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UNLV
UNLV students created multimedia-rich blog posts about the Las Vegas Democratic debate -- on deadline, with a brand-new moblogging tool. |
Last night's debate in Las Vegas among the major Democratic candidates for president garnered major, but predictable, sports metaphor laden coverage from mainstream news outlets. It was the same old story: Who "won?" Who "scored points?" What's the current ranking in the "race?"
Meanwhile, journalism students from Charlotte-Anne Lucas' digital storytelling class at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, were telling less predictable, more diverse, and more compelling stories on the UNLV Presidential Debate 2007 blog. This is a first-class effort. It seems to me that news organizations stuck in hackneyed debate-story ruts might take away some lessons from this low-budget, high-energy project.
The 17 students made more than 150 posts to the blog. Many of these text, audio, and photo posts were sent directly to the blog from students' cell phones using a new free tool Utterz. They also covered the local run-up to the debate, including what Lucas described as "CNN's shabby behavior on campus" (a popular post).
The students' ambitious use of Utterz as a moblogging platform is especially interesting.
Just one week ago, Lucas participated in my blogging ethics panel at the Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. Up to that point, as Lucas wrote in her blog, "I hadn't expected was how much time we would spend in class wrangling with technology. It amazed me how difficult it was to even get a blessed piece of audio off of a digital recorder and onto the students' blogs."
At Blogworld, Lucas talked to Randy Corke, co-founder and president of Utterz. After learning about this new tool, Lucas wrote that she "decided the student bloggers would try something I hadn't planned on or tested because it sounded like just the pixie dust we needed to make this blog fly.
Said Lucas, "Utterz lets you use your cell to send in photos, video, text and audio, then it mashes them together and plunks the finished product right down into a blog post."Because these students are almost digital natives and all the way fearless, they tried it on deadline, and they not only made it work, they made it sing. One of them immediately waded into a crowd of demonstrators, interviewed people with his cell phone and had the audio up on the blog in less than 10 minutes -- it was his first live 'radio' interview. Holy cow!"
Indeed. Kudos to Lucas and her students for having the guts to experiment when the stakes were high.
