Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Photographer Marc Lester, reporter Julia O’Malley and the Anchorage Daily News won the 2008 BOP News Audio Slide Show (Under) for Marc and Julia’s “Crystal Becker says Goodbye.”

While working on a multimedia project about local milk I ran across these hanging doors at a future dairy.

The building began life as a grocery story, became a food bank and is now being converted into a cheese processing and milk bottling plant. And upon this construction rests the hopes of an entire sector of Alaskan agriculture.

The University of Alaska Anchorage is hosting the Division II NCAA West Regional tournament this weekend and for the first game I decided to continue my G9 experiment, this time adding video. The game itself was a bit of disappointment (UAA won 80-60, very few students on hand due to spring break) and I didn’t get much of a story but I am pleased with the results from the camera.

I collected stand-alone audio with an M-Audio 24/96 (which is the dominant sound in the piece) but left the camera’s audio track in place under the video.

I may look like an over-eager parent but this small, light set-up seems promising.

At the beginning of the year I talked to the editor about creating a YouTube channel for the paper. My interest in it came directly out of the Knight Digital Media Workshop and the idea that we might be able to reach a few more people and just maybe get them to visit adn.com.

And. Not much happened. The videos of our soldiers returning picked up a few hundred views and a handful of comments but nothing to get excited about. All the photographers are pretty good about uploading material (we convert our audio slideshows to .movs and post those as well) and we were up to 23 movies after Bill Roth posted his video of the the Iditarod restart on March 2.

Well, on the 11th someone at YouTube decided to promote Bill’s video on the site’s home page.

There were over 11,000 hits on the video by 11 am that morning. Now, about 60 hours later, there have been over 72,000 views.

I’ve no idea what it all means. The AncDailyNews channel got 1,400 views and now has over a dozen subscribers but our metrics show almost no referrals from YouTube. It’d be nice to have collected those eyeballs but they’re almost certainly people who wouldn’t have seen the video anyway. I suppose a slightly raised profile is better than nothing at all.

Trying on themes for this site grows out of the Design for Publications class I’m teaching at UAA this semester. More than a little concerned that my students don’t have the skill set they need to get a journalism job, I’ve assigned them the task for maintaining a wordpress blog for the class.

I spend a (large) portion of every day mucking about in our content management system and quite frankly I don’t see where we’re going to hire a recently J-school graduate that can’t keep up with our web publishing software.

This particular theme, “The Morning After,” is designed for a web zine and is packed with great features but it may be too much for my purposes here. I can do thumbnails and lede pictures but there’s a little too much, well, content management involved.

And so, unfortunately, the theme revolution may continue.