Agenda 12-19-05
From YAHWiki
Newstroop Minutes - 19 Dec 05
Attending - Angel, Andrew, Buz, Ricardo, Paul, Birgit, Jennifer, James, Ann C.
Reading of previous minutes were skipped as no one had a copy with them.
Ricardo was re-welcomed. He said he hadn't understood much from previous meeting. We talked a bit about how the group worked to possibly help with this.
There was a discussion about Agenda Bashing and most present were for it. It was noted that Ann C, who prepared the agenda, but was not yet present, would not be in favor of bashing it. The Agenda was reviewed and adjusted.
Paul gave a summary of his podcasting efforts. Two new episodes are on the wiki for download. He intends to put all the episodes up in two versions each, using one old codec for old computers, and one cutting edge codec for ipods, itunes and people with newish computers, and package them as podcasts for RSS distribution, down to the level of individual segments.
Buz had made new timelines for the first two episodes which did not have chapter markings. He will make dvds with the chapter markings for Paul. With chapter marking, the division into segments is semi automatic using some of the software Paul has found.
We asked Paul to write up the more technical details and email it to the group rather than taking meeting time, as some of wanted to hear all the gory details and some did not.
The copyright/creative commons issue was touched on. For the time being, Paul is marking all material with normal copyright, i.e. all rights reserved. Someone needs to write up a summary of this for members and producers. Jennifer offered to notify producers of old episodes about any proposals to change the copyright on older shows. Note anyone can find out about this by starting at creativecommons.org.
Buz mentioned "institutional memory" - i.e. when people do complicated things for the group, like podcasting or researching creative commons, a note should be written and saved so other people can go back to it later.
Announcements:
Renato had told Buz that tentatively he is planning to move the thursday show to 9am on channel 9. This puts it right after Democracy Now, and frees an evening slot for some other series. If this happens Buz will edit the promo to reflect.
The national ACM Hometown video festival will happen early next year. According to Susan, they will accept a compilation episode. However, they don't post their rules on their website and haven't sent out this years announcement. Jennifer will research last years rules to give us a head start. Several people were enthusiastic about submitting a "best of" compilation instead of a normal episode, since the competition should be tougher nationally than it was regionally, where we placed second. If necessary to qualify, the episode could be aired a few times.
A committee of Buz, Andrew, Birgit and Ricardo formed to look into this further.
Birgit annouced that the problems with our web pages and url have been fixed. Our urls are:
http://youareherenews.org http://youareherenews.org/wiki/
Buz will update the URL in the credits of the next show and the promo.
Story ideas and Progress.
Ricardo had an idea for a story on Kwanza.
James said he had been thinking about a story about the upcoming merger of Macy's a d Filenes, and job loss in the region. Paul pointed out that at Downtown Crossing, Macy's and Filene's have in had "duelling animatronics" in their windows and this will be the last year for that.
Ann C arrived late, having come from a City Council meeting where the Dancers had won a tactical victory. She may do an update story on this.
Review of show design:
Ricardo - would like more info in intros.
Buz - intros should be better planned - producer should submit a full title, and also how the introducer should phrase the lead in - for example "The Brattle - New Life" as title, and "Our next story is about a group of activists who are trying to keep Cambridge's Brattle Theatre going" as intro. This, plus maybe using more than one phrase or sentence, when appropriate, would satisfy Ricardo's complaint.
Comment: the earlier final submission date should allow us to do a better job here.
Buz - standardize some phrases. "Our next story" not "Our next segment". "You Are Here News" (or the full title "You Are Here, the Cambridge News Magazine"), not "You Are Here Newsgroup" or "You Are Here NewsMagazine". "You Are Here" is ok if it is repeated several times in the course of narration, but the first time in a story, and the last, should include the word News.
There was general agreement on all these suggestions, as summarized a�bove.
Animation:
Andrew would like a customized, but semi standard, animated intro for each show. An art director might do this - but so far no one in the group knows how.
Angel reported Jonah was still working on an animated "bug". She thinks the present bug is boring, in that all it does is just quietly fade in and out at certain times. Others thought an animated bug would be like the annoying Microsoft paperclip.
Paul - moving map idea to highlight location of each story.
Jen - Google Earth has been opened up to application and scripting access, maybe we could do something with that.
Credits:
Angel thought the credits went by too fast, and sometimes the font was too small.
Buz said it is difficult to design each page of credits, with room for the inset video, without using the move and scale features, so there is no standard font size.
Also we are currently using James' design where each episode gets the same amount of time for its credits. We could change this to make sure each page of credits gets at least some minimum amount of time. Buz also commented that Angel often has many more credits than anybody else, which is what resulted in the small font sizes in the credits of Angel's story in the last episode.
Some people thought fast credits were fine. No final decision.
Ready Team Concept:
This is the idea that we organize ourselves in such a way as to be
more able to cover stories that come up on short notice. For example, we got a tip from Susan that the Zeitgeist Gallery was having the opening of a new show on Palastinian Art the day after our last premier and no one covered it. The way we do stories now, some member decides to produce a story, and organizes getting it done. This is fine but misses most opportunities that come up with short notice.
An extreme version of this concept is that there is a team ready to do a story on short notice for each day of the week. After some discussion, it seemed that since we are all volunteer, we can't really do this much, but we can raise the level of awarenes a bit. To this end, people stated what times during the week they might be available and Jennifer will put this in a spread sheet and keep it current.
Availbility:
Andrew - mondays instead of meeting - most of us could do this. Buz - afternoons and evenings Angel - 2-5pm most mon-thu Jen - call at station Birgit - evenings and weekends Paul - evenings?
Other discussion concerned email delays, pagers, phone tree.
Another comment related to this is that the ready team might just be in charge of capturing the footage, not doing the edit and story design.
