About 200 million Chinese consider wine part of their lifestyle, and their palates are becoming more sophisticated. Australian winemakers are keen to break the French stranglehold on what is potentially a huge market.

Late last month, almost 600 Chinese staff members from the giant beverage company Pernod Ricard went to South Australia’s Barossa Valley for wine appreciation courses.

They were introduced to a range of wines made for the Chinese palate. Bernard Hickin, chief winemaker at Orlando Wines in the Barossa Valley, crafted the China-specific range, called the Jacob’s Creek Winemaker’s Selection.

“We created an aroma and flavor profile that we think suit Chinese food,” he says in a phone interview.

Hickin focused on enhancing the flavors from the grape varieties for all of the seven wines – two whites and five reds. He described them as, “fresh (and) not too alcoholic, with soft tannins”. The soft tannins came about through allowing the fruit to ripen longer on the vines and avoiding too long of contact with the skins.

“I wanted a natural flavor profile,” Hickin says.

The wines are designed to be consumed with food. “And given the popularity of red wine in China, you will be able to eat seafood with the reds,” he says.

Hickin became chief winemaker with Orlando Wines in February 2006, assuming ultimate responsibility for the portfolio of the company’s wine brands and products. Jacob’s Creek is the biggest selling wine in Australia and the company’s main brand. It is the fifth best-selling wine in the United Kingdom, the world’s biggest wine market.

Horace Ngai is deputy managing director for Pernod Ricard China, which owns the Jacob’s Creek vineyard. Ngai says the art of wine appreciation is gaining popularity in the country. Consumers are looking for quality and substance, and moving away from simply buying brand names.

The Jacob’s Creek wines will be available next month. About 85 percent of wine and spirits consumed in China is enjoyed with a meal, so most of the new range will be available through restaurants in major cities.

* “Wines designed for sipping with Chinese nibbles” in China Daily 14 August 2010, page12

Indeed, Box Stallion has been selling wines into China since 2005 and the company has a Chinese-language web site (http://boxstallion.com).

Box Stallion focuses on a range of grape varieties beyond those typically produced on the Mornington Peninsula. Half of the grapes grown on the peninsula are pinot noir. Chardonnay represents another quarter.

The company grows a range of French, Italian and Spanish varieties to produce an international, forgive the pun, stable of wines.

Box Stallion received five stars, the highest rating, in this year’s edition of James Halliday’s Australian Wine Companion. That book is the best-known reference for Australian wine.

Halliday awarded 94 points to both the 2008 sauvignon blanc ($18) and the 2006 tempranillo ($36). Another four wines, the 2004 and 2005 chardonnays, the 2008 gewurztraminer and the 2006 dolcetto all received the equivalent of a gold medal.

Earlier this month Box Stallion picked up five awards at this year’s International Wine Challenge in London. It is the world’s largest wine competition with entries from every wine region in the world.

Box Stallion’s 2008 shiraz won a silver medal, the 2008 pinot noir and the 2007 tempranillo received bronze medals, and the 2008 gewurztraminer and the 2008 chardonnay were highly recommended.

Owner Garry Zerbe said he established vineyards on two distinct locations in the region to get different micro-climates. These add complexity to the flavours of his wines. “We believe our fruit-driven styles will appeal to Chinese palates. We are educating our clients about our wines.”

This year is winemaker Alex White’s 38th vintage. White is one of Australia’s most highly regarded winemakers.

He said his aim was to make the most interesting wine possible. “Where necessary we vary the wine-making procedures to achieve complexity and flavour balance with the emphasis on the consumer’s expectations for varietal and regional character,” White said.

The vineyard’s name comes from the fact it used to be a horse stud, and the stallions’ barn now serves as the vineyard’s headquarters. A restaurant, the Red Barn, attracts visitors from around the world. The restaurant is open for lunch and tasting every day of the week, and the menu is affordable for most families.

A brochure in Chinese about the Mornington Peninsula can be downloaded from http://www.emmp.net.au/

* “Complex flavors from award-winning stable” in China Daily 7 August 2010, page 12.

