Before we start – you need to know there are two versions of Wordpress - Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org
There are important differences between the two, and you need to decide which is most appropriate for you. Wordpress.com is the simple version that you can get to work on without any preliminaries. Wordpress.org is more sophisticated, and involves downloading and unzipping Wordpress to your computer, and having a hosting provider
There’s a good guide to the pros and cons of each here from the Expand2Web blog, where you'll also find this smart illustration..
With Wordpress.com your ability to change the look and feel of the site you create is limited.
With Wordpress.org you can customise the look and feel of your site. And you can install a wide variety of themes, and add many WordPress plug-ins to extend its functionality.
For a non-techy, looking at what you need to do to install and run .org can be daunting. But it needn’t be. There are a number of hosting services that make it easy, some offering one-click installation of Wordpress. But you do have to pay for their services.
Wordpress.org offers a list of recommended hosts here.
You can also choose your own hosting company. Tell them you want to use the Wordpress operating system and they’ll set you up an account on their server where you can administer your site. We’ll look at that in Masterclass 45: Building Proficiency in Wordpress.
In this Getting Started guide we’ll look only at Wordpress.com, and take the most straightforward approach to getting a Wordpress site up and running.
So this course fits into the first of the three levels of training used in the book version of MMJ, and in this companion website. At times we will refer to material that is covered in other modules of Getting Started, particularly Chapter 2: Creating a Publishing Platform, which starts on page 68.
You'll need to subscribe to MMJ to access the other material referred to. To do that, you have to buy the book, in either print or ebook format. A code given there gets you access to everything on this site. The book costs about £25 from Amazon UK, a few pounds less in Kindle version, or about $40 from Amazon USA.
Makemynewspaper.co.uk and Multimedia-Journalism.co.uk are offering two lucky winners a free, 150-copy print run for their 16-page tabloid newspaper
The competition is open only to UK-based journalism course tutors or students, hyperlocals or start-ups, and is offered by makemynewspaper.co.uk NOT .com, which operates in the USA.
The idea is that if you are itching to publish your own tabloid newspaper, this is your chance to create and have printed a sample that shows what you can do.
It’s something you might be able to submit as part of course work, or, if you are a hyperlocal or startup, to help your fight to get funding or to trial your idea and get reaction to it.
To apply, you’ll need to come up with a convincing pitch as to why you should get one of the two prizes.
Imagine you are pitching to a potential publisher or backer. Why should they put their faith in you?
The pitch should be as concise and professional as you can make it.
Include enough information for us to check out that you really are who you say you are, and to verify any claims in your pitch. So if you are a tutor, details of the institution you work for; if a student, contact details for your tutor; if a hyperlocal or start up, links to what you are doing now, and contact details for the leaders of the enterprise.
If we discover you are spamming us, we'll delete your entry.
You’ve got until midnight on February 28 2012 to apply.
The judges’ decision will be final and no correspondence about those decisions will be entered into.
But if you would like to ask anything about how to prepare your pitch, or to check your eligibility, feel free to get in touch using the email above, or any of the contact buttons on this site.
We’ll aim to feature the two winning projects on the MMJ website.
Should no suitable projects be put forward for consideration by the closing date, the competition will be cancelled.
Location is the fastest growing aspect of communication
Providing location-specific content holds out huge opportunities – and challenges – for journalists and publishers
How do we harness the potential of geo-location for our journalism, whether we are working in hyperlocal, local, B2B, specialist or any other media?
Whatever your beat or specialism, the exponential growth in the use of smartphones and other mobile, wi-fi enabled devices, means that we must look at ways we can make our content relevant to our users when they are on the move.
Mobile devices offer consumers information that is tailored to where they are, and what they want to do, right now. We need to put our own content on the leading mobile platforms.
The challenge to local media: Geolocate or die
The message to local media companies is: geo-locate or die. Or, perhaps more acurately, continue to fade.
For any local journalist, or local publisher of a blog, hyperlocal news site, or local newspaper then the question of locality is central to what they do.
