Week 6: April 20, 2009 to April 24, 2009

This week, I created the last three advertisement for the Global Journalist.

In the ad for the World Editors Forum I I combined both the logos of the World Editors Forum and their owner World Newspapers Association. At first I had trouble putting the elements together in a harmonious way. In my first version, I put the logo of the World Newspapers Association next to its full name. But I later decided to put it in the middle of the page, so that there would be a consistent central axis for the whole ad layout.

With the ad for the Freedom House, I created a bar for the explanation of the Freedom House with a triangle extended, so that it is associated with a roof as a word play with the name of the organization.

With the ad for the ad for the Inter American Press Association, I created a structure of the Z letter for the eye movement.

My efforts to find a way to embed a Google map on the magazine’s Web site still got nowhere. I talked with an IT trainer about this and she said I needed to change the way I put my Google API key. I did, but nothing changed. I wrote to another trainer to ask for his help and I’m still waiting to hear from him. I believe that it is a matter of time before we need to find a way to embed the map on the Web site of the magazine. The current map is put a Web site of a third party and they put ads on the site which often cover parts of the map.

RESEARCH:

I began recreating a Web site for my research on ad placements. I followed my committee chair’s advice on choosing a real news Web site, so that the reactions to the ads are more realistic. I chose the Website of the Global Journalist, as its structure and content more simple than other news Web site. I hope to finish it by the end of this week.

Week 5: Apr 20, 2009 to Apr 24, 2009

This week I made the changes to the ads for the Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) and International Press Institute (IPJ), following Pat Smith and Brian Schraum’s suggestions. I also finished the changes for the other 3 ads for the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ), International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
With all the ads, I created a hyperlink for the Web sites and a small triangle which looks like a play button, so that the readers are tempted to click at it and be taken to other Web sites.




For the RSF ad, I added the bullet points for the explanation of their mission. All the bullet points would lead the eye to the triangle, that is the play button sign.


With the CPJ’s ad, I made the triangle red, the same color as the fire of the torch on the logo. This made the two stand out of the black and white of the rest of the ad.


With the IFJ’s ad I changed the colors of the ad to make the color contrasts work better. I also used the name of one of its campaigns “Stand up for Journalism” as its explanation.



I did a video with Jane Kellogg, covering our editor Stuart H. Loory’s lecture. When I shot his answering the audience, he moved around, so I decided to take the camera off the tripod. This explained why the footage was not as still as it could have been.

While Kellogg was a magazine student and said herself that she hardly had any video experience, I learned from her the importance of perspectives in telling a story. When we edited the part in which Loory mentioned that the bloggers should have the right to say what they wanted, even when they might make it up, I intended to leave it at that. But Kellogg said: “I wanted to include his shrug” after he said that. That shrug escaped my notice. So while I was too attentive to what was said, she paid more attention than me to what was seen. And that’s very important with videos.

As for my research on the map for World Watch, I tried to find a way to embed the Google map on Global Journalist’s Web site. To do this, I first tried embedding it on my Web site but got into trouble with the coding. The Web site gave this notice: “The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site”. I will ask my IT trainers about this.
RESEARCH: I finished the set of questions that I wanted to use for the layouts and send them over to my committee chair for his opinions.
Here is how my questions looked.
There will be in total 50 questions for the survey.
1/Are you male/female?
2/How many hours do you spend reading online news a week?
These questions are for each of the six websites
For the following questions, there will be a 5 point scale, 1 for “Totally agree” and 5 for” Totally Disagree”
1/ Do you find the Web site credible?
2/ Do you find the Web site competent?
3/Do you find the Web site trustworthy?
4/Do you find the Web site annoying?
5/ Do you find the ad intrusive?
6/ Do you find the ad irritating?
7/ Do you find the ad enjoyable?
8/Do you find the ad pleasant?
Professor Daryl Moen pointed out that the questions needed to be structured in a way to measure the different degrees of audience’s reaction rather than just to get them to answer Yes or No. I will also need to work on the layouts to make them more realistic and focused on one Web site layout with three ad positions for two different ads. This will help me to control better other factors and just focus on measuring how people will react to the ads when the content is changed and the placements are changed.