High mountains produce a micro-climate that is three to four degrees warmer in summer and a similar number of degrees lower in winter. This produces a longer ripening period.

The best way to visit the vineyards is to take the famous wine routes, established in 1971. The five current routes take you past 148 vineyards. The high number of vineyards also means that prices are competitive.

Hire a car at Cape Town airport. A good time to visit, if you like crowds, is to attend the Stellenbosch Wine Festival, usually held in June each year.

I visited Warwick Estate in early July, just after the festival. The estate started in 1770 as a fruit farm. The Ratcliffe family planted vines in 1964 and winemaking started two decades late. Norma Ratcliffe became one of South Africa’s first female winemakers.

Warwick’s flagship red, the Trilogy (a traditional Bordeaux blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot), was named in Wine Spectator’s top 100 wines around the world for a second time in 2009.

I tasted the 2007 Trilogy and, though still young, it had a distinct cigar box aroma and tasted of dark chocolate. The wine receives 24 months in French oak (40 per cent new), so it exhibits a dusty tannic structure.

This means Trilogy should be cellared for at least eight years after vintage. At about $34 a bottle from the vineyard it is a bargain.

Another stand-out wine was the Old Bush Vines pinotage 2008, another bargain at about $13. Pinotage is a grape variety conceived at the University of Stellenbosch, a hybrid made from pinot noir and hermitage (aka shiraz).

Pinot noir struggles in the South African climate but the hybrid flourishes because of the influence of the more rugged hermitage.

Another excellent Warwick wine is the Three Cape Ladies, a blend of pinotage, cabernet sauvignon and shiraz. It sells for $15. It also receives solid oak treatment, this time 23 months in French oak (40 per cent new). And it should be cellared for up to a decade before being consumed.

Warwick Estate wines are available in China from East Meets West Fine Wines at 988 Shanxi Bei Rd in Shanghai. Stephen Quinn travelled to Cape Town courtesy of the South African Tourist Board.

* “Mountain wines” in China Daily, 31 July 2010, page 12.

Museum releases are older vintages that the vineyard has kept because the winemaker believes the wine has great cellaring potential. Supplies are scarce and most vineyards will only sell you one bottle per visitor.

Coonawarra takes its name from the Aboriginal word for “honeysuckle,” a sweet scented shrub. Grapes were first planted in 1890. Since then Coonawarra has become recognised as one of the world’s best regions for cabernet sauvignon because of the unique flavours the soil and terroir impart.

The soil is known as “terra rossa” – Italian for red earth – and the metre of red earth gives the wines their distinct character. About a quarter of all wines are exported, and Coonawarra has won the Jimmy Watson Trophy more times than any other region in Australia. The Watson is awarded to the best one-year-old red wine and is considered the most prestigious wine award in the country.

It is difficult to single out any particular vineyard because they all produce fine wines. Parker Estate has attracted rave reviews in Wine Spectator magazine, produced by Robert Parker (no relation), considered the world’s most influential critic. Prices for Parker Estate cabernet sauvignon have soared because of this recognition. The 2001 cabernet sauvignon first growth I tasted in 2006 cost $US 60 a bottle at the cellar door. The 2004 first growth I tried this year had jumped to $US 83 a bottle.

Elsewhere in the region, prices have remained low over the past four years, probably a reflection of a desire to control costs because of the global financial crisis. I visited the region in 2006 and 2010 and kept all my tasting notes.

Leconfield cabernet sauvignon is one of my favourites. The colour is wonderfully black red, and it offers intense aromas of briar and cedar and black fruits. The 2003 cabernet cost $US 24 a bottle when I tasted it in 2006, while the 2007 I tasted this year was still only $US 26. Wine of this quality is a bargain at that price.

* “Coonawarra red in a league all its own” in China Daily, 17 July 2010, page 12.

Terroir is an elusive concept. In French it means “soil,” and it has come to suggest the special character that geography gives to a wine. Put another way, “terroir” is how a wine reflects the combination of soil, climate and growing methods used at a vineyard – the “expression” of the soil in a wine.

