Online Journalism Backpack

South African workshop set-up

For the South Africa Online Journalism Workshop we build a setup based on (almost) free software that is worth copying. There is no reason why we shouldn’t benefit from the swarms of open source resources, free- or shareware. So here is how we did it:

For video editing we use whatever comes with the computer and since this workshop was PD based, we used Windows Movie Maker. We did encountered a problem though: DVD cameras (Sony Handicam dcr-dvd7e) do not plug right into MovieMaker. So you will need a converter that rips the DVD and changes the movie into a format that Movie Maker recognizes. We found that AVS Video Converter from www.avs4you.com works well. It is shareware and works only with Windows.

For sound editing we choose Audacity which is free and available for both Macs and PCs. Together with the ad-on Lame Mp3 Encoder, Audacity lets you create mp3 files. Again, the problems we encountered were between the recording device and the computer. We used Olympus recorders and they need drivers and their own programs before you can access the sound files.

For photo editing we use Adobe Fireworks. Could have used anything free too, but we choose Fireworks because we can download a 30-day free trial version. Use any software that can do simple photo editing and generate JPG files. We are not into advanced photo editing.

For simple sound/photo stories we use SoundSlides Plus which costs 70 USD. It takes photos and mp3 files and turn them into very nice multimedia stories.

For multimedia we use Flash. It is state of the art and there is no way around it. Try the 30-day free trial before you do anything else.

For the website we use WordPress. It is also free and straight forward. All you need is a webserver. We use www.jourlab.com for that purpose.

As our photo server we created a Flickr.com account.

For video we did the same, created a Youtube.com account.

That’s it.