10 Free Journalism & Media webinars on social media, writing, storytelling & more

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Thu, Nov 3 - 2023 Social Media Trends

What: Why “personas” are over and communities are the new focus  How social commerce will rise and fall, and why customer experience will get even more social  Ways that predictive social analytics will disrupt marketing.

Who: Natanya Anderson GM, Strategic Services for Khoros; David Low Global CMO for Talkwalker; Dan Rucolas Lead, Marketing Reporting for Kraft Heinz                           

When: Noon, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: AdWeek, Talkwalker 

More info

 

Thu, Nov 3 - Protecting the Rights of High School Student Journalists

What: A discussion of the issues student journalists are facing in schools, what rights they have, and where they can get help.

Who: Adriana Chavira: Teacher/Journalism Advisor,

Daniel Pearl Magnet HS 

Nathalie Miranda: Former Student Editor, Peal Post 

Mike Hiestand: Student Press Law Center 

Susan Seager: Adjunct Law Professor, UC Irvine Press Freedom Project 

Moderated by Benjamin Davis, Associate Professor, Broadcast & Digital Journalism, Cal State Northridge

When: 8 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Society of Professional Journalists, LA Chapter

More info

 

Mon, Nov 7 – Media Law Office Hours

What: Allows journalists with legal questions to help find answers. 

Who: Attorney Matthew Leish

When: 5 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free 

Sponsor: Deadline Club of New York

RSVP

 

Mon, Nov 7 - The First Amendment Lives On

What: MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey discusses with editor Stuart N. Brotman his book "The First Amendment Lives On", a collection of conversations with First Amendment scholars and advocates.

Who: Stuart Brotman, John Palfrey

When: 6 pm, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: American Writers Museum

More info

 

Wed, Nov 9 – The Art of Longform Storytelling

What: We want to dig into some key questions like: How do you find a narrative structure that works for your story? What are editors looking for in long-form features? And essentially — how do you take a mountain of reporting and turn it into an engaging piece of journalism?

Who: Katherine Bagley is the executive editor of Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future; Tom Huang is Assistant Managing Editor for Journalism Initiatives at The Dallas Morning News; Sandi Villarreal is Deputy Editor, Digital at Texas Monthly. 

When: 4 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: The Uproot Project, a network for journalists of color covering environmental issues, as well as students and others aspiring to cover this beat.

More info

 

Thu, Nov 10 - Uncover the Social Media Metrics That Actually Matter

What: Tips for uncovering insights about your brand and industry that can help strengthen consumer engagement  The best metrics to use to analyze your competition and key benchmarking metrics to help grow your business  The vital role social and media channels play in ensuring your content resonates with your target audience

Who: Mike Baglietto, Global Head of Market Insights at NetBase Quid

When: Noon, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: AdWeek

More info

 

Tue, Nov 15 – Covering Campus Crime

What: How to cover crime at their college — public or private — and how to get around potential roadblocks thrown up by admins and campus police.

Who: Lindsie Rank, a graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Law, Media and Communication dual-degree program, through which she earned a juris doctorate and a master’s in mass communication with a focus on First Amendment law.   

When: 1 pm, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: College Media Association

More info

 

Wed, Nov 16 – Writing Tips You’ll Use Every Day

What: A discussion of structure, making stories flow, crafting anecdotes and much more.

Who: Steve Padilla, a nationally recognized writing coach and longtime editor with the Los Angeles Times

When: 6pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free for members

Sponsor: National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Google News Lab

More info

 

Wed Nov 16 – Pinpoint Training

What: Learn about Google’s newest tool, Pinpoint, explicitly built with journalists in mind. We’ll explore public collections, as well as learn how to upload document sets to examine through powerful search functionality, including searching handwriting and text within images. And we’ll show you how to use Pinpoint to transcribe audio and video files, such as interviews and meetings. We’ll also review some case studies and see how U.S. newsrooms have used Pinpoint in their work.