Because Geelong is a cool climate region, the wines tend to have lower alcohol levels than wines from the sunny north. Hot weather produces riper fruit with more sugar, which converts to higher levels of alcohol.

Cool climates also mean things like fog, which keeps the sun from the vines. This prolongs the ripening process. As a general rule, the longer the ripening time, the better the quality of the fruit and the resulting wine. Hot climate wines taste like stewed fruit or jam. Cool climate wines are more elegant and less aggressive.

Barwon Plains Estate, to the south west of Geelong, produces excellent pinot noir and chardonnay grapes. Some are sold to the Shadowfax Vineyard near Geelong, to go into Shadowfax’s award-winning range. But these wines are expensive, ranging from $US 30 to 60 a bottle.

Phil Kelly, winemaker at Barwon Plains Estate, produces excellent wines with other pinot noir grapes from his 4-hectare property. The 2005 is a wonderful monster and needs to be cellared. It should be opened from about 2013. The 2006 Barwon Plains pinot noir, also $US 15 a bottle, is another bargain, though stocks have almost all been sold.

Bad frosts meant no wine was made in 2007. The 2008 pinot noir is wonderful, with intense flavours of cherry and musk. It drinks well now but could also be cellared for up to five years.

Kelly is experimenting with a range of other grape varieties that he believes have potential in the region. Unlike pinot noir, shiraz is a relatively easy grape to grow and it produces large harvests. Shiraz will give nine tonnes to the hectare, compared with three or four tonnes for pinot noir.

For that reason shiraz is the most widely grown red wine in Australia – 45 per cent of all red grapes. Pinot noir is less than 5 per cent.

* “Cool on the vine, plenty of time to ripen” in China Daily, 10 July 2010, page 12.

People from China visiting the region will probably arrive via Tullamarine airport, north of Victoria’s capital, Melbourne. The ideal way to reach Geelong involves touring the Mornington Peninsula region first, and then taking the ferry from the southern tip of the peninsula across to Queenscliff.

This beautiful and historic town is an ideal entry point for the Geelong region, which is actually three sub-regions. One sits on the majestic Bellarine Peninsula, a short drive from Queenscliff. Another in the Moorabool Valley is north west of the city of Geelong, and the third, called the Surfcoast region, hugs the southern coast.

An ideal holiday would combine wine tasting with a drive along the Great Ocean Road, which starts south west of Geelong. It is among the top four or five great drives in the world.

Scotchmans Hill is probably the best of the Bellarine Peninsula vineyards. [Note subs: no apostrophe in Scotchmans Hill.] It offers three levels of wine. The introductory label is named after Swan Bay, a lovely stretch of water on the peninsula. The Swan Bay pinot noir sells for about $US 15 and is a bargain. It presents an aroma of plums and cherries, with a slight hint of beetroot and spices.

The mid range of wines retail for between $US 19 and 25. In this range the Scotchmans Hill chardonnay and pinot noir represent examples of local excellence. Given their quality, the top of the range reserve chardonnay and pinot noir are a bargain, at $US 55.

Less well known, but of high quality, are the wines made by Dinny Goonan at Dinny Goonan Family Estate south west of Geelong. His 2008 early harvest Riesling offers a mouthful of sweet and tangy lime. Its low level of alcohol and rich aromas of lemon will appeal to Chinese palates. It costs $US 20.

* “Drink in beautiful Geelong” in China Daily, 3 July 2010, page 12.

Australia produces a wide range of pinots. Most of the best are grown in a u-shaped arc that runs through Victoria, the south-western state, and the island of Tasmania.

The Mornington Peninsula in Victoria makes up the right-hand side of that u-shape. The top of Tasmania represents the base of the “u” and the Geelong region is the left-hand side.

Pinot grows best in these cool climates. The northern areas of Australia are too hot for the grape variety. Remember that Australia is the reverse of China, with the northern areas much hotter than the south.

The Mornington Peninsula is a finger of land about 65 km from the state capital, Melbourne, with the Pacific Ocean to the east and Port Phillip Bay to the west. Cool ocean breezes in summer ensure the grapes ripen over an extended period.

