Blogs > Ivan Lajara
Daily Freeman Life Editor Ivan Lajara talks about journalism, living in the Hudson Valley, language, the Web, cats and even politics. But he shouldn't.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
DFM chat on process journalism during breaking news
Today we're talking about process journalism during breaking news, including dos and don'ts.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.
Labels: breaking news, dfmchat, digital first, digital first media, digital journalism, jrcchat, process journalism
Monday, July 23, 2012
Hudson Valley Chalk Festival
Labels: chalk festival, Hudson Valley, instagram, New Paltz, photos
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
DFM chat on commodity news
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Image via http://www.edupics.com. Trying to illustrate churnalism over here. YOU SHUT UP! |
Today we're talking about commodity news, its role, how to gather and disseminate such information and the changes brought up by content farms and companies that outsource such tasks like Journatic.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.
Labels: dfmchat, digital first, digital first media, digital journalism, jrcchat
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Friday, July 13, 2012
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
I am the one behind News Cat Gifs!
I am responsible for News Cat Gifs!.
For the uninitiated, News Cat Gifs! is a Tumblr that's gone viral, mainly in journalism circles, for over a week now. Really.
For those who know me, this is not news or a surprise, since my dealings with news cats are well documented.
And yes, the idea is not original. There is, after all, #RealTalk from your Editor, Frustrated Journalist Cat (where a number of my submissions made it), Procatinator, Cat Gif page and on and on.
I was on vacation in late June and, while camping, I was ruminating over how to make things go viral after the Slate piece on Buzzfeed. I'm part of Digital First Media's Idealab, after all, and I like to experiment with things on the side.
I didn't just want to quite mimic something from Reddit, though. But I figured if I had potential if it was something that was niche enough (journalism) and if I hit industry influencers (that's why I had gifs with Steve Buttry at @stevebuttry, who is my boss, and NPR's Andy Carvin at @acarvin).
That was July 2. I posted about 20 gifs and @dfnewscat started posting the tweets. Other journalism industry influencers picked up on it early, I presume thanks to the targeted tweeting, including GigaOm's Matthew Ingram and the Associated Press' Eric Carvin, Andy's brother. Other journalism heavy hitters joined in soon thereafter.
I followed the Twitter spread with a simple Twitter search, so I could see the reaction (which was great and made me smile many times, especially when it was reaction from people I follow and admire).
The Tumblr was anonymous because that's part of the fun and because I wasn't posting the sources of the gifs. I wouldn't do that professionally, obviously. I was just having fun grabbing gifs from Tumblr and Google searches.
(TANGENT LINK: This is how to find the credit of the images online)
I messed up the metrics widget, however, and I didn't fix until about noon on July 3. But I knew it had gone viral already because of the Twitter chatter.
Since July 3 at around noon, the blog has had more than 239,000 hits, and close to 93,000 unique visitors. The average return visits as of now are 1,271 a day. The blog has an average of 19.50 note-to-post ratio. Yesterday it went viral in France and Australia, so it picked up a healthy 47,823 hits.
It received an interesting visit from the IP address of a U.S. Senate office in Auburn, Maine and it got many referrals in French at one point. There were tons of nuggets like this that made me smile.
I spent about an hour a night scheduling eight to 10 posts for the next day. I posted one over the weekend. The posts were not all just my experiences. It was more of a collective newsroom experience.. I'm glad many enjoyed it and related to it as I did.
It has 1,602 followers as of 2 p.m. today. It was shared wildly on Twitter, Facebook and even Google+ and Pinterest, and the latter doesn't even like gifs. It had nice referrals from 10,000Words and Kotaku as well.
Note that the blog has no social media share buttons at all.
Top Three Most Popular Posts
Text: 188 notes - Published 7 days ago
Text: 121 notes - Published 5 days ago
Text: 98 notes - Published 8 days ago
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Image via http://space-symphony.tumblr.com |
Labels: cats, News, news cat gifs, viral
DFM chat on using multimedia during breaking news
Journalists, members of Digital First Media and pretty much everyone else who wants to - are going to be taking part on the weekly Twitter chat Wednesday at noon, Eastern Time.
Today we're talking about using multimedia during breaking news.
The live feed is posted below. But you can also follow the chat here or here or also here. And you can also check out past chats over here.
If you want to chime in, just post a tweet with the hashtag "#dfmchat" so it can automatically appear below.
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Labels: dfmchat, digital first, digital first media, digital journalism, jrcchat, tools
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The Catskills according to New York City dailies, as told through tweets
Labels: catskills, dean gitter, hipsterism, new york times, wall street journal
Mid-Hudson Bridge from Walkway Over The Hudson @wothshp
Monday, July 9, 2012
How to post from Instagram to Blogger, via Android
So here's how to post from Instagram to Blogger from an Android device.
Superfast Tutorial 1: Make an ifttt recipe. Better yet, just grab this one.
Obviously, you might want to save it as a draft and then edit the post. Here's one I just did with ifttt.
The advantage of this method is that it's fast and the images appear larger (though you can always size the image).
I should also note that it took about 10 minutes or so for the draft to appear.
Tutorial 2.
1. Get the Blogger app and place it next to your native 'Galleries' app.
2. Open the Gallery app. You'll be happy to find that one of your albums is your Instagram photos.
3. Pick the photo you want, hit the "Menu" button, "Share" and "Share via Blogger"
4. The image will be embedded on your post, which you can edit however you want.
Here's one I did with that method, the Ghost Mobil of Route 199 before the Taconic Highway:

Labels: android, blogger, digital first, Idealab, instagram, jrc on demand
Monday, July 2, 2012
Which Kingston hospital should remain open?
You can also share your ideas via Twitter, like this, or in the comments below.
Labels: benedictine hospital, hospital, Kingston, kingston hospital