Week 4: April 20 to April 24

This week the ads on which I worked so far got critiqued by those who work on the Global Journalist magazine. I learned a lot from these critiques. Here are some notable criticisms that were particularly helpful.
The curves that I used for the International Press Institute and Reporters Sans Frontieres were not effective. The one in the ad for the International Press Institute was lengthy and the words were hard to read. The one in the ad for the Reporters Sans Frontieres was not in balance.
For the ad of Reporters Sans Frontieres, instead of having smaller text for the English translation of the French name, I should give equality for the two names. The solution is having the logo changing back and forth between French and English, which is what the RSF did themselves, in French, English, and Spanish. Due to the technical restraints of the site, I should not do this animation in Flash but a Gif animation instead.
The length for the ads should be less than 350 px, as the current ad with that length stretches the Web site.
There should be a way for the ads to tell the audience that if they click at the ads, they will be taken to the sites of these organizations.
The color for the ad of the International Federation of Journalists should be changed. The explanation for this organization should be changed also, as their own claim of being the world’s largest journalist organization could not be verified.
In other words, from the critiques I learned that my efforts to be artistic might not always be effective with the audience, if the type was hard to read. Also, the ads should be as intuitive as possible. For my audience, it might be not obvious for them that they could click at the ads to go to other Web sites.
I changed the first two ads for the International Press Institute and the Reporters Sans Frontieres based on the criticisms and to test whether I should follow suit with the other ads (I include the ads at the end of the entry). The reactions from my supervisor Pat Smith and my colleague Brian Schraum are quite positive and I will made further changes based on their suggestions and finish up the changes for other ads.
During this week, I also helped Sarah Khan in her video story of William Lobdell, a journalist who worked with the LA Times and covered religion. Khan managed to get an interview with Lobdell in the last minute and I shot his lecture.
The lecture however was very personal and not ideal for a global audience, as Lobdell discussed how he uncovered children’s sexual abuse in the Catholic church in the US specifically and ended up becoming an atheist. I also made the mistake of shooting the lecture and my tape ran out before it came to the more interesting part, which included the questions and answers between Lobdell and the audience.
So we decided to use Khan’s interview instead, as it had much better quotes about journalism and religion on a broad sense. I helped Khan in editing the story with Final Cut Express. Khan wanted to use all the quotes, but I said that I believed even though her questions were different, there were a couple of similar answers, and only the one which was more informative should be kept. Also sometimes a quote was lengthy but not of much substance
For some reasons, in my first capturing of Khan’s video, somehow the sound and the images did not match. Thanks to this difficulty though I learned from Lilian J. Kelly how to sync the sound and the images. However, it took us a lot of time and labor and both Kelly and I eventually decided that it would be much easier just to recapture it. To save time, I let Khan capture only the quotes she wanted to use for the video and from these clips, we edited further to the best bits of the interview.
In the byline, I let Khan's name stand as the one who compiled and edited the video, while I was the one who assisted her. I believe that she deserved the credit, as my footage was not usable in the video.
Also the fact that we shot and edited the video together successfuly encouraged two other students, despite having no or very little video experience, to approach me for their potential video stories which I considered a notable success.
Here are the evidences of my work in this week.




RESEARCH
My committee chair agreed with me that 15 Web sites for the survey are too many considering the number of answers the audience are going to have to answer and I decided to reduce the number of Web sites to 6. I finished working on 6 lay outs for 3 Web sites, each Web site with the ads on two positions: on the top and in the middle of the page, as these are the most desirable spots for advertising.