When: 7 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Journalism & Women Symposium

More info

 

Tue, Dec 6 - Top Mobile Trends for 2022

What: Join leaders from IHOP, Wavemaker, Horizon Media and T-Mobile Advertising Solutions for a look at how media and creative strategies are keeping pace with these mobile ad changes. You'll find out:  Which mobile consumption trends are most compelling for agencies and brands  Why app install campaigns are still so popular, and why marketers need to move beyond the download  How brands and agencies are responding to signal loss.

Who: Delphine Fabre-Hernoux Chief Data & Analytics  Officer, North America Wavemaker; Laura McElhinney EVP, Chief Data Officer Horizon Media; Nathan Casey Executive Director, CRM,  Loyalty, Digital, Ecommerce IHOP; Mike Peralta VP & GM  T-Mobile Advertising  Solutions   

When: Noon, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: AdWeek

More info 

Model the behavior you expect from employees

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Employees look to leaders for guidance on culture, but they tend to discount lofty statements about abstract values. Instead, they closely observe what leaders do for signals about what behavior is encouraged, expected, and tolerated.

There is no correlation between what companies aspire to and how employees assess them on corporate core values. When leaders act consistently with core values, however, it is one of the most powerful predictors of how positively employees rate their corporate culture.

Donald Sull and Charles Sull writing for the MIT Sloan Management Review

29 Data Science Articles from Oct 2022

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“The Pentagon needs an intelligent decision support system to assist with analyzing all the data available without causing information overload for the analyst while detecting nuances and subtleties an analyst may not observe.” Read more.

Russia's anti-satellite threat tests laws of war in space

The Space Force & US Space Command could see action if Russia follows through on threats to target commercial satellites assisting Ukraine’s defense of its homeland. Read more.

SpaceX Amazon & FCC discuss satellite spectrum rulemaking

Senior Russian foreign ministry warns that the commercial satellites used by the US & its allies could become "legitimate" targets for retaliatory action by Russia. Read more.

Understanding graph neural networks & how they “apply the predictive power of deep learning to rich data structures that depict objects and their relationships as points connected by lines in a graph.” Read more.

How linear regression is used in machine learning

Linguists believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. New AI models prove otherwise. Read more.

The value of imaginary numbers in quantum ideas to describe the hidden shape of the universe. Read more.

NSA cybersecurity director's 6 takeaways from the war in Ukraine 

Artificial intelligence explainability according to MIT: “the ability to manage AI initiatives in ways that ensure models are value-generating, compliant, representative, and reliable” Read more.

Military research groups are buying advanced US software products & selling them on, boosting China’s hypersonic missile program—despite export controls designed to prevent resales to foreign entities. Read more.

FCC tightens rules on space junk: the five-year limit for getting rid of dead satellites could slow the growing orbital litter problem—if companies will abide by it. Read more.

Surprise discovery of radio signals could help track space junk and limit global security risks

The future of military satellite communications starts now

Ukraine Lessons for Naval Intelligence's Next War

Russia launches three satellite deployment missions in one week

An update on the space race matching smartphones with low-orbit satellites

Radiation from outer space could affect the computers on satellites

The charge required to corrupt data is getting smaller all the time, meaning it is actually getting easier for cosmic rays to have this effect. Read more. 

3 Simple Ways to Speed Up Your Python Code

“Sweeping change is coming to the U.S. Army’s fleet of fixed-wing intelligence-gathering aircraft over the next several years.” Read more.

10 Data Science Cheat Sheets

The war in Ukraine has underlined the growing importance of space to armies on the ground

“For serious software development, the no-code/low-code approach doesn’t work when you need to develop mission critical software. It is even more far-fetched, then, to have only citizen data scientists running your AI/ML.” Read more.  

What will happen to the space debris in orbit?

10 things journalists should know About AI

The NRO is “redefining how it works with the US Space Force and the US Space Command” to “expand the NRO’s space-based intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance” as it faces a “more complex near-peer adversary environment.” Read more.

