no journalist, but….

Last week I tried. In some ways, I tried too hard. But I learned some interesting lessons.

Oh. In case you just joined this conversation, I spent last week in Gulfport, Mississippi with 19 other people from our church working to repair damaged houses and encourage damaged lives. I was along to work, to pray, to provide spiritual direction. I also had my own agenda of seeing how well we could report on our progress in real time using new media.

We did pretty well. I wrote several posts, another guy wrote a guest post, we created some audio posts with several people talking, and I even tried a video blog. I uploaded some of our pictures using flickr.

Here’s what I learned:

• passing a phone around is a pretty good way to interview people, especially with the audio blogging feature of hipcast.
• warning them in advance so they have some time to structure their thoughts is even better.
• Odeo wouldn’t work for me…and I’m glad I found out before I left town.
• I had an mp3 recorder that would have been nice, but the audio card in the laptop I had was not reliable for processing either audio or video…but I knew before I left.
• I had to give up on the video editing project by wednesday. I was working too hard on the whole package to make that happen too. And giving that up was a wise thing.
• I am not a good interviewer, am not good at finding the questions to ask that will put people at ease. That’s okay, I’m not a bad commentator, but for other aspects of embedded citizen journalism, other people will have to do it.
• Thinking about producing this much media, until the habit is formed, keeps the brain working. By Thursday, something had to give, which ended up being my migraine (mild and I kept going, but it was my reminder that I am a very finite creature).
• Other people can help, and another time I will prep people for blogging ahead of time. Brent’s post was a wonderful sample of how different perspectives can help.
• I don’t see this as very difficult, but the fact that not many other groups have tried to report on the spot means that we need to work at it more. HCRN is trying and has added a forum to their website which will be great as more groups use it.
• test everything before you go. Have an extra camera and phone battery. Don’t depend on power cords being available at worksites.
• I created a CD for our team to listen to as we traveled down. It was, I knew, a 30 minute podcast in style, but almost no one in our team knows anything about iPods, so I just didn’t call it anything. But it proved to me that that format can work very well for a narrowcasting project. 4 cars, 20 people, same trip, same directions to hear on the road. [produced by having people from previous trips leave stories on my K7 answering machine, used Audacity to assemble the stories, recorded my pieces with a headset mic that I use for skype as well, and added a couple songs.]
• Talking with Chris about the project got him posting and requesting funds. We’re still working with HCRN to find out if anything came in through that appeal, but it was a great model of using the blogosphere for requesting support of projects.
• I’m thinking about the next project which will test some more of the lessons as well.

For those of you who read along with our trip, thanks for coming along. We had a great time.