Oops…

A big thank you to all those who tuned into the ‘fax on Thursday night on Eastlink!

In the midst of what we in the TV room like to call ‘Monday Madness’ we unfortunately left out a couple important things in our first show:

First of all we would like to thank Karl Jonasson for providing original music for the ‘fax’s intro. Big thanks Karl! It really helped in setting the tone for the show.

Secondly, we forgot to give a shout out to our friends in the online workshop! They’re putting in tremendous work to publish stories daily at http://unews.ca/

In our closing credits, we forgot to add that Sarah Kraus stepped in as line-up producer (we couldn’t have put the first show to air without you Sarah!) and Amy Crofts was our online producer. Amy’s last name is spelled “Crofts” not “Croft”.

Thank you for all the feedback and support everyone! We appreciate your patience, after all we are still learning!

the ‘fax INTRO – Winter 2011

“The opening credits of the 2011 winter season of the ‘fax were produced with the idea of contrasts in mind, focusing on Halifax’s multiple facets. The rapid pace of the credits reflects the city’s busy schedule on the foreground of a calm and brisk winter day. In an effort to stay away from the clichéd touristic shots of the city, the viewer will recognize flash images of the corners of structures, street signs and lookouts familiar (or hopefully not) to all Haligonians.”

Justin Barry Mahoney

the ‘fax INTRO – Fall 2010

“The Fall 2010 TV workshop students put together a current affairs show entitled The’fax. The concept is simple; the inner workings and behind-the-scenes of a student show. The intro, in essence, captures the hectic yet organized development of their production. It’s fast-paced, interactive, and diverse.”

Mick Côté

“Truth: Fact and Fiction” launches 2010 Howe Symposium

In the opening session of the 2010 Howe Symposium, special guests Linden MacIntyre and David Adams Richards discuss this year’s topic, “Truth: Fact and Fiction”.

Watch Part One for MacIntyre and Richards in conversation with CBC Radio One host Stephanie Domet.

In Part two, you’ll find their question-and-answer session with the audience.

Videographer: Dale Leckie

Liveblogging the proceedings (Twitter #howe10, @kingsjournalism): Mick Cote @mickcote

Howe 2010: David Adams Richards’s writing life (Sat.@10:00)

From the time he was a child, David Adams Richards knew that he would be a writer. To say the path was rocky would be an understatement. He explains why, and how he overcame his demons, in this conversation with David Swick.

Videographers: Adam Burns and Liz Brown

Howe 2010: Linden MacIntyre and the writing life (Sat 11:30)

This son of a hard-rock miner took his first job — cub reporter at the Halifax Herald –as a way to pay the bills. Today, Linden MacIntyre is an award-winning journalist and novelist. In this session from the 2010 Howe Symposium, he speaks with Dean Jobb about the “writer’s life” and how it became his own.

Videographers: Marie David and David Kumagai

Howe 2010: Richards on novels vs screenplays (Sat 1:30)

David Adams Richards has seen several of his novels and short stories turned into films. He has also written or co-written the screenplays. In this “Books into Films” session from the 2010 Howe Symposium, he speaks with Susan Newhook about the differences between the two, and the challenges of adapting his stories and their characters for the screen.

Videographers: Scott Riddell and Heather Gillis

Howe 2010: MacIntyre/Reardon on books and doc (Sat 3:00)

The title of the session was “Books into Film”, but in this final conversation of the Howe Symposium, Linden MacIntyre talks with Sally Reardon about – among other things – how he worked to balance the personal and professional on two projects for  the fifth estate : the engrossing and tragic story of Ty Conn, and more recently, “Betrayal“.

In each case, he wrote a book on the same topic: his first non-fiction book, Who Killed Ty Conn, and the novel The Bishop’s Man.

Watch the session here. Please note that since the session runs a bit over an hour, it takes a little time to load…but it’s well worth the wait.

Question for comments: How many topics discussed in class come up in this session?

Videographer: Stephanie Directo.

Final note: Congratulations to Stephanie, Adam Burns, Liz Brown, Marie David, David Kumagai, Scott Riddell, Heather Gillis, Mick Cote and tech supervisor Dale Leckie for their great work on the livestream.

Thought-provoking Margaret Atwood

It’s not unusual to describe Margaret Atwood and her views as thought-provoking: in this interview with the US website bigthink.com she touches on a number of topics we’re talking about, or will talk about, in class: social media, where stories come from and how they come together, even the motivations behind storytelling itself.

Beyond the actual content, there’s still more to think about in the way this piece is put together. Focus, multimedia production approaches, new formats for interviews: it’s interesting on all these fronts and more.

Questions to think about include:

- Is this one interview or several?
- How did they choose the topics? – Does each get enough attention?
- How would you focus this in your advance preparation?

- The interviewer doesn’t appear at all, and Atwood addresses the camera directly. This is becoming a common production approach in online interviews. What do you think of it?

-The text @ the bottom of this post is cut and pasted from the e-newsletter I got from bigthink.com this morning. What do you think of it as an intro to the interview? (length, number of links, etc)

- On the site, there is a clickable ‘lineup’ of the whole interview that lets you jump to sections of interest, or a transcription of the complete interview.  How useful are these?

Overview text from bigthink.com’s e-newsletter (the links don’t work in my cut-and-paste, but I’ve bolded them)

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“Canadians have a reprehensible habit of making fun of just about everything,” says novelist Margaret Atwood. In her Big Think interview, Atwood tries to explain Canadian humor, asking us, “What does a Canadian girl say when you ask her if she’d like some sex?” Though highly entertaining in person, Atwood’s books are not particularly known for their humor. Her most recent novel “The Year of the Flood,” is about a future in which mankind has been decimated by a man-made virus. Discussing the preponderance of books and movies about the apocalypse in recent years, Atwood said that they become popular “when people have suddenly realized that things may not necessarily go on along the same set of assumptions that they have been going on for the last little while.

Atwood’s books may talk about technology as a threat to mankind, but she’s no Luddite. The sprightly 71-year-old is an active Twitter user and a proponent of e-books. She told us about some of her favorite Twitter threads, including the recent push to elect a turnip as Prime Minister of Canada. A prolific author of more than thirty books, Atwood also describes her creative process and what it’s like for her to begin a new book. The hardest part about writing fiction for her, she says, is exposition. Atwood comes from a scientific family, so she knows much about the evolutionary science and neurology behind reading and storytelling. Storytelling is also a deeply human activity, she says, one that may have emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.

What can news learn from viral online ads?

An article from the Nieman Journalism Lab in the US argues that those viral (and funny) Old Spice ads have a lot to teach us about the future of news.

No, really…

The piece is a huge piling-on of ideas – pick a couple of points and tell me what you think.