With the school semester winding down, our digital journalism class was tasked with one last assignment. Our third video slideshow has been completed! This time our slideshow focuses on Julie Esteves, the bilingual co-director of the Children's Outing Association. We followed her around at a Family Gathering Night for the HIPPY Program.

For this part of the project, I took photos, along with my partner Liz, and edited the final audio for the slideshow. I wrote the first draft for our 500 word story, which was edited by Liz, and we both worked hard in Marquette University's Wakerly Center to put all the pieces together.

I hope you enjoy.

Christmas is less than three weeks away, and winter break for college students like myself less than two weeks away. And with Christmas just around the corner, New Year's isn't much farther down the line. CNN.com recently highlighted an article on their homepage revisiting the major news stories of 2011 that dominated the headlines.

Scrolling through the article brings back to memory how many events have happened this year, from the devastating earthquakes in Japan to the end of a ten year hunt to find Osama Bin Laden, to the killing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The article covers multiple other news stories, providing links to CNN.com's coverage with every one of them.

CNN.com also offers an interactive graphic that allows you to choose from the top 20 news stories of the last 12 months and customize your top ten. People can submit their choices and view the results of others' choices.

Reviewing all of the major news stories and just how complex they are reminded me just how daunting a task it is for CNN.com to cover so many stories with in-depth quality. And with CNN recently cutting 50 staffers, that task will prove even more difficult, as 2012 is sure to be just as exciting.

The CNN.com article ends with this: Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in October. His final words, according to his sister, were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!" Fitting words for 2011.

For my latest blog posting, I decided to take a look at CNN Heroes. CNN Heroes is a project CNN has undertaken to shine the spotlight on America's often unsung heroes.

CNN.com currently has 10 CNN Heroes finalists, and people who register with CNN.com (which also allows you to fill out iReports) can vote for who they think should win the award of CNN Hero of the Year.

CNN.com put together a nice multimedia package to cover their heroes, including photos, videos, graphics, and articles. CNN will also be airing a special, CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, December 11th at 7p.m. The CNN Heroes fall into various categories: community crusaders, championing children, medical marvels, defending the planet. 

CNN has narrowed their heroes down to the top ten, all of whom are either community crusaders or championing children heroes.

CNN Heroes is definitely a nice project by CNN, offering some good hearty news, when many of my blog postings have covered CNN.com's coverage of negative news such as the deaths of Steve Jobs and Andy Rooney, and CNN.com's home page has been covered in recent weeks with reports of sexual exploitation of children by two assistant college coaches. The project also gives some well-deserved attention to people who are devoting their time and energy to helping others and trying to make the world a better place to live in.

While CNN.com contains plenty of tradional news articles and videos keeping people up to date on the day's breaking news and hot topics, the website also provides blog and podcasts to entertain and inform its viewers.

CNN.com does not give its blogs and podcasts sections any prominent display on the homepage. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find links to the blogs and podcasts pages. For newcomers to podcasting, the podcast page offers a small introduction to what it is and how it works.

People can listen to various content with CNN's podcasts, from a political notebook podcast, to a simple news updates podcast, and even a CNN Student News podcast that focuses on middle and highschool classrooms. Unfortunately, I cannot provide links to these podcasts, as they can only be accessed directly from CNN.com's podcast center.
CNN.com also offers dozens of blogs, with topics ranging for sports to food to Anderson Cooper. CNN's Viewer Communications Management Team has even created a blog, CNN.com Behind the Scenes, which is described as a blog for the viewers and all about the viewers.

While CNN.com does not provide any sports content (rather, it sends viewers to Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com), it does have a blog on sports, CNN World Sport. Rather than focusing on scores and updates, it delves into  other issues and aspects in sports, such as racism and a blog on the quality of this year's MLB postseason.

I think that CNN.com has done a good job delving into the worlds of blogging and podcasting, offering truly unique content that is a mix of information and entertainment. However, CNN.com needs to do a much better job highlighting these aspects of their website.

I am incredibly excited to share this project with all of you. As our latest assignment for my Digital Journalism class, we teamed up with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service to produce two slideshows focusing on charitable organization in the Milwaukee area. The first one has just been completed, and can be found here.

This slideshow is about the Children's Outing Association, which has several locations throughout Milwaukee and is ranked as one of the top charities in Wisconsin and the nation. The project focuses on COA's "Home Instruction for  Parents of Preschool Youngsters" program (HIPPY), and a parent, Monique Strickland, who is participating in the program with her five-year-old daughter Madison.

My partner, Liz McGovern, and I worked very hard on this project. We both took pictures, and I was responsible with asking follow-up questions during the interview. During the editing, I focused primarily on audio while Liz worked on the photos, and we worked side by side putting the finishing touches on our slides.

I will definitely use this first project as a learning experience to make our next slideshow, which will be coming in several weeks, even better.