Half of the grapes grown on the peninsula are pinot noir, with chardonnay making up another quarter. Pinot gris is increasingly being planted and represents another eighth of production.

The peninsula has about 200 vineyards, and about 50 of those are open for tastings. Perhaps a third of the vineyards are small and fall in the “boutique” category.

Prices for Mornington pinot noir tend to be high. Flagship wines from Port Phillip Estate cost close to $US 100 a bottle. The winery is a must see if you visit the area; it must have one of the best views of any winery I have visited.

Paringa Estate continues to produce superb wine. Its introductory level pinot noir, at $US 23 a bottle, is as good as the reserve wines from many of the other producers. Aromas of plums and ripe raspberries jump from the glass. Paringa was voted Australia’s winery of the year in 2007.

Some of Australia’s best racehorses are bred on the Mornington Peninsula. Box Stallion Estate produces fine wine as well as horses, and is one of the few vineyards in the region to export to China. It offers Spanish and Italian varieties as well as the classic French grapes.

Future columns will talk about the other regions that make up Australia’s u-shaped arc of pinot perfection.

* “Victoria’s not so secret delights” in China Daily, 26 June 2010, page 12.

Australia makes good pinot noir. But pinot noir from New Zealand’s Central Otago region has been receiving much attention from the world’s influential wine critics.

Robinson MW, wine writer for the Financial Times, was in Shanghai and Beijing last month to launch the Chinese edition of the World Wine Atlas. She describes Central Otago as having a good claim to be “the next great pinot region”.

Rudi Bauer, winemaker for Quartz Reef in Central Otago, is the region’s best-known winemaker. He was one of six people short-listed as international winemaker of the year, the equivalent of a wine-world Oscar. The award will be announced March 20.

Gibbston Valley was an early standard setter in Central Otago, its 2000 vintage gaining the trophy for best pinot noir at the London International Wine Challenge. Such is the demand for that wine that it sells for $NZ 450 a bottle.

In 2008 the Wild Earth 2006 pinot noir received an award for best pinot, and then the trophy for champion red wine, at the International Wine Challenge in London. Last year Cuisine magazine named the wine New Zealand’s best pinot noir.

Wild Earth’s owner Quintin Quider, an American, told me yields were deliberately kept low to improve fruit quality. The vineyard sits at the end of Felton Road, opposite the famous Felton Road Vineyard.

Next door to Wild Earth, another American, Jen Parr, is weaving magic in the vineyard at Olssens, and picking up lots of awards, especially for her whites. Parr’s 2009 Annieburn Riesling is sold out, such is the demand for this sweet delight. The 2009 dry version of the Riesling has elegance and great length, with minerally hints of honeysuckle and lime.

Perhaps the best-known red at Olssens is the Nipple Hill pinot noir, named after a mountain above the property that looks like the breast of a powerful Amazon goddess. It is a friendly, entry-level red with plenty of ripe fruit.

* “In praise of pinot noir” in China Daily, 29 May 2010, page 12.

Love and wine brought Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen together. They met in Australia while making wine for rival vineyards in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales. Sarah-Kate, a New Zealander, convinced Dan, an Australian, to move to the Central Otago region of New Zealand’s south island.

Central Otago is one of the most visually magnificent places in the world. It is also rapidly becoming known as one of the world’s best regions for cool-climate wine, especially pinot noir. America’s Robert Parker, probably the world’s most influential critic, featured the region in his highly Wine Spectator magazine.

Jancis Robinson MW, wine writer for the Financial Times, hosted wine dinners in Shanghai and Beijing last month. She describes Central Otago as possibly “the next great pinot region” in the world. And influential Australia critic James Halliday called Central Otago “God’s country” in relation to pinot noir.

Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen have launched their own label in Wanaka in Central Otago (www.maudewines.com), and I had the pleasure of tasting the current vintage and some barrel samples while in Wanaka.

Sarah-Kate makes wine for her own label, Maude, and for a vineyard her parents own, Mount Maude. All are seriously good wines. The 2008 Maude pinot gris spoke of long romantic walks in an orchard, surrounded by the perfume of pears. The 2008 Maude pinot noir is refined yet complex – a lot like a good relationship. The 2008 Mount Maude chardonnay is creamily elegant, with excellent length on the palate.

