[Journalists] Community Journalism

Sat Sep 24 15:57:19 UTC 2016

Hi Elizabeth,

Those are definitely some of the questions I want to ask. How are photos made accessible? JAWS would most likely say "graphic ...", even for the caption. Not sure, but that's my guess. What about video packages? My professor wants us to focus on the small town papers, since most newspapers in the country are actually weeklies, not dailies. Several stuff is available on Newsline or on a mobile app, but sometimes not everything. Back home in Nebraska, a smaller town close to me called Fremont isn't on Newsline. Neither are the small papers out in the panhandle of Nebraska. Some bigger papers like Lincoln Journal Star or Omaha World-Herald are, but my professor wants us focusing on small town papers.

One area that might be interesting is the local PBS stations. Legally, they have to be accessible and so often they're not. Another interesting bit is this: FWST has you and you're blind so they're able to learn and make adjustments. Several small town papers might not have a blind person even in town, much less working at the local paper. It could just be that they're not aware that this audience exists. Sad, but true. Oddly enough, my professor said that he's been teaching journalism for years - and I'm the first blind person he's had. He's had others with visual impairments, but not to the point where it's affected their ability to drive a car or things like that.

I'm definitely also interested in the technology side of it like the programs used and that statistical analysis programs as well, but that could be a whole different paper. I'm getting a lot of ideas from this, so thank you for that.

Rachael E. Vacanti
(402)-960-9085 (mobile)
revacanti at Hotmail.com<mailto:revacanti at Hotmail.com>

________________________________
From: Journalists <journalists-bounces at nfbnet.org> on behalf of Elizabeth Campbell via Journalists <journalists at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 10:55:02 AM
To: Blind Professional Journalists List
Cc: Elizabeth Campbell
Subject: Re: [Journalists] Community Journalism

Hi Rachael,

I am happy to help with your research paper.

The Star-Telegram produces several weekly papers primarily covering areas
near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. I write for the Star-Telegram but also
write stories for the weekly called Hurst-Euless-Bedford News. My
Star-Telegram stories are meant to reach a broader audience and often
focus on controversial lawsuits or major economic development in area
cities. The weekly papers tend to focus more on what we call hyper
community coverage which includes happenings from the school districts as
well as from city councils. Our weeklies also have a lot of high school
sports coverage.

I will send you links to the papers as all are online and accessible
either via the web or on our app called ST Mobile. As you know, the
emphasis is on digital first and promoting and posting what we do on
social media. Most of our readers come to us via Facebook and from Google
searches. We also get traffic from Twitter, although not as much as from
the sites I mentioned above.
So, we are responsible for writing SEO-friendly headlines as well as
making sure we add keywords that are relevant to Google searches.
Photos and video are also incredibly important, and we must post photos
for all of our online stories.
Then, we keep up with analytics using several tools including Chartbeat
which gives you feedback in real time on how stories, videos and photos
are ranking in online traffic.

We are also working with a site called Omniture which gives a weekly
overview of how much traffic our stories generated in terms of "unique
visitors" how long someone spends reading the story, and so forth.
Sadly, the analytics tools are not very accessible,and I don't work with
them as often as I should. The same is true for our publishing system
called NewsGate. I can do the basic functions such as creating story
folders, files and photo requests. However, when it comes to tasks like
choosing story destinations, tagging and putting the headline, byline etc.
in to the proper fields, that is where access is nonexistent.

Fortunately, the editors understand this and will put the headline, etc.
in to the correct fields. I have a work-around of writing my headline,
summary, etc. at the top of the file which also has the body of my story.

I would venture to say that most of the major papers and news orgs will
have pretty accessible sites, but I'm not sure about the smaller papers.
Where I think those of us who are blind face more barriers is in the
hiring process and then working in an environment where the emphasis is
more and more on visual content.

Sorry this is a very long answer to your question, but I hope this helps.

Best

Liz

Elizabeth Campbell
general assignments reporter
(O 817-390-7696
(c) 817-247-6862
liz at star-telegram.com
Twitter @fwstliz

-----Original Message-----
From: Journalists [mailto:journalists-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of
Rachael Vacanti via Journalists
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:58 AM
To: Journalists at nfbnet.org
Cc: Rachael Vacanti
Subject: [Journalists] Community Journalism

Hi journalists,

I'm Rachael, a current grad student getting my masters at Ohio University.

I'm writing a paper (fine multiple papers) for my community journalism
class. Does anyone know any small-town newspapers I can look at to see if
they're accessible to blind people? I'm looking for non-mainstream media.
Weeklies or dailies in a suburb would be the best probably. I'm hoping to
get this into a publication like CJR, Quill, maybe Braille Monitor,
anything.

If anyone can be of assistance please email me at rv233815 at ohio.edu, or by
responding to this message.

I'll probably be back in touch for my final graduate project as well for
that class. It's a 3000 class, but they let grad students do independent
study if they want, so I signed up and I'm loving it.

Rachael Vacanti
(402)-960-9095
rv233815 at ohio.edu
revacanti at hotmail.com

Sent from my iPhone
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