Week 3: March 30, 2009 to April 3, 2009

This week I designed three ads: Committee of Concerned Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontieres, and International Federation of Journalists. I also made some changes to the previous ads.
Here are some principles I used to design my ads so far:
International Press Institute:


About the logo: At first, I put the initials IPI under the globe which is what the IPI often do. I then chose another treatment of the logo that the organization sometimes used on their website: putting the initials on the globe and the full name under it. This helped to give more white space. Also with the initials IPI standing separately from globe and the full name under it, a viewer’s attention is divided, as they struggle to decide whether their eyes should fall on the globe or the word IPI.
About the line” The global network is dedicated to press freedom”. I repeated the curve of the globe with curved line of the explanation of the IPI. At first I put the semi-circle upside down. I then decided against that, as I wanted to give the name “International Press Institute” more prominence, and with the semi-circle standing on its belly, it seems to hold up the name.
Committee to Protect Journalists



I put both the name and the explanation under the letters “C” and “P” to balance them out with the letter “J” which extends itself to the lower half of the logo.
The white line is to separate the logo from the explanation and focuses the viewer’s eyes on the upper part of the ad.
Committee of Concerned Journalists

http://www.bengal.missouri.edu/~cn9dd/nguyen/ccj.gif
The J in the ad of the Committee of Concerned Journalists extends both above and below the two C’s. Therefore, I put the explanation and the name on two different halves of the ad. I established clear ranking by making the name Committee of Concerned Journalists much bigger than the explanation.
Reporters Sans Frontieres


I made use of the 3 colors that RFS used black, white and red of the whole ad. Their activities “Investigate – Expose – Support” is made into a curve, to show that these three duties go hand in hand. And they all reflect the motto of the RSF which is put inside the curve.
International Federation of Jornalists

Before coming to this choice of colors I tried using the logo of the IFJ on a white background. I then switched to a pink color with the white outline of the logo, to make it look more interesting, while not sacrificing the necessary degree of color contrasts.

The name is put on a red background to repeat what the IFJ did on their own website. The explanation at first was in white. But the black-white contrast easily overshadows the color contrasts of the white name “International Federation of Journalists” on a red background. So, I switched to the pink on a black background instead. I always want to make sure that the full name of the organization must stand out more than the explanation, even though the explanation must still attract the attention.

During this week, Sarah Khan and I also attended the RJI’s discussion about Walter Williams. We shot from afar, and our camera is a small Canon camcorder (I think Canon HV20 HDV). We shot the whole event which lasted an hour, but it turned out that there was no sound in the footage. The lesson is that we can only use it to shoot at a short distance to be able to record sounds.

I went on with my research for the map for the World Watch. It was fairly easy to create a map and the text boxes fixed at the same places every time the map needs to be updated. The text box could be linked either a TXT or XML file. And another person who doesn’t know about Flash can simply copy the text in to this file.
However, Sean Patron, the IT trainer who I talked with last time and who is an experienced Flash coder, after his own attempts on my behalf , said that to make a map with different spots to be updated each time might need thousands of lines of codes. As not only one needs to create a database for all different countries, one also needs to do the coding so that the boxes for some countries will be hidden, while those of some others could be shown.

Another IT trainer recommended that I could instead make use of the Google Map API tutorial to learn how to embed and make use of the Google map on the website the way I want, without having to use an outside website. That is what I am going to study next.
RESEARCH
I began building up the questionnaire for the survey. In the proposal, I wrote that I would build three Web sites, with ad placements in 5 different positions. In other words, it means that I will need up to 5 versions for each Web site. It means that if for each Web site the readers needs to answer 10 questions, the total number of questions will be 150. I decided to ask my committee chair Daryl Moen for his opinions about this later on.
I got the questions so far based on the materials I had for my literature review, mostly studies on intrusive ads. The hardest part was coming up with questions to link the ad positions with attitudes towards the Web site, as past studies mostly focused on the content of the ads themselves. I decided that if the attitudes toward the same ad are different when the ad is in different positions, and this difference is consistent in different Web sites, there should be a relationship between the ad position and the attitude toward it