Barrel samples of the 2009 pinot noir and chardonnay promise even better things. The chardonnay was like walking into a bread shop, to be embraced by aromas of brioche and bread dough. The pinot noir offered a range of red fruits, all contained in an elegant structure of new oak.

Wine speaks so much of love and wonder, and should be enjoyed in excess.

* “Elixir of life from God’s country” in China Daily, 15 May 2010, page 12

19 June 2010

This course will look at

Using blogs for research and finding story ideas
RSS feeds for better journalism
Skype and CallRecorder
Mobile journalism (mojo)
Micro-blogging and using Twitter (TweetDeck) for journalism
Visual reporting: Panoramas, Wordle and Soundslides
Web 2.0 tools for reporting
Assessing information quality

Bio of the teacher
Stephen Quinn was a full-time journalist for two decades until 1995, and continues to practise as a journalist. He has worked for regional newspapers in Australia; the Bangkok Post; the UK Press Association, BBC-TV, Independent Television News and The Guardian in London; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney; and Television New Zealand. He was a producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Centre in 2002-03 while running a research centre in Dubai, to re-acquaint himself with new television production technologies.

Dr Quinn became a full-time university academic in 1996. Since then he has written 14 books, scores of book chapters and thousands of journalism articles. The most recent books are and Mojo: Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region and Funding Journalism in the Digital Age. Other books include Asia’s Media Innovators and Australia-UAE: Expanding trade and cultural links, which appeared in 2008. In 2007 he co-wrote with Dr Stephen Lamble Online Newsgathering: Research and Reporting for Journalism. He published three books about convergent journalism in 2005 and 2006. In the past decade Dr Quinn has presented more than 150 academic papers in 27 countries. More than a third have been by invitation.

Dr Quinn contributes to newspapers and magazines, consults for media companies, presents at industry conferences, and conducts research and training courses for media companies. In the past decade he had run almost 100 training courses in eight countries. He is a consultant for the Ifra Newsplex (based in Germany) and Innovation International (based in Spain), a member f the Counsel of the Newsplex, and a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Introduction
The history of journalists’ adoption of newsgathering technologies contains a continuing theme: reporters will embrace new tools if they are relevant – that is, they make the job of storytelling easier – and if the tools are easy to use (intuitive).

Some powerful digital technologies have become available to reporters over the past few years. This course focuses on some of the latest. But please note they require a little practice before they become second nature.

Blogs
Blogs and other related technologies offer new opportunities for journalists. Blog is a word combined from web and log. The word “blogosphere” describes all the content built by blogs, moblogs, podcasts and video blogs (these are discussed later).

Research with blogs
Journalists can use blogs as research tools, but the quality of information varies considerably. Think of them as a convenient electronic tool for listening to scuttlebutt. It’s a bit like listening to conversations on public transport or at social events. Sometimes they will stimulate ideas for stories.

Use blogs to discover what people in the blogosphere are saying about local businesses or sportspeople or politicians. But remember that blogs are more influential than they deserve because Technorati, like Google, ranks sites based on how many people link to that site. This produces high rankings for bloggers who link to other bloggers. If you find lots of links to a blog, this might mean the blogger is respected and the blogosphere thinks they know a lot about the subject. They might prove a useful person to interview.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) is the leading tool for searching blogs. According to Technorati, more than 175,000 new blogs start every day. More than 1.6 million blog posts appear a day, or about 18 a second. As of early 2008 Technorati was tracking 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million pieces of social media. Four years earlier Technorati tracked a mere 2.4 million blogs. Now the site simply says it tracks “millions” of blogs. It claims to report within eight minutes of a blog being published.

Google also has a good search tool for finding blogs at http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ though it is still in beta, which is geek speak for still being tested.

Also remember that the same search terms typed into a blog search tool such as Technorati will produce different results compared with using those same terms in a search engine such as Fast or Google. So when casting the net wide for information make sure you search both on blogs and search tools.

