UCLA Extension is slowing rolling out a multimedia arm to their certificate program in journalism and the CyberFrequencies team all had a hand in teaching the class, and Joshua Rodriguez and I just completed the first advanced class this week.
The students came up with fairly ambitious stories and were asked to make them into multimedia projects -- but here's the rub -- using all freeware. And despite the great promise of the web -- that everything's free -- we found out that when it comes to freeware...you get what you pay for.
So the students who pulled it off did so through sheer grit and determination.
For the last class we assembled a panel of "judges" from both new and traditional media. They were:
Wiki book writer Andrew Lih, former Wall Street Journal and Newsweek writer Jennifer Ordoñez, Flavorpill editor Tanja Laden, New Media writer Shana Ting Lipton, and KPCC reporter Molly Peterson
These judges looked at the projects online, listened to the students pitch the projects, and then huddled to choose the winning project.
And the winner was...drum roll please....Jessica Perez and Rachel Sulprizio's project the LA River Rubout, about the "the whitewashing of the LA river using federal stimulus package.
In this video Jessica and Rachel drove their cars down in the river before the rainwater had drained out -- no they didn't get arrested, and yes the car still runs.
But throughout the project those girls were bad-ass like that -- they were ultra focused and doing whatever it took to get the story done!
