Podcast Telephone Interview Made Possible by App

My last exciting blog post detailed creating my first podcast for the Teaching Multimedia course, an overview of the Hancock County Courthouse in Sparta, Georgia.  After that, I was ready for another task, namely one that didn’t involve recording myself.

But wait—there’s more!  Now I had to create another podcast that would include interviews with others.

Hancock County Courthouse.  Sparta, Georgia.  National Register of Historic Places 
(April 16, 1974).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (July 20, 2015).

I decided to delve more deeply into the courthouse topic, particularly the fire that virtually destroyed it in 2014 and the reconstruction process. 

I had contacted officials in Hancock County’s government, offering them my photos (a whole year’s worth) for archival purposes, and I’ve kept up with two of them: Sistie Hudson, Chairman of the Hancock County Board of Commissioners, and Teresa Kell, District 4 Commissioner.  Both were willing to participate in an interview.

Conducting the interview presented a challenge.  Sparta is more than two hours away, and while I wouldn’t mind a Saturday jaunt to Georgia, with endless schoolwork, housework, and yard work, I hardly had time!  I could neglect these chores (I do most weekends), but both ladies in Sparta were just entering a busy period of personal and professional commitments.

What’s the next best thing to being there?  A telephone interview!  But how would I record it?  If I used the speakerphone at school and recorded on the iPhone, I may sound clear and “live,” whereas my subjects might sound tinny and artificial.  If only I could record both ends of the conversation with a balance of sound quality!

Surely there’s an app for that.

There is…more than one.  After some internet research, I settled on an app.  Call Recording by NoNotes.com had positive reviews and required no special equipment (no VoIP or Skype connection needed).  This app would record a call I had initiated (many only record incoming calls).  The app is free, including 20 free minutes of recording per month, with options to purchase extra minutes (most charge, but this one was reasonably priced); I purchased more time in case the interview ran long…and it did.  For an additional fee, calls can be transcribed (hence the name).

Using the app is easy:  After entering my phone number and creating a password, I made a sample call.  The app accessed my contacts and routed the call through its network.  Immediately I received an incoming call from NoNotes.com.  I answered to hear the phone ringing, connecting me to the contact dialed.  After the call, I received an e-mail message that the recording was ready.  I downloaded it by simply logging in to NoNotes.com on the computer.

I composed my questions and called Sparta at the appointed time.  The interview went well, mostly.  A few words of mine are unclear near the beginning, and there was some latency between questions and answers, similar to latency during televised satellite interviews, but I edited that out in Audacity.  Thanks to previous lessons on Audacity, editing wasn’t difficult.

Now I’m tired of hearing myself talk—on to the next task!  

Podcasting Novice Chooses Topic, Makes Recording with Ease

Create a podcast.  I should be excused from this assignment.  Shouldn’t podcasts be delivered in the smooth voice of Casey Kasem?  Or intoned in the authoritative voice of James Earl Jones?  Even if the instructor insists on subjecting herself and my non-Southern classmates to this voice, what would I record a podcast about?

A favorite piece of literature or beloved author?  They’ll already think they’re listening to a monologue from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  A great architect or monumental building?  Frank Lloyd Wright?  Louis Sullivan?  The Sears Tower?  The John Hancock Center?  Perhaps another building that derives its name from Mr. Hancock…if I can’t contract this assignment out to a better voice, I should at least choose a matching topic: The Hancock County Courthouse in Sparta, Georgia, the most beautiful courthouse in the state, at least in my opinion. 

I know enough about the building to write a script.  I traveled to Sparta once each month in 2013 to photograph it—3,336 miles and fifty-seven hours on the road.  Some thought I was crazy to invest so much in one dilapidated building, but I’m so glad I did—the courthouse was almost completely destroyed by fire eight months after I finished the project, so I have some of the last photos of it.  I’ve also researched the building’s history and become acquainted with some local citizens after I sent them copies of my photos.  So there’s my topic.  I can even throw a y’all or two into the podcast just like that Georgia peach Paula Deen!

I now had to get the technical knowledge down.  After reading the assigned textbook chapter and examining the websites listed, I can’t say I’ve committed to memory everything I need to know about equipment and software, but I know where to find out. 

Some of the microphone discussion and comparison I was already familiar with—my principal wants to start a broadcasting program (meaning he wants me to start a broadcasting program), so my friend Louise, who taught broadcasting at a nearby high school for sixteen years, has paid several visits to school to consult on equipment orders, evaluate our existing studio, and expose my students to equipment, including different microphones and their recommended use.

