How to Record Audio for the Web

Recording audio isn’t rocket science, but you do need to pay attention to where you are choosing to record. If at all possible, record in a sound studio using high-quality microphones. Usually, this isn’t possible, and you will often be recording interviews in someone’s office or on the street.

Understanding Blogs

Blogs, or Web logs, are hot these days — among journalists, citizens, even CEOs. News organizations and freelance journalists are finding blogs to be a great way to encourage interaction with readers and to elicit immediate comments on the day’s news.

How to Take Pictures for Online Use

Whenever you can, take photographs with a digital still camera, as opposed to a digital video camera or a regular camera. You will be able to turn the image into a Web-ready format more quickly and you’ll get a better quality picture than if you used a digital video camera or took screenshots from a digital video. or a camera phone?

How to Shoot Video for the Web

As you set about shooting video, you may want to consider hiring an expert if you don’t already have one in-house. With patience and creativity, a novice videographer can shoot like a professional, but you must invest the time to develop the expertise. If your budget permits, hire a freelance journalist with videography experience. If it doesn’t, get excited about learning a new set of skills and having some fun.

Getting Familiar with SWiSHmax

Macromedia Flash is the weapon of choice for serious interactive animators, but the outstanding application SWiSHmax may be a better choice for those who need to get the job done with a minimum of fuss – or for those who like its $99.95 price tag better than Macromedia Flash’s $699.95.

Note: While SWiSHmax offers many of the same functions as Flash, the menus differ greatly, so these sections do not serve as a proper Flash guide. For help with Flash, check out the tutorial that Jane Stevens wrote for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Web site.

Visualizing Data

If you’ve worked with computers for any length of time, you know how easy it is to collect data, and yet how hard it can be to make the best use of that data. In this section, we’re going to suggest some ways you can help your audience understand the raw data you’ve collected. As a niche publisher, you have a special opportunity to gather and share data that might not regularly be available to your audience. Data in its raw form can be useful to a small subset of your readers. But if you take that data and put it into a meaningful form, such as a chart, a graph or a timeline, your audience can more easily absorb, remember and draw useful inferences from what was once just raw data.

Digitizing Audio

Digital sound is created by a process called "sampling." Most digital sounds, whether on a CD or from the Web, were created by recording hundreds of very small snapshots of sounds as they were played. These snapshots build the waveform that is a digital sound. A 44.1 kHz file for example, uses more than 44,100 samples, or snapshots, per second. The quality, as you might expect, is fairly high – CD-quality, in fact. Four or five minutes of 44 KHz-sampled music creates a file of about 50MBs. 

Writing and Editing a Blog

Writing a blog isn’t rocket science, but it also may not be quite as easy as it looks. A successful blog’s conversational style either comes naturally or it doesn’t. So does that sense of what topics will hit the mark with the blog’s audience.

Getting Familiar with Web Graphics

Only two image formats — GIFs and JPEGs — can be used completely safely on the Web. Sometimes, the PNG format is also used, but is not fully supported by all Web browsers.

Using Adobe Premiere

In the next sections, you will get a look at digitizing and editing video using Adobe Premiere Pro, which includes most of the editing tools you need and has good integration with digital video — the best type of video for the Web. The ideas and concepts you learn here should be adaptable to most video-editing software. You can download and try both Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Premiere Elements for 30 days from the Adobe Web site.

Forums and Feedback

Your Web site is not only a tool allowing you to communicate with your readers, it’s also a good way to allow your readers to communicate with you and with
one another.

Creating a Basic SWiSHmax Animation

Begin experimenting with SWiSHmax by creating a simple animation.

Editing Audio

If you’re worried about making mistakes, save a backup of the original file so that you can revert to it if needed. It is often a good idea to save a couple of copies of your file. One should be the original digitized file, untouched in case you destroy the sound in later versions. You might also save a version of your edit. You can throw away these versions later, but they’ll save you time if you mess up your file and need to go back and try again.

Choosing Blog Software

There are many software options available for blogging. First, you must determine where the blog should live: Hosted or Installed.

Preparing Images and Photos for the Web

Here are some guidelines for making your images download quickly and display correctly.