Former SLO County DA investigator Larry Hobson talks about the Rex Krebs case. The video interview of Hobson was shot using a Sony HDV 1080i and a 10″ clamp light. The piece was edited in Final Cut Express. It was featured in a special section that I created for a series of stories that ran in the newspaper.
Hobson talks about taking Krebs to the scene of the crime. The video includes video footage shot by investigators with the DA’s office. The original footage was converted from VHS to DVD. The video interview of Hobson was shot using a Sony HDV 1080i and a 10″ clamp light. The piece was edited in Final Cut Express. It was featured in a special section that I created for a series of stories that ran in the newspaper.
The Tribune/SanLuisObispo.com did a series in May 2009 on Rex Krebs, a former San Luis Obispo County resident who murdered two San Luis Obispo college students. I interviewed former DA investigator Larry Hobson about the case and how he got Krebs to confess. The video includes photos from the case and footage from the interrogation. The video interview of Hobson was shot using a Sony HDV 1080i and a 10″ clamp light. The piece was edited in Final Cut Express. It was featured in a special section that I created for a series of stories that ran in the newspaper.
One of my duties as a Web producer is to shoot breaking news video. My main duty is to get the story for print and online, but I always make sure to have my video camera in my car. Unfortunately I didn’t have a tripod, so I used some of the techniques I learned in the video classes I’ve taken. The video was shot using a handheld Sony DCR-SR42 30GB Hard Disk Drive camera. The video was edited in Adobe Premiere.
When our crime and courts reporter told me last week that an infamous murder trial was set to begin on March 6, I immediately thought it would be a great opportunity for us to try a live Tweet. She agreed so we set her up on a laptop and had her Twittering from inside the courtroom. The murder trial began with opening statements from prosecutors and followed with testimonies from several witnesses. The trial is for a Cayucos man accused of killing his grandmother, stuffing her body into a suitcase and dumping it off a cliff somewhere near Ragged Point. I’ll spare you with the gruesome details, however, you can read them on our Twitter page
to see how our reporter handled the case. Our experiment was a success and I hope to do more live Tweets in the future. And to all you Tweeters out there, be sure to follow @slotribune for breaking news updates throughout the day.
I finished another mini project at work today. It turned out OK but I would have like to spend a little more time cleaning up the text and fleshing out my interactive map a little more. But hey, I did what I could. I’m happy I finally had a chance to play with UMapper. It’s a great program (included in my list of Top 5 fave sites for embeddable Flash components). It’s very simple to use and doesn’t require an API key to embed straight onto an HTML page.
I like doing these kinds of projects, especially when I have good content to work with. Thanks to Dave Middlecamp for the photos and for creating the SoundSlides project.
I was going to include a few more tips on mountain biking around SLO County (there are a lot of great trails here) but I ran out of time. Instead, here are a few good resources including a book on the topic by my buddy Brian Milne (that’s him on the cover).
The book covers some of the more popular trails including Cerro Alto (starts at the campground between Morro Bay and Atascadero), Blinn Ranch Trail (backside of Santa Margarita Lake accessible via the Pozo area), both sides of Cuesta Ridge and Cerro San Luis. Montaña de Oro also has some pretty good trails.
Mapping these trails on UMapper wasn’t that easy since the only way you can really map a hiking trail is on a GPS unit, according to Brian. I figured my way around this by using UMapper’s Polygon and Line tools. Instead of points and dialogue boxes, UMapper allows you to highlight a section of the map, or draw lines and circles to highlight an area.
Thanks to the South Asian Journalists Association for including The (San Luis Obispo) Tribune in their roundup of Oscar front-pages. We’re one of only a couple McClatchy papers included in the roundup. Now, time for a shameless plug: The Trib was recently recognized for oustanding front page design by Poynter for its November election issue. As a result, we’ll be included in Poynter’s upcoming book of top election front pages from around the world. Go Tribune!
Check out a gallery of other SLUMDOG front-pages included in the roundup and comment in the SAJA forum.
Ever since I attended the Knight Digital Media Center’s Multimedia Traini
ng for Journalists I’ve only been able to produce 2 Flash applications for The Tribune. I’m trying to get into the habit of creating at least one a month. This week I’m making one on recreational bycycling in SLO County. Anyway, here is a list of some great, easy-to-use Flash applications that will come in handy for any journalist. I encourage you to visit these Web sites and play around with the different tools each has to offer. By the way, the first Flash project I produced at The Tribune was based on a staff photographer’s journey through India. Check out Faces of India.
1) Knight Digital Media Center’s training pages
Check out their tutorial pages on Flash, audio, video, photography and web design. They even provide downloadable templates which you can use to create your Flash projects. Best of all — it’s FREE!
2) Flash Den
FlasDen isn’t really tailored toward the average journalist, but it’s a great site to check out what you can do in Flash. I’ve come up with quite a few ideas for multimedia projects based off the components I’ve seen on this site.
SproutBuilder is an excellent program for making customizable widgets for your web page. You can even integrate audio, video, web polls, and other content to your Sprout widget. I’d suggest browsing through the “Recently Built Sprouts” section to get an idea of what you can do with SproutBuilder.
4) UMapper
This program allows you to create embeddable Flash maps for free. If you create a Google map in Flash you’ll have to use Action Script to program the points, dialogue boxes, and the ability to add links, video, and audio. UMapper does that for you and then generates embeddable code. You’ll have to tinker with the KML code and Google API keys (I think) but its doable. Check out some of the maps that have already been created and shared on UMapper. There are a bunch of big newspapers already using this program. I’ve had great success with it. Trust me, you won’t want to program your own map (I once spent five hours writing ActionScript to perfect a small Google map. I’ll never do that again!)
I’ve only used once component off this site, but it seems to have great little video players and cool components for interactive maps (I used the component GMap which is free.) Their customer service will also help you figure out how to work with KML code. They’re great at responding to e-mails.
I spent quite a bit of time last night perusing through some very cool easy-to-use Flash applications. Like many other news organizations, The Tribune is trying to get into more multimedia. I plan to use a couple of these applications for a project this weekend on recreational bicycling in SLO County. I’ll post the applications that I’ve used (and plan to use in the near future) in a separate post tonight.
Thankfully the sky will be clear on Thursday, the day the Amgen Tour of California rolls through Paso Robles. Should be fun! The best part of the TOC is the media booth (lame, I know) but it’s fun to see journalists from all 
over the world huddled into a room waiting anxiously for riders to cross the finish line. It’s a pretty cool sight to see. One of the perks of being a journalist is the media access 
This is the first time the race will be ending it’s fifth stage in Paso Robles. For as long as I’ve been at The Tribune the race has finished in downtown SLO. Not sure what prompted the change, but I’m guessing it had a lot to do with $$$ and sponsorship deals.
This year should be the most exciting because it’s the first time Lance Armstrong is competing in the race. Armstrong fans are probably pretty pumped about that. Too bad his time trial bike got stolen after the prologue in Sacramento on Saturday. It’s apparently worth $20,000. Hope he gets it back! BTW — a cash reward is being offered. Armstrong Tweeted about the burglary on his Twitter page. Hopefully the rest of the race goes well for him and the other riders, including Floyd Landis, who is also part of the race this year.
Stay tuned for updates from the TOC, including photos and maybe a video clip or two from the event. For complete coverage of the race visit our special section at www.SanLuisObispo.com/TOC. We’ll have video and stories of the race in Friday’s print edition and online.
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