Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog
Explorations of personal and community journalism... Traditional, Alternative, Online... The new TAO of newspapers?
"The first rule of journalism is... don't talk about journalism... Or maybe that's 'Fight Club'?"
That's one of Steven Colbert's lines from his "senior media correspondent" days at the Daily Show, in a different context, but it's here to celebrate the fact that this semester's classes are done talking about journalism. Final exams wrap up today.
The new Tennessee Journalist news site looks great, and my students making their first attempts at learning HTML with one hand and reporting news with the other did fine work too, some of which is on that site. Semester-long projects have been completed -- some with whole hours to spare. And one of the first finished Web projects I looked at raised a question that wasn't asked in class all semester -- about putting YouTube movies on "your" page or weblog.
Learning is never over, and I'm sure my students will all be gathered by the festive holiday symbol of their choice for the next few weeks, merrily editing their pages and surfing the Web to see what else they can learn about writing HTML. Well, maybe not. But just in case they want to play with YouTube, here goes...
I'll admit I've only glanced at the YouTube "Help" section on Sharing and Embedding videos, but I didn't see any mention of reducing the size of the embedded video player or adjusting its position on a page, which struck me as useful things to do. Some videos of "talking heads" don't need to take up that much of the screen, so I've reduced this one by a fifth. For positioning, you could enclose the video player in a table cell or a CSS division of some kind, but this page is a quick-and-dirty test of a simpler approach. (It's also a test of whether either technique works with this blogging software's page template, which is not the most up-to-date code. Updating that could be my holiday project. But probably not until another holiday, maybe July 4.)
To change the size of the player, all I did was proportionately reduce the width and length numbers given in YouTube's embeddable code. (When students do that with a still image, I tell them to go back and really change the image dimensions in Photoshop, but for the YouTube video, I'm willing to compromise.) If the trick is working, it's because I multiplied both codes by 0.8 to reduce the standard 425-by-350-pixel player by one-fifth.
If the video player is pleasantly positioned against the margin of this page with text wrapping around it, it's because the old-fashioned HTML "align=" code works when added to the more recent "object" and "embed" tags pretty much the way it worked with the original 1993 "img src=" tag. And if it doesn't work, I'll fix it tomorrow... which is something I could never say at an old ink-and-paper newspaper.
The next question the astute student journalist should be asking is, "Hey, wait a minute, is republishing The Daily Show like that legal?" I'll leave that answer for next semester. Meanwhile, bake me a cake with a file in it, just in case.