Exercise
Choose a subject you plan to research. It might be a local person or sporting identity or organisation. Or for the exercise you could use your own name. Search for the name in a web-based tool such as Google or Fast or Yahoo! (putting the full name in quote marks tells the technology you only want mentions of the name that are in a phrase). Then do the same search in Technorati, the blog search tool.

Compare the different results. You will note that these tools search different parts of the Internet. It helps to research something topical because people tend to blog about current events. For example, you would search Technorati for a local sporting identity close to a major game, or a local politician close to an election.

RSS feeds
Blogs can help reporters do better research and consequently better journalism. But blogs are spreading so quickly it is difficult to keep up. A technology known as RSS is available to help keep journalists abreast of the news, and also follow the latest blogs. RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. It means journalists can have information constantly fed to them instead of searching for it. Technlogy “pulls” content to your computer, as opposed to being “pushed” with email.

A program known as a news reader (sometimes called a feed reader or aggregator) checks a list of sites the journalist chooses and displays all updated articles. The software provides summaries of web content plus links to the full version of each story. As with email, unread entries are shown in bold.

News readers come in two forms: web-based aggregators that gather feeds for reading in a browser, or desktop news aggregators that can be installed on a computer. The latter can be cross platform, or specific to the Macintosh, Windows or Linux. I use Google Reader because it is part of the Google group of tools, such as Gmail.

Exercise
Set up a Google Reader account. You can use your existing Gmail account to log in. You will need to set up a Gmail account if you do not have one.

Google tools for reporting
Google’s mail tool (Gmail) is useful for journalists. The chat option keeps a transcript of the conversation, so you have content to use when you write a story. You can use the same log-in for Gmail as for Google Reader. Google tools inter-connect with each other, so you have access to Picasa, the free picture editing software, from the desktop.

Skype and CallRecorder
Skype (www.skype.com) is free software that lets you make free phone calls to anyone who has skype installed on their computer. It works best with broadband. If you put money into a skype account, you can call mobiles and landlines that do not have skype. The cost is low for international calls, compared with toll calls, especially from hotel rooms. I make almost all my international calls by skype.

Read this column by Amy Gahran headlined “Skype: Why every journalist should use it”. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=155339

CallRecorder (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/) costs $US16. It used to work only on a Mac running OSX. It links with Skype to record the conversation, using the Mac’s built-in camera. Calls are saved as a QuickTime movie. The local and remote audio tracks of the conversation are recorded on different tracks. So you can select one track to use as the audio for a sound slide. More on sound slides later.

A PC version is now available at http://www.callcorder.com/.

Exercise
Demonstrate Skype and CallRecorder.

Online video and multi-media
Over the next few years newspaper journalism will transform itself from its current print emphasis to a focus on a combination of print and multi-media, delivered online.

As that happens, newspapers will compete with broadcast companies to be first with the news. Before the spread of the web, broadcast companies owned breaking news. Radio could interrupt programs to announce the latest news. Television could go live if executives considered the situation appropriate, but only if they had a camera crew at the location. Meanwhile, newspapers had to wait until they were published. Now newspapers can break news online, often ahead of radio and television.

Much research has shown that breaking news drives traffic to newspaper web sites. The most popular form of breaking news, the kind that builds and holds audiences for web sites, is multi-media: news that is some combination of text, video, still images, maps, timelines, chronologies, slideshows and audio.

The simplest and quickest way to get multi-media news on a web site is via the mobile phone. Reporters can also send news back to the office via text messages from mobile phones and via tools such as Twitter (more on Twitter later).

Enter the mojo, a mobile journalist armed with only a mobile phone and a wireless Internet connection. With these simple tools a reporter can get multi-media breaking news onto a newspaper’s web site within minutes of an event being reported, ideally after an editor has looked at it first.

Enter the mojo
At least six companies offer tools for streaming live video from a mobile phone to the web. They are Qik, Shozu and Kyte in the United States, Mogulus in Canada, Bambuser in Sweden and Flixwagon in Israel.

The technical process is simple: Register the mobile phone number with one of these companies. Within seconds you receive a text message with a web link. Select the link and the software loads onto the phone. Thereafter, it takes one button to open the video software or audio recorder on the phone and one more to begin and end filming or recording.

