plus, we can post photos online at sites such as Flickr and Shutterfly to share with friends or the world. So tell us which photo sites you like to visit either to see great photography, or to share your own photos. Why do you like the site, and what features set it apart? As a bonus, tell us what features you would like that don't exist yet. Share your thoughts in the comments, and I'll run the best ones in the next Your Take Roundup.
more »Tags
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