How to create satellite imagery datasets and how to apply a classification model to them based on convolutional neural networks. Read more.  

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The Four False Idols

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As Arthur Brooks sees it, our brains mislead us into chasing things that feel good but don’t result in sustained happiness. Those things are often what he calls the four false idols: money, power, pleasure, and fame. Like drugs, they tickle our dopamine receptors, but unlike drugs they’re socially acceptable because they’re all markers of success. Yet a success addiction, like a drug addiction, will still leave you unhappy in the long run. “Nobody is ever like, ‘Dude, you did five grams of cocaine today, congratulations on that, that’s a preternaturally high dose!’” Brooks tells me, with gusto. “But ‘You made a billion dollars!’ is sort of the same thing.”

Instead of chasing those idols, Brooks advises that we focus on what he calls the four pillars of our “happiness portfolio”: faith, family, friends, and work. The happiest people, according to Brooks, adhere to a belief system that helps them transcend their narrow perspective and “understand life’s bigger than the boring sitcom that is me, me, me.” They have deep family ties and strong friendships. And they do work that serves others and allows them to earn their success. 

Clay Skipper writing in GQ

AI Shows Linguistic Experience essential for Language Skills—Not Grammar Knowledge

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“Children should be seen, not heard” goes the old saying, but the latest AI language models suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, children need to be engaged in the back-and-forth of conversation as much as possible to help them develop their language skills. Linguistic experience—not grammar—is key to becoming a competent language user.

Morten Christiansen & Pablo Contreras Kallens writing in Fast Company

Tuesday Tech Tools: 34 Design Tools

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Adobe Indesign
Adobe product that is the industry standard for page layouts and design (posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books). For professionals and high end projects but for personal or smaller projects, there are other programs with a lower learning curve.

Adobe Pagemaker
While not on the level of Adobe InDesign, it is an effective page layout program for the non-professional. Includes predesigned templates that can be modified.

Adobe Color (formally Adobe Kuler)
Find complementary color palettes using a color wheel.

Axure
For UX design. A wireframing prototyping software tool. No coding needed. Aimed at web and desktop applications.

Balsamiq
Design software, a quick starter for wireframing tool. 

Beautiful.ai
Quickly make beautful slides with these graphic tools. Slightly different workflow than PowerPoint so it takes a little time getting used to but more fun. Free.

Butterick's Practical Typography
Everything font-related including kerning, spacing, formatting, and more.

Color Me
Visualize hex colors.

Commarts
"Inspiration for graphic designers, art directors, design firms, corporate design departments, advertising agencies, interactive designers, illustrators and photographers—everyone involved in visual communication."

Design Thinking
Blog by Tim Brown about Design issues. Brown is author of Change by Design.

DesignEvo 
Create logos. Easy to use but the free version allows only limited sizes and only paid accounts get trademark options. The paid accounts are somewhat expensive.  

Florish*
A data visualization tool that makes it easy to create both standard charts and a mobile-friendly animated charts. Some customization available. Examples.

FontJoy
This site will generates font pairings for your design project whether you are aiming to create balance, tension or set off content. Free.

FontPair
Helps you pick font combinations for your resume, website, poster, etc. so your creation stands out from the typical Times New Roman on other material.

Font Shop
This link takes you to the design section of the website where you can "improve your design skills with typography tips and tutorials. FontShop Education docs are formatted for easy downloading and printing, perfect for the classroom or studio."  There's also a healthy glossary section, among other things.  

How Design
This site seeks to meet the "business, creativity and technology needs of graphic designers."

Idea Mag
Japanese design magazine.

Indesign
See Adobe Indesign.

Kartograph
Simple to use data visualization tool if you know some Python or Javascript. Free.

Keynotopia
UI design templates.

QuarkXpress
Page layouts for Mac or PC.Alternative to Adobe InDesign.

Marq (formally Lucid Press)
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.