Most of the software is currently only available on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones and a handful of handsets running Windows Mobile. Newspapers need to consider how to pay for data charges because video and audio generate large files, and phone companies charge for data transmitted, not time connected. The best option is to choose an “all-you-can-eat” monthly data package if they are available.

Safdar Mustafa of Al-Jazeera talks about mojos at his channel. The video runs for 2:47. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W9q3q_SVZI

In most examples of mojo work, the video is streamed from the reporter’s camera to the software company’s site. Then the newspaper copies selected pieces of video to the newspaper’s web site. A faster option, which would involve negotiations between the software companies mentioned earlier, would be to stream video directly from the camera to the newspaper’s web site. Newspapers considering this option would need to contact the individual software companies.

Recommendations
Of the software tools mentioned earlier, Qik and Bambuser worked best for reporting breaking news as of late 2008. My main criteria for selecting software were simplicity of use and quality of image. Qik is by far the easiest to load onto a mobile phone and use. If the software corrupts, one simply logs in to one’s private section of Qik and requests a repeat of the software. It appears seconds later and takes less than a minute to download onto a phone.

The quality of the video each software package produces varies, depending on how far the phone is from the server, the number of servers the company owns, and the calibre of local wireless broadband networks. Qik’s servers are in California while Bambuser’s are in Sweden. Both offer fast connections, which suggests they have plenty of server power.

Examples of the author’s mojo videos can be found at http://qik.com/mojo1 and http://qik.com/mojo2 and http://bambuser.com/channel/mojo1.

Twitter (aka micro blogging)
One of the big developments since early 2008 has been the concept of micro blogging via the web or mobile phone. Twitter was the original tool (http://twitter.com/). Reporting with tools like Twitter is limited to 140 characters (similar to SMS). A post to Twitter is called a “tweet”.

I originally used a free tool called Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/). But I now find TweetDeck easier to use and it has a cleaner interface. See http://www.tweetdeck.com/. I think TweetGrid is a great tool for monitoring Twitter: http://www.tweetgrid.com/ A video about it is listed in the readings at the end.

Tweetscan (www.tweetscan.com) is like a search tool for tweets. Insert words that interest you, such as earthquake or riot or protest and see who is twittering about these things. Or use TweetGrid. In May 2008 American blogger and journalist Robert Scoble reported the major earthquake in China on Twitter an hour before CNN or major media started talking about it. How did he do that? “I was watching Twitter. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on. Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account. It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.”

Here is a map of the world in which tweets appear from the continent of origin (it seems to have a lag of about 40 minutes). http://twittervision.com/

Also useful way to see what the blogosphere is saying is via Twitscoop. It uses an automated algorithm to monitor hundreds of tweets every minute and extract words mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a tag cloud at http://www.twitscoop.com/. Pierre Stanislas, one of the developers in Paris, said Twitscoop crawls in excess of 20,000 tweets an hour.

For a laugh, watch this mock documentary about a new form of communication called nano-blogging at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s

Think of Twellow as the Yellow Pages for Twitter: http://www.twellow.com/. A journalism graduate student in Buffalo New York, Craig Kanalley, launched a fascinating Twitter project in 2009 called Breaking Tweets. It organises thousands of tweets into a news service. Think of it as “hyperlocal gone global”. Find it at http://www.breakingtweets.com/

Reporting with social networking (Web 2.0) tools
Web 1.0 was one-way delivery of information to the audience. Web 2.0 involves interaction and connection between audiences, and is also known as and social networking. “Web 2.0 journalism” is the term that describes the relationship between the Internet, social networking possibilities and reporters. Examples of Web 2.0 tools for journalists include Facebook, Delicious and FriendFeed.

Facebook is an excellent way to find people to interview and story ideas. It has thousands of groups, many of which are useful for journalists. Join a group that relates to your area of interest. Some journalists have found Facebook a quick way to locate a photograph of someone in the news.