With so many primary debates taking place for the 2012 republican presidential nomination, I thought this would be a good time to explore the CNN.com political tab.

The page is a bit scrambled, with so much information, but it is easy enough to navigate. There are different sections for Congress, the White House, and news buzz (currently following Chelsea Clinton's new job as NBC political reporter).

CNN.com has also already created a 2012 election center that can be accessed from the politics tab. The election center gives updates on all of the recent debates and developments, such as the latest poll results, which most recently saw a surge for New Gingrich's supporters.

The politics tab also contains plenty of opinion pieces from CNN.com writers, such as this article from David Frum on why the Euro crisis should be a concern in American politics. If you want local politics, CNN.com has you covered as well, although the website thought I was in West Virginia when I was in Milwaukee, so I was getting updates from towns I've never heard of.

If you want local politics, CNN.com has you covered as well, although the website thought I was in West Virginia when I was in Milwaukee, so I was getting updates from towns I've never heard of.

After CBS announced the death of "60 minutes" essayist Andy Rooney, CNN.com put together an obituary package that included articles on his career and impact as a writer, and videos that had former coworkers and bosses sharing their insights on Rooney.

The four-time Emmy Award winner was famed for his grouchiness, and CNN.com paid homage to that, with an article full of some of Rooney's best rants and video slideshow borrowed from Time that featured 10 of Rooney's most memorable segments.

CNN.com's coverage of Rooney's death was well-rounded, although I found it odd that the website had two videos that were practically word for word the same audio, one narrated by Gary Tuchman and one by Karen Caifa.

The death of Rooney was the top subject on CNN.com's "Newspulse", which shows the most popular stories at the moment. By Saturday night, the death of Rooney had been replaced on CNN.com's homepage by news of LSU's defeat over Alabama in college football. I wonder if Rooney would have had something to say about that...

CNN.com is very good at covering breaking news, from the death of American inventor Steve Jobs to the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The website is sure to have multiple in-depth articles and videos covering the news in a very quick time frame.

A quick search for Gadhafi on CNN.com will bring up 23 pages of results that have been updated since the first reports of Gadhafi's capture and death--230 results in total. CNN.com did not just have articles that explained that facts of the situation. The results range from videos from CNN's television broadcast to reactions from Libyans shooting into the air to American pundits writing about what this means for Libya and the United States.

One video was of a high school teacher who had her second grade class write letters to Gadhafi in 1986. Gadhafi actually responded to the letters, although he spinned what the second-graders had written into pro-Gadhafi propaganda. The video showed the letters and had the teacher reflecting on what Gadhafi's death means to her.



CNN's Breaking News Twitter account was also constantly updating the news. The first tweet said that Gadhafi had been captured, followed by tweets that a "big fish" had been captured, but it was unconfirmed whether it was Gadhafi, to tweets that the leader had been killed, although this was followed by tweets that this could not be confirmed.

Digital Journalism II's midterm project was to take our slideshows from a few weeks ago and turn them into audio slideshows using Soundslides. Incorporating audio into the project offers a third insight into my subject, in addition to the photo slideshow and a short text section.

My patience with technology was definitely tested, working with unfamiliar software like SoundSlides and Audacity. But our professor and former reporter Herbert Lowe assures us that Soundslides is a news industry standard, so it was a necessary learning experience, and I feel much more comfortable working with Soundslides now.

The project follows Brian Timmreck, a sophomore in the Diederich College of Communication majoring in Broadcast and Electronic Communication. He is also a resident assistant in Marquette University's Mashuda Hall.

The most difficult part for me was getting the photos to correlate with the audio. Unlike many in my class who took photos of a person during a specific part of their day, such as a shift at a campus coffee shop or work as a desk receptionist, I followed Timmreck throughout the day. Many of the photos focused on a different aspect of his day. I ended up switching several photos to narrow the focus of the photo slideshow, allowing me to better incorporate my audio. However, rearranging the photos and choosing the audio that best matched them was definitely a struggle.

Last year, my freshman year of college, I came to Marquette University with no television. Usually I get my news from watching CNN or local news on TV, but with no TV in my dorm room, that stopped. Other than checking out the Chicago Tribune app during breakfast, I really had no regular source of news.

However, with this beat assignment, I have regularly been checking out CNN.com's website, and reading my classmates' blogs on their beat, helping me check out other news sources I might not otherwise have looked at.

What has impressed me most about CNN is the time and resources devotede to developing their news website. With a 24 hour news network, it would be possible to make the website an afterthought and simply throw news videos from television reports onto the website. And while CNN does provide many videos from its TV network, it also makes available plenty of web content such as written articles.

I was impressed with its coverage of the 9/11 10th anniversary and the death of Steve Jobs as well. CNN.com combined in-depth stories with photo slideshows, rememberance videos, and live blogging to cover these front page news stories.