Newspapers were, once upon a time, the best way to get information to those in a particular locality.
What geo-location does is bring a massive advance in the opportunities to do that.
The challenge for any local journalist or publisher is to ride this development.
If you don’t, if those in your area can’t immediately find information from you that is relevant to where they are and what they are doing, or want to do, than you are failing as a provider of local content and information.
I don’t see many local papers getting abreast of this. I do see some pioneering hyperlocal sites and blogs doing it.
What geo-location platforms to use?
At the moment there is a competing array of localising platforms out there.
You can’t build your own and you wouldn’t want to if you could.
What you can do is see which platforms people are beginning to use, and find out whether you can get your content on them.
That’s our aim in this masterclass.
Are they on Foursquare, for example, and could you use Foursquare as a platform for reaching people?
We’ll look at the breakthrough one hyperlocal site, BlogPreston, has made using this platform. What about Gowalla, another check-in site that lets you create local journeys?
There are other potential publishing platforms that are far less well known, and I’ll be demonstrating some of them, including a very promising one called Bubbleby which I think has great potential for local journalists because it lets you create content and community – in what it calls bubbles – around a particular location.
Great for campaigning, or focusing discussion on a particular distinct area in the town you cover.
Mapping platforms
Then there are the various mapping platforms that enable you to put information on a map of the area you cover and then embed those information-laden maps into your website or blog. We looked at using Google Maps as a backdrop to a feature on pages 417-8 of the book version of MMJ, and here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/98 on the web version.
We’ll look at a range of other ways of exploiting the potential of mapping in local journalism.
Build your own GeoGuide
There is the opportunity, from a company called Geodelic, to create a guide to a particular area, called a GeoGuide, that can be read on a Blackberry, iPhone or Android smartphone.
We’ll look at Geodelic, on which I’m building a guide.
The GeoGuide I’m building is not local in the local paper sense, but locality is important to it. It’s an app that brings together the best places to train as a multimedia journalist in the UK. It’s a work in progress but we’ll look at how far I’ve got with it.
GeoGuides could be useful to any editor of a magazine where location can be relevant to some of the title’s content. A golfing mag, for example, might have a GeoGuide to the best courses and cluster a lot of relevant information around those venues. Any specialist-interest magazine could create GeoGuides.
Here are some thoughts:
A business travel mag might create a guide to each major airport.
A fishing mag could let readers see which is the best river or lake close to where they find themselves.
Real ale fans can be told where to get a pint of Owld Scroat in the strange town they happen to be visiting.
How to explore the potential of geo-location for your journalism
Mashable said this about geo-located content in its predictions for 2011:
“In 2010, we saw the growth of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR. Even Facebook entered the location game by launching its Places product, and Google introduced HotPot, a recommendation engine for places and began testing it in Portland. The reality is that only 4% of online adults use such services on the go. My guess is that as the information users get on-the-go info from such services, they’ll becomes more valuable and these location-based platforms will attract more users.
“Part of the missing piece is being able to easily get geo-tagged news content and information based on your GPS location. In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we’re going to see news organisations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a start-up will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.”
So how do we get on the bandwagon and use geo-location on our website, blogs and in the apps we create?
That’s the question this masterclass explores. It won’t give you all the answers, but it will point to some promising possibilities.
There will be some suggested projects along the way, to give you some starting points.
And, as ever, if you do experiment in this area, you must feel free to share what you have discovered with the MMJ community by clicking on any of the comment buttons and sending us a link.
Your iPhone has the power to transform the way you work, and to greatly enhance your effectiveness as a journalist.
This seven-module e-learning course offers tuition, demonstrations and hands-on exercises in how to file reports, using the full range of multimedia, from your iPhone to the static web and to mobile devices.
We will cover both:
the iPhone as a news gathering, editing and transmitting device, and
how to establish publishing platforms for the material you create
The modules are:
Module1: Gadgets to make your iPhone reporting more professional
Microphones, lights, brackets, Buetooth keyboards and more. Bits of kit that maximise the iPhone's performance as a journalism tool.
