Loud Narrative

Building Loud Narrative

keith — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:08:59 +0000

UPDATE 2/20/2012:

Loud Narrative has moved into closed beta at loudnarrative.com. Registered and invited users will soon be able to start building their own shows, so there are no public demos currently available. Head on over to loudnarrative.com to request an invite, and I’ll get right on it.

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This demo shows how easily you can manipulate slides in the timeline. You can click & drag the slides to rearrange their order, or drag the slide borders to change how long the slide will be displayed in the show. All of this can be done in real time while the show is playing. In the final release of the Slideshow Builder, you’ll be able to add text, lower thirds, custom border and background colors, and custom transition effects. It will be easy to share finished slideshows by embedding them into any webpage with a simple iframe.

My new Facebook Application: Rank Your Friends

keith — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:43:02 +0000

Click here to check out my Facebook application that ranks all of your friends by the ranking of their undergraduate college. I know–it really doesn’t get a lot more superficial or vain than this. I wanted to experiment with using Facebook’s Open Graph data against an external dataset (the U.S. News College Rankings), and this was the result.

Click here to check it out.

Philadelphia Citizen

keith — Tue, 24 May 2011 19:39:01 +0000

Philadelphia Citizen is a collection of schoolwork I completed in the journalism department at Temple University in Philadelphia between 2007 and 2011. At Temple, my concentration was in magazine journalism. Although my main interest was in learning to write creative nonfiction, I also produced several audio, video and photographic pieces, some of which you’ll find on this site.

I built this website with HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery. This was partly an experiment with some of those technologies (which were still kind of new to me at the time), partly my final project as an undergrad, and partly an attempt to put everything I do together in one package.

Go to phillycitizen.com

Filter Babble

keith — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:22:06 +0000

If I approach my friend who is interested in politics and I say, “You’re never going to believe what Microsoft did today,” he is probably not going to stop me. My friend probably won’t say, “Whoa, hold on. I only want to hear about political news.”

Even though my friend is not very interested in technology, he probably doesn’t want to cut himself off entirely from hearing about it. At least, not voluntarily.

Eli Pariser has recently written a book and given a TED Talk about what he calls the “filter bubble”–the isolated state you’re left in by algorithms that tailor Google results and the Facebook news feed to your interests. That friend of mine who isn’t into technology, he probably won’t see a link to an article in Wired magazine when I post it to Facebook.

Pariser points out that this is bad for society, bad for democracy, and keeps people sheltered from ideas that are outside their comfort zone, and, to a certain extent, it’s true.

But then he goes on to say The Washington Post and the New York Times are “flirting with personalization,” implying they are using these same kinds of algorithms to protect readers from stories they don’t want to see, and that’s just not true.

What he’s referring to (and I believe it’s with more specificity in the book) are things like “recommended links” on news websites. Newspapers sites typically use a Facebook plugin to show you which links from the site your friends have been sharing or liking. That’s all. What they are definitely not doing is hiding articles from readers based on past preferences.

Displaying some recommended links is a far cry from the filters used by search, aggregation and social websites. I don’t like the idea of someone, particularly a non-technical person, trying to shoehorn news websites into this archetype just because it’s an archetype they’ve become fascinated with.

In the talk, Pariser refers to the traditional role of broadcasters and print editors as gatekeepers. He says that what’s happening is a shift “from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,” which is a profound and apt thought when we’re talking about the whole Internet as a medium.

But it’s a thought that, at least for the moment, only applies to social networking and search sites. Parser is a non-technical person who seems to have a weak understanding of how news publications operate and how they approach their mission, and I just don’t think he’s qualified to write books or give talks on this topic.

Spanning multiple media

keith — Sun, 15 May 2011 19:19:38 +0000

I think the biggest problem I have with the concept of multimedia journalism is that it has yet to actually be implemented.

In classrooms and newsrooms, they say, This story needs a video. More photos. It’s the result of this drive that makes me crazy. The result is, Here’s a beautifully written story, and, shit, OK, here’s some moving picture colorfuls to go with it. The result is arbitrary. At best, it’s a video, and it was produced by the same reporter who wrote the story, and it has some extra info. At worst, it’s just a summary of the story in case you didn’t feel like reading today.

Either way, it’s an aside. It’s all the way over there.

What I have never seen is a singular, linear narrative that spans multiple media.

Let me try to explain my goal. Here’s an example of what this might look like.

Text: Let’s say it’s a long, compelling lede. The subject is, I don’t know, a guy who’s involved in an underground fighting league. He’s an up-and-comer. Here’s his background and how he got involved. Tonight is a big event.

Video: The big event.

Text: The aftermath of the big event. Maybe then we get into the bigger picture, like any other long form narrative.

Audio slideshow: Interviews with family members, maybe other fighters and their family members as well, fight promoters, whatever.

Text: Some kind of conclusion.

What I’m trying to make clear here is that the video and the slideshow are not disparate elements that can just be arbitrarily chucked onto the side of the story. They are part of the story, and you don’t see them until you’re at that part of the story. Obviously, a big limitation here is that you really need the right kind of story, and it has to be one you can devote magazine article time to.

Maybe this is expecting too much from the reader?

My report on Philly’s childhood obesity problem published on Philadelphia Neighborhoods

keith — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:18:18 +0000

Like many North Philadelphia neighborhoods, Strawberry Mansion is one devoid of proper food markets, and corner stores, as a result, are a primary source for groceries. These stores often do not carry fresh food, and kids stopping in for breakfast on this April morning were, as usual, tempted with the high-calorie, low-cost options. This is a dynamic that contributes to a growing phenomenon: while poverty in other countries often leads to malnutrition and unhealthy thinness, in the Unites States, it leads to obesity.

Read the story here.

Video: Getting healthy foods into corner stores.

keith — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:28:09 +0000

In this documentary short, Briana Almaguer Sandoval, a project manager with The Food Trust’s Healthy Corner Store Initiative, explains the process of getting healthy foods into corner stores.

This is part of my story on childhood obesity for Philadelphia Neighborhoods. Read it here.

sp11strawberrymansionobesity from Philadelphia Neighborhoods on Vimeo.

Video: Working Philadelphia II–The Italian Market

keith — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:22:47 +0000

I really can’t stand listening to this video. I don’t know where my weird anchor voice came from. Anyway, here’s a short video about a cheese monger who works at the Italian Market in Philadelphia.

I’ve been accepted to j-school!

keith — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:13:37 +0000

In 2008, I watched this student-made documentary about the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and thought about how cool it would be to go to school there. I’m happy to report that, starting in August 2012, I will. I found out on March 15, 2011, that I’ve been accepted into the M.S. program, focusing on Digital Media in Journalism. I’ve been granted a one-year deferral to start the program next year.

Audio slideshow: Working Philadelphia I–Street Music

keith — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:12:13 +0000

Here’s an audio slideshow about a couple of Philadelphia’s street performers. I built this slideshow in Flash.

Please allow a moment for the slideshow to load.