After preparing my script, rehearsing the timing, and editing for length, I had to record.  Creating an audioBoom account and downloading the app were easy; in fact, most everything about audioBoom was simple: recording on the phone, saving, deleting, pulling the recording up on the computer, and embedding the recording in the blog post were straightforward (a test post proved adding the podcast was easier than adding a photo slideshow).  The only real problem with audioBoom was finding the recording—it didn’t immediately display as a saved file, but after clicking around on the menu, there it was under Profile/Posts/Drafts.  Another problem is the lack of voice-filtering technology, but the class will just have to deal with it.

After all, y’all are the ones who have accents, not me!   

Alleged Photographer Learns Valuable Lesson

When I set up my Twitter and Instagram accounts for the Teaching Multimedia class, I had the nerve to use the word photographer in my profile to describe myself.  Deluded would have been a more accurate term.  And now I have to describe what I’ve learned in only 500 words.  Impossible! 

I ventured out to Columbia’s Main Street on a bitterly cold (to a Southerner, anyway) Sunday morning to collect photos for this assignment, armed with camera and tripod and clutching in my gloved hand the list of ten tasks and the notes I’d taken from this class and the Teaching Photojournalism class last semester.

You see, even though I fancy myself a photographer and have my friends and family fooled into thinking I am (although I quickly and demurely add the word amateur when people say I’m a photographer), most of my photography successes can be attributed to dumb luck and the auto function on the camera.  I’ve always thought composition is my strength, but I have very poor technical skills.  Even after the photojournalism class, I told myself I’d experiment with what I’d learned over the holidays, but that didn’t happen with all of the other things to be done (mainly recuperating from school, cleaning house, and sipping eggnog).

So what have I learned this past week?  Not quite everything…but so much!

Finally the triumvirate of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture are starting to make better sense.  I started out consulting my notes (and I still glance back at them when needed), but now I have a better grasp of what to adjust and what those adjustments mean and can do.  At times, I began taking test shots at the extreme end of things: ISO 1600, shutter speed really fast, aperture wide open…or vice versa…then I would begin making adjustments: If the photo was too bright (in some cases, I got a 4x6 white block instead of an image), I knew to lower the ISO.  Or close down the aperture.  Or both if one or the other didn’t work.  It was like working through proofs in geometry class: If the photo is too dark, then I need to dial up the ISO.  If, then.  If, then.  Dial up.  Dial down.  How professional I now sound in my interior monologues!     

I also watched a Lynda lesson that included instructions on how to make light trails from moving light sources, such as car headlights.  I was able to achieve this by slowing down the shutter speed.  This lesson also showed me an app called Slow Shutter, which I immediately downloaded.  It does the job, but I found I need an adapter to attach the iPhone to the tripod to keep it steady, so I ultimately got better results with the camera.

The biggest thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn, and to do that, I need to keep practicing.  Just not on a windy, freezing street in the middle of February…

Know-it-all Makes Startling Educational Discovery

Not to be a know-it-all, but…

That’s a line only a true know-it-all would open with.

Heritage Classroom.  Massie Heritage Center.  Savannah, Georgia.  National Register of 

Historic Places (April 13, 1977).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (September 26, 
2015).

Not to be a know-it-all, but the first module for the Teaching Multimedia course was pretty much a review for me.  I’ve been advising my school’s newspaper since 2003, so I know it all.

Protecting sources?  Know it.  Maintaining objectivity?  Know it.  Cutline?  Know it.

I thought this was a multimedia course, not an introduction to journalism!  I had visions of immersing myself in technology that would help me help my newspaper students class up our little online paper with interactive elements and slideshows and video—video taken by my Broadcast Journalism I class on our fancy new audio and video equipment (if we can ever cut the purchase order from the confines of district red tape).  And I would be able to use all of these new audio and video editing skills I had hoped to acquire in this course with the broadcasting students, too.  Our first broadcast would be so professional that people at school would think they had mistakenly tuned in to CNN, not WWJK News.       

So far, we’re learning journalism basics.  Easy.  This course must be for journalistic greenhorns, not a know-it-all like me! 

Then I got to Task 4: View these live links.

The very first link took me to a list entitled “Multimedia Tools.”  I was dazed as I examined the list—I’d only heard of a few of these resources (and that few includes Google Maps).  But weren’t these the very same resources I’d hoped to be exposed to during this course?

My smugness at being familiar with basic journalism concepts continued to fade as I delved into “Tutorial: Multimedia Storytelling: Learn the Secrets from Experts,” the next link.  This is where I learned how complex putting together a multimedia story package can be.  Shells and storyboards and fieldwork!  Oh, my!

