This site should win an award but not for my efforts. Kimberlie Kranich, WILL’s Outreach Coordinator, has outreached herself and everyone else in creating this project. I am but a dumb webmaster.
Destination China was a multimedia group blog I built for the International Reporting class lead by Professor Nancy Benson at the University of Illinois Department of Journalism. 10 students travelled to China to report on various subjects, including the growing economy of China, and its environmental issues.
Some of the students contributed really good reporting, all of it posted from the road in Shanghai, Beijiing, and points in between. Most of the multimedia content remains on the site, but alas, some videos posted to Google Video have gone dark along with Google Video. A good argument for hosting your own media files, if you ask me...
Categories: Journalism • Media • Websites
WILLblog began in March 2004 as an experimental blog for me as the webmaster at WILL-AM-FM-TV. No one else on the staff was blogging yet, and while blogs weren't exactly new they weren't yet totally mainstream and ubiquitous as they are now. I told me then-boss I would spend no more than ten minutes on it per day, as my time was at a premium even then (much more so now!). I attempted to post to it every few days at least, but there were whole weeks, and later months, when I didn't post anything at all.
What I found was that the format tempted me to become a bit edgy. I look back and cringe at a few posts, but that's probably inevitable. I did use it to publish content directly related to WILL and public broadcasting, including streaming archives of various political events. Today that content would more likely go on WILL's main website...but WILLblog served a unique purpose at that time for publishing new media. I've attempted to revive it recently, and may yet find a new rhythm and purpose for it. Meanwhile, some possibly interesting archival postings remain with WILLblog, hosted at Blogger.com.
The 2004 conference of the Integrated Media Association was a watershed moment for many of us in public broadcasting who are committed to, well, public broadcasting. Combine the mission of public TV and radio with the technology of the Internet, and you could get something really powerful for community, enlightenment, and democracy.
That's the idea behind opensourcebroadcasting.org.
Categories: Journalism • Media • Websites
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