You are pioneers in this evolving medium. As such, you'll have to learn to be flexible as we experiment with various ways of running the shop. It'll give you great practice for working in a digital newsroom.

Here are some givens: Every week we'll be posting original work from our staff and packaging some stories from the other three news bureaus run by the college (news bureaus in Annapolis and Washington, and the TV bureau on campus). We'll rotate responsibility on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays for updating the home page and for helping to update other areas of the site. In addition, you may be asked to contribute to an auxilliary CNS site, The Bay Beat.

You'll be juggling updates on these sites with additional reporting, packaging, multimedia, research and photo assignments.

We'll have a news meeting early in the day about story, link, photo and graphic choices for the home page and other sections.

Sean and I will be helping you with basic coding and Photoshop and with other multimedia editing tools that include Soundslides Plus, Adobe Audition, iMovie and Apple's Final Cut Express. We'll also be using WordPress for a blogging tool and will be moving into using Drupal for content management.

I'll also occasionally bring in professional or academic guests to give us additional tips and advice. In the past, we've had guests provide additional guidance on audio, video, photos, graphics and interactive elements.

I'll be helping you to make sense of your stories -- the reporting, writing, editing and presentation of them. Your primary jobs here are as storytellers.

We'll want to present each story in the best format for it.

ONE KEY POINT: No one but faculty editors and Sean Mussenden should be saving stories, section fronts or home pages onto the live server. You will normally work on stories in the H drive, and copy them to staging when you're ready for editing. 

You may, however, move photos and graphics and audio clips onto the live server, after you've cropped and sized or otherwise edited them.

And you may also move video clips to the server, after they've been edited.

I'll elaborate on this and explain our publishing system during the early days of the bureau.

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