But the kicker came when I investigated the “Best Online High School Newspapers” link.  What incredible journalism these high school students are engaging in!  The sites showcased here are so professional looking—with movement, photography, Twitter feeds, scrolling updates on sports scores…even live broadcasts.  But isn’t this, too, what I wanted to learn?  The tools and training to help my student staff build a snazzy journalism program—nay, a media empire—are before me in this course, the very course in which I had, only days before, thought I had known it all!

Now, I realize I am just one of the greenhorns.  This course is exactly what I need as a teacher to help my students bring our online newspaper to a higher level of quality, to start this broadcasting program off in an innovative fashion, to entice the introductory journalism students to continue in the program, and to engage our audience with newsworthy content delivered in a fresh, exciting way.

But before that happens, this know-it-all has a lot to learn.

From Blah to Blog

In the article “The creator of Godwin’s Law on the inevitability of online Nazi analogies and the ‘right to be forgotten,’” these lines leapt out at me:

“This is the first time in human history where individuals, in this number, have had the agency to be heard around the world on a really large scale…now, everyone is in the position of essentially being a publisher, an autobiographer, a poet” (2).

Underwood Standard Typewriter.  Margarita European Inn.  Evanston, Illinois.  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (July 13, 2014).

I have to admit at the beginning of the Social Role of the Mass Media course, I was less than thrilled when I read the requirement that we would have to maintain a weekly blog.  I saw it as one more requirement.  And I’ve always been resistant to the idea of blogging. 

Who would really care to sit down and read my thoughts on any given topic at any given time?  Who am I?  A little nobody from South Carolina who isn’t qualified to offer an opinion on much of anything. 

Full Disclosure: I did once win a judging contest held by my cousin’s twin girls (then in elementary school) after their parents and I judged some of their artwork.  Or an impromptu performance.  Or something.  I can’t really remember, but they judged me the best judge of them…I know—I was confused, too, but I did win.  I even got a handmade certificate for my excellent judging abilities.

Anyway…I have friends and colleagues who blog.  One keeps a poetry blog.  One maintains a blog on her experiences as a teacher.  Another blogs about her fledgling wine-making adventures.  The teacher blogger has suggested that I start a blog as well, but I’ve always brushed her off.

Who has time for such pursuits?  In particular, who has time for such pursuits in the middle of the school year while taking a course and trying to keep up with the innumerable deadlines and demands of the journalism program, along with those of “normal” teachers and trying to keep up with all of the yard work and the housework, not the least of which is vacuuming up after two Persian cats?

Unless it’s required.

So I grudgingly wrote the first blog and set up the site, merely using the same hosting site the poetry blogger uses because I had his site bookmarked on the computer.  I customized the blog site with a theme and my own photos…I would never just use the defaults—how pedestrian!

Soon I began to look forward to the weekly blog because it gave me a chance to be creative, not creative for school but personally creative (or at least that’s the way I took the assignment).  I had been putting so much time into school and these classes and photography that I’d gotten away from writing for the past few years.  But now this blog gave me the chance to do a little writing—and get a grade for it!  The blog became a little treat amongst all of the serious work of analyzing the social role of the mass media.

So now I have the agency to be heard around the world…now, I am a publisher, an autobiographer, a poet.

I even have fantasies of maintaining this blog after the course ends—of my own free will!

Until I’m buried again…in the middle of the school year…under the next course…and the journalism deadlines…and the teaching duties…and the yard work…and the housework…and a mountain of cat hair…

Reference
Scola, Nancy.  "The creator of Godwin's Law on the inevitability of online Nazi analogies and the 'right to be forgotten.'"  Washington Post.  11     Aug.  2014.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/the-creator-of-godwins-law-on-the-inevitability-of-online-           nazi-analogies-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten/

All the News That’s Fit to Broadcast

This has been a pretty good week at school.  Miraculously I have had some time during my planning periods the past few weeks to get the Journalism Work Room and Dark Room (really a storage room since we don’t work with film photography) mostly straightened and cleaned up after months—nay, years—of neglect…including organizing the cabinets and drawers.  Now, as of this week, I have just a couple of drawers and four cabinets to work through before it’s done!  I’m not sure where all of this spare time is coming from, though.  Probably Monday I’ll walk in to an e-mail message reminding me the Japanese translation of War and Peace I should have been working on for the past month is due by 3:15.  Oops!

But that’s not the only good news on the school journalism front.  I also found out one of my best writers from Journalism I, whom I also taught in English I Honors a couple of years ago, will be on next year’s staff.  She skipped a year somehow (probably scheduling), but she’ll be back next year.  And this young lady has already engaged in a partnership with a local media outlet (which I totally forgot to mention in this week’s discussion board question about partnerships).  This past year, she has been an intern with the Columbia Star, a local, independent, weekly newspaper.  I’ll definitely be picking her brain to see if we can take further advantage of the door she’s already opened.