MockPlus
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Drop and drag. No coding needed.

MyFonts
Large selection of professional fonts.

OmniGraffle
Design software. Industry standard.

Page Stream
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.

Principle
Popular UI prototyping tools for designing mobile apps. Especially useful for creating animation. No coding skill needed. $129.

Print Mag
Design tips, education, resources from Print Magazine, a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design.

SassMe
Colum vizualize color functions by inserting Hex codes.

Society for News Design
Columns and tips on design, workshop schedule, membership database and more.

Society of Publication Designers

Scribus
Page layouts. Alternative to Adobe InDesign.

UXPin
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Simple setup with drop and drag.

What the Font
Figures out what font you are looking at. 

WordStream
Upload your comma-delimited file with time and text columns and you get a chart. Adjust sizes and the metrics. Free.

More Tech Tools

Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade

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In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.

A decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it. Bad science is still frequently published, including in top journals.

Kelsey Piper writing in Vox

Historically redlined areas disproportionately receive slow internet speeds

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An investigation found AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town -Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin writing for The Markup

More about redlining and Critical Race Theory

Transcending the Present

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Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Taylor Swift’s Metaverse

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Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?

Well, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg is almost totally failing, yeah. This may seem like a leap, but a metaverse—a futuristic virtual-reality world—is essentially a shared online experience, which is not all that different from the online fanscape that Swifties inhabit. It sounds like the Swifties might be living in something that is pretty close to a metaverse currently. They’ll go wherever she goes. So it’s not a virtual world, but it’s a virtual community. That’s really what makes the metaverse and metaverse platforms powerful. People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question.

Wagner James Au quoted in The Atlantic

The Appeal of Video Games

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Good game designers know how to draw us in by catering to some very basic emotional needs. (Researcher Jane McGonigal) notes that the best games have four elements: clear goals that allow us to feel a sense of purpose; rules that make the task harder and thereby challenge our creativity; rapid feedback to chart our progress; and an experience that is voluntary.

Wouldn't it be nice if work was more like a video game? Your boss would articulate a clear mission and set of milestones you were expected to meet. You would go into the office every day and receive ongoing feedback about your progress so you could see the impact you are having.

The truth, of course, is that reality is messy. Our goals are fuzzy, our progress unclear. Video games, the majority of which now focus on getting us to cooperate rather than compete, offer a more fulfilling existence, McGonigal argues.

"We all want to find more meaning in what we do, like we're part of something bigger," McGonigal said. "Games give us a place to feel that, to cooperate and do something that is more satisfying."

Chris O'Brien, Mercury News Columnist

Givers and Takers

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"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of a study to be published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania.

In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write. What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self."

For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

19 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

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Free short online courses to strengthen your skills and add a line to your resume. Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound - In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online 

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication - For authors, editors, educators, journalists, journalism students, news producers and news consumers

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions

Conducting Interviews that Matter  

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers -Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know -How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition) -What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works

Tuesday Tech Tools: 6 Video Stabilization Options

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GoPro Hero 11
This action camera comes with HyperSmooth, software-stabilization now in its fifth iteration from Hero 7 to the present. The iPhone 14 Pro is getting close to being as good—but not yet, when it comes to intense action and extra features. $399 with a subscription.

GorillaPod tripod* 
Joby GripTight PRO. Flexible legs wrap around objects for unlimited angles. From .7 - 11 pounds. Rubber foot grips provide stability on any surface. 

Moment*
Cases, lens, batteries, lights, gimbals, etc. to enhance photos and videos taken with a phone. 

Osmo Mobile 6
A handheld stabilizer that works for smartphones and works in concert with the iPhone 14's Action Mode—a software feature that stabilizes videos. $159.

Shoulderpod S2*
A handle grip for your smartphone to steady your shots. Works with tripods and comes with a wrist strap. Additional accessories available. $50.

SMOVE
This smartphone video stabilizer that doubles as a charger. Portable, fits in your pocket. $200. 

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