Module 2: Establishing publishing platforms - recording, editing and publishing from the iPhone to your range of publishing platforms
The basics: filing to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
More advanced: establishing a wesbite that acts as both a publishing platform for multimedia content and a distributing hub for your content to social and other platforms. Plus, how to embed all your multimedia content in an existing static website.
Module 3: Creating and filing text Using the iPhone’s keyboard and the inbuilt Notes software, plus consideration of alternative free and inexpensive software and teh best protable Bluetooth keyboards on the market.
Module 4: Creating and filing audio reports
The range of software compared and tested. Which to use, and how to get the best out of each.
Module 5: Creating and filing still images
How to take, edit and publish stills, picture stories and photo albums. Working with iPhone app software including Flirkr, Photoshop Express and Autostitch panorama creator
Module 6: Broadcasting live video straight from your phone
Broadcasting live to a range of publishing platforms usign the best live video apps on the market.
Module 7: Professional-quality video and audio editing on your iPhone
Using Vericorder 1st Video software to record, edit and publish video and audio packages
Equipment: what you'll need You'll need an iPhone, and a few free or inexpensive apps.We aSO take you through a range of harDware enhancements, but the only one you must have is an inexpensive external microphone.
Who's it for?
Any journalist who wants to use their iPhone to transform the way they work
How the course works
The course is delivered online, through a dedicated website that only students and tutor have access to.
Students can contact the tutor at any time, either publicly on the site through comments, or privately through email. Phone support is also available.
The modules include to a range of projects that students are invited to complete.
The results of these assignments can be submitted to the tutor for assessment. At any point students may contact the tutor for additional guidance, either publicly or privately.
Once you have signed up and your payment has cleared we contact you with course access details.
Costs and signing up
The course is now available at a special introductory price of £95. That's a fraction of the cost of most training, and is only available for a short introductory period.
You can pay securely via PayPal. Don't have a PayPal account? No problem, pay by credit card via Paypal. Click here
Once you've signed up, be sure to email us so we can start your enrolment process.
I ask the question because, from feedback I’ve been getting this week from a total of 20 communications professionals who would like to develop mobile websites for their organisations, IT departments are being highly obstructive.
I’ve been running training courses on how non-programmers can now create mobile versions of their static websites – a mix of web and native apps that quickly put mobile-appropriate content into a form that the users of web-enabled phones can access.
I show delegates now to do it without any knowledge of programming, and only a lay understanding of web design and site architecture.
All the delegates spoke of an explosion in smartphone ownership among their customers. One had figures: 27 to 28 per cent of those who used his organisation’s online services have smart phones, and it was projected that 35-40 per cent would have them in a year.
And yet, when he and the others on the course had sought to engage with their IT departments on getting mobile-optimised sites or apps up and running, they were met with, at best, indifference and, at worst, hostility.
Why is this?
I suspect it’s because IT departments, perhaps with good reason, see themselves as the guardians of online provision, particularly in big organisations and those that are ripe targets for spammers and hackers.
Yet the web has moved on. It is now possible for the non-programmer to create all sorts of highly professional web presences, including those for mobile devices. And they don’t need to be hosted on your servers.
Such sites can be created either for free or for a minimal cost.
And yet when my delegates asked about the costs of developing mobile, either from their IT departments or from external developers, the prices quoted were ridiculously high.
It seems that developers seek to charge as much for creating a mobile apps they would for an extensive static website.
That can’t be right.
How can they expect to charge from £2-3,000, and sometimes much more, for a simple web or native app when you or I can create one either for nothing or, for an iPhone and Android app made available in the iTunes store and Android market, no more than £400?
From the feedback I got this week, I’d say that IT departments and web developers ought to get up to speed on all this.
Otherwise, as I’ve seen from the take-up of the courses I ran this week, their customer-facing colleagues will take the ball and run with it.
If you’d like to know more about creating your own apps and mobile websites, please go to www.andybull.co.uk and use the Contact options you’ll find there.