Detail.  Gymnasium wall.  W.J. Keenan High School.  Columbia, South Carolina.  2007.  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (September 30, 2007).

But wait—there’s more!

Another current journalism student (second year) asked me this week what Journalism III Honors was—she said when she was called in by her counselor to make her schedule for next year, that’s the journalism class she was put into.

And, yes, I am at a school where teachers aren’t given their teaching schedules for the following year much in advance or even have much say in it.  Some years I’ve surmised my schedule based on students telling me they were going to be with me the next year for journalism or English.  But it’s better than it was—the first few years I was there, we received our teaching schedules in the mail along with our welcome-back letters.  In August.  With hardly any time to plan.

But I digress.  And this gets even better.

When I went in to see my principal for my final Goal-Based Evaluation conference for the year, he talked about building up the journalism program.  He pulled out a draft copy of the master schedule and told me there was room for another journalism course, which would being me up to three; in fact, he said I currently have only two English II sections, so this could mean I may…possibly…perhaps…conceivably…perchance have four journalism courses next year.  The most I’ve ever had is three, and that was only one year.

Then the other shoe dropped—he would really like to see a broadcasting component in place.

Beggars can’t be choosers, so I guess I’ll have to take that Kent State broadcasting elective after all.

But imagine what I can do with three or four journalism courses!  Imagine having the time to teach all of the concepts we’ve been learning about and produce the publications!

How exciting!  And how frightening!

Let’s just hope I’m not getting in over my head…      

Down the Photoshop Road

Included in this week’s readings for the Social Role of the Mass Media class was a piece called “Detecting the Truth in Photos,” which detailed the ever increasing ease with which one can manipulate photos.  Not only is Photoshop and its ilk widely available and periodically updated, providing more opportunity for image manipulation, but the rapid nature of social media posting makes the spread of such images more rampant and, I would say, so frequent that only the most dedicated among us has time to do the legwork to investigate whether an image has been altered.

And as a dedicated journalism teacher, I looked down on Photoshop use, even by my best friend Paul, who likes to add filters and effects to photos using the program.

Chicago, Illinois.  Looking northeast from the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower).  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (June 14, 2012). 

I looked down on Photoshop, that is, until the summer of 2012.

That summer I found myself on an architectural pilgrimage to the Midwest to visit and photograph as many Frank Lloyd Wright properties as I could in Wisconsin.  The icing on the cake was the fact that the Wright Plus housewalk in Wright’s Oak Park, Illinois, neighborhood coincided with the first leg of my trip, so, of course, I took advantage of this opportunity!

Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with Photoshop.

When I returned to South Carolina and began pulling the photos off of the memory card to categorize and edit them, I was horrified to see an indistinct gray blob in the top left corner of the last several sets of photos.  Somehow, at the end of the Wisconsin portion of my trip and all the way through my second stop in Chicago (and, yes, there would have been a third stop in Chicago if there had been any way possible), some dust or debris had found its way into the camera and lodged itself on the lens, creating this blob on each photo.  And since I couldn’t see it in the viewfinder, I never even knew it was there. 

My immediate concern was getting the camera repaired before I took any other photos.  Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of camera stores these days, especially around here, so the best and closest one I could find was Biggs Camera in Charlotte, North Carolina, about an hour north of me.  This was in no way a hardship, though, because of the Cheesecake Factory in SouthPark Mall, just minutes from the camera store!

Of course, my next concern was what to do about the spot in the photos.  In some photos, the blob was indistinguishable, obscured by trees or dark colors or patterns, but all shots with sky or light colors at the top left were ruined.  Creative cropping only helped in a few cases.  I certainly couldn’t go back and recreate my trip (although I would have loved to), and I certainly couldn’t discard all of those photos of Frank Lloyd Wright properties, a few county courthouses, and that stunning Chicago skyline. 

So I broke down and bought Photoshop.

I can’t say I did it all perfectly, but I managed to get rid of that gray blob in each photo.  Was I manipulating reality?  Not really, I suppose, because the blob really wasn’t in the sky or on the building or floating above a daylily blossom.  And keep in mind, these photos were not being used to illustrate news—I justify this to myself by thinking of these as artistic photos rather than journalistic photos.

“Detecting the Truth in Photos” tells us the latest versions of Photoshop are so advanced that some changes are practically undetectable.

I needn’t worry about that—the work of my steady hand could be spotted all the way from Chicago…