Look at that, folks from yesterday’s post.
This is what we in the business call “good continuity.”
For those of you who don’t care to dive into the rabbit hole: Hello!
Welcome to me talking about today’s Society of Professional Journalists — Cal State Fullerton chapter meeting.
I’ve been our branch Secretary for a year now, but last semester the meetings conflicted with my three-hour Visual Communications class.
So this semester I’ve been better about going. Even if that means commuting for just that, like today.
Doing so has offered me the chance to live tweet a guest presentation by Washington Post editor Gene Park:
Then it took me on a tour of the CBS2/KCAL9 Broadcast Center.
Today, the train of interesting things continued as we hosted USC Digital Journalism Professor Amara Aguilar.
The funny thing is, I’ve attended one of her presentations.
Last year at the ACP Convention in Long Beach, I learned about Google reporting tools like the Cardboard VR camera from Aguilar. Wrote all about it here.
Today she went over a couple of different tools that are useful for journalists to create a better social media presence on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
The presentation started with a few general tips, despite the idea that most content is tailored to the platform.
Primarily that social media content is best if it “awe” a viewer, provides them “laughter and amusement,” or instills some sense of “empathy” and “surprise.”
Then I jotted down this quote about how social media should be used to connect with people:
“When you’re looking at your device late at night before bed, people want to see personal content,” Aguilar said.
Personal stuff is particularly effective when it’s visual, so she spent her time teaching us about two apps anyone can access on their mobile devices.
First, the graphic design portion of the Adobe Creative Cloud: Adobe Spark Post.
If you’ve spent a lot of time on social media or digital news sites like Now This, you’ve likely seen the kinds of images with text overlays that Spark Post is good for.
Because CSUF students have free use of the Adobe Creative Cloud, we were able to practice creating our own.
For the purposes of goofing around, I reused this image from my post-Us Twitter freak-out:
And reimagined it as this baseless Peanut’s fan graphic:
Nice, huh?
I think that resource is pretty neat, but mostly because it’s good for cropping images to dimensions used by specific social media sites.
The piece above being perfect for Instagram, apparently.
Dunno about that… I’ll let you know if I get more than just four likes on the post I made using it.
What I can see as being more useful to me in the long-run was her introduction to the GIPHY CAM app.
See, I’m a man who likes a good GIF — and I pronounce it both ways, so don’t bother asking.
I’ve always been interested in making my own, but never enough to seek out good ways to do so.
When I’m on my phone, this app seems like a pretty decent approach.
For instance, check out this practice GIF I made attempting to create a looping image:
Isn’t it amazing how I’m not only chubby, pimpled, clearly sleep-deprived and unshaven, but also that I couldn’t get the camera to sit perfectly still even when I had it propped up on a table?
I love that about myself.
Probably not the most successful first GIF attempt, but now that I know about this app I can get more practice.
Perhaps one day I’ll be skilled enough to make silly comic book GIFs in a big news story like this UFC girl piece from Medium Aguilar showed us.
Funny enough, this SPJ meeting was held in Professor Frank Russell‘s Comm 201 class. There was an issue booking the Titan Student Union.
Almost three years ago I first started my Twitter account in 201 because he required it. I’ve come to both thank him because it taught me a lot about social media, but also resent him after spending hours mindlessly scrolling.
Now that I’m about to graduate, it looks like I’m still learning new things about social media with him.
Isn’t it amazing how things come full circle?
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 