Delicious
This weirdly named site (http://del.icio.us/) allows journalists (after they register) to store all their bookmarks in one location on the web. So if reporters are on the road, they always have access to contacts and information.

More importantly, plenty of people make their bookmarks publicly available on the web, which means that it is often possible to locate ready-made sources of research on specific topics: del.icio.us is an excellent research tool for journalists. Visit my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/sraquinn/ to see my links about mobile phones and business models for journalism. More relevant for journalists is this huge collection of links on the subject of internet freedom: http://delicious.com/internetfreedom/ Search the site using keywords.

Visual reporting: Panoramas and Wordle
One new way of combining images and audio online is what has come to be known as a panorama. A panorama is a series of photographs taken over a short period of time and linked via software to produce a continuous single image. Audiences can explore the image by scrolling their mouse around the image.

Here are some good examples from The Washington Post and The New York Times. The first was taken at the Pacific Arch, the national World War II memorial on the National Mall in Washington. The $US 172 million memorial was dedicated in May 2008. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/360/042904-20p.htm

The second panorama was shot on the floor of the New York stock exchange. Vikas Bajaj, who covers finance for The New York Times, describes how the New York Stock Exchange has changed in the age of electronic trading. See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/23/business/20081023_NYSE_PANO.html?src=tp

Click and drag your mouse over either image in any direction to see some amazing detail.

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) describes itself as a “toy” for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak the clouds with different fonts, layouts and colour schemes. A wordle is an excellent and simple way to illustrate news stories such as speeches.

Soundslides
This software, created by American photo-journalist Joe Weiss, has become the default tool for creating multi-media slideshows. Many newspaper photographers take many images at a news event but only one appears in the paper. Slideshows are wonderful ways to publish the spare images on the web, combined with audio. The software is available at http://www.soundslides.com. The demonstration version is free. It costs $US 40 to buy the basic edition and $US 65 for the deluxe edition.

Here is a suggested process for creating a slideshow. Assemble all your images in a clearly marked folder. Number those images in the order you want them to appear. Make sure those photos, already cropped and photoshopped, are in the JPG file format.

Prepare a sound track. It could be a reporter’s voice-over, or music, or an interview, or a file recorded on Skype via CallRecorder, or some combination of these. Make sure you save the sound track as an MP3 file. The sound track is the backbone or skeleton of the slideshow. The duration of the sound track is the duration of the slideshow.

Open the software and select new project. Make sure you know where you saved your project (desktop is simplest), and the name of the folder. You can use the video cited in the references to teach yourself how to use Soundslides. Allow about 5-6 seconds per photo, on average. A slideshow should be about 60 to 90 seconds. So 90 seconds of audio will require 12 to 15 good photos.

Nothing is more boring than image redundancy or repetition. So choose pictures wisely.
Soundslides offers a great way to tell multi-media stories. Sometimes a video of a person speaking can be boring. But that same voice combined with a slide show will produce strong storytelling.

Everything on one site
One good way to remember it all is via FriendFeed, which helps put all your links on one page. Demonstrate: http://friendfeed.com/sraquinn

Online resources
Mark Briggs has written a free book on multi-media for journalists. It’s basic but it includes a good section on Web 2.0: http://www.kcnn.org/resources/journalism_20/.

You can learn lots about multi-media journalism at this site from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. Multi-media journalist Jane Stevens wrote many of the tutorials: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/

Mindy McAdams, professor of journalism technologies at the University of Florida, has a comprehensive blog about online journalism: http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/

The author’s blog about mobile journalism has a range of information about reporting with only a mobile phone. See http://globalmojo.org

Mark S. Luckie writes an excellent blog about multimedia which should be on your list of regular reads. http://www.10000words.net/

Readings
Jonathan Dube of Cyberjournalist provides an excellent introduction to RSS feeds for journalists. Read it at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001913.php. JD Lasica has written a RSS guide for journalists at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php.

If you use the Pro version of Soundslides, here is a video tutorial on how to use it: http://www.multimediashooter.com/wp/uncategorized/video-tutorial-soundslides-part-1/

Reporters Without Borders has a guide for understanding how people in repressed cultures can publish their blogs: http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542