J2 News

Syrian President Bashar Assad denied Sunday that his government had anything to do with last week's gruesome Houla massacre, saying not even "monsters" would carry out such an ugly crime. In a televised speech to parliament, Assad said his country is facing a "real war" and he blamed terrorists and extremists for the bloodshed. He expressed horror over last week's massacre in the central Houla region, which killed more than 100 people, nearly half of them children.

Mubarak and former Interior Minister Habib El Adly were sentenced to life in prison for their crimes. Mubarak was immediately transferred to a prison in southern Cairo to serve his sentence, and a prosecutor said the former president, who attended court on a gurney, would be transferred to the prison hospital.

A good site for pictures for the U.S. Envoy to Israel story

Stung by a cheating scandal involving dozens of Long Island high school students, the SAT and ACT college entrance exams will now require students to provide a photograph when they sign up for the exams, and officials will check those images against the identification the students present when they take the test.

Slideshows from the Online News Site for Prince George HS in Virginia.

Intern Edition from NPR is an entirely intern-run multimedia newsmagazine. One of the hallmarks of NPR's internship program, this semester-long project unites 40 interns across the country, from nearly every department at NPR, to report, edit, produce and design everything you see here. The project culminates in a 30-minute multimedia show that premieres on the Web and at the NPR headquarters in Washington D.C. at the end of the internship term.

Not all stories make good multimedia stories. The best multimedia stories are multi-dimensional. They include action for video, a process that can be illustrated with a graphic (e.g., "how tornadoes form" or "how this new surgery works"), someone who can give some pithy quotes for video or audio, and/or strong emotions for still photos and audio. Most multimedia stories require that the reporter go into the field to report the story face-to-face with sources, rather than doing a story entirely by telephone.

How to Do a Rough Storyboard A multimedia story is some combination of video, text, still photos, audio, graphics and interactivity presented in a nonlinear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant. So your storyboard should be put together with all those elements in mind.

Whether you are longing to ditch daily deadlines or have just been made redundant, there are a number of reasons to go freelance as a journalist. Here are IJNet's main takeaways from a recent webchat hosted by The Guardian career section.

Writing is low on the priority list in our online journalism classes, not because I want it to be, but because we've got limited time to focus on other things. During two-hour classes, students create individual or group websites and learn how to operate online content management systems. They produce audio slideshows, podcasts and videos. They join online communities or create their own. They gather raw data and use it to create online visualizations. They tinker with HTML and CSS, and dissect their website's analytics, among many other tasks. By the end of term, students will produce a body of multimedia journalism work and become active participants in an online network throughout which they can disseminate their work. Students complete many of our projects without writing a piece of text longer than an average tweet, which can be a major letdown for budding wordsmiths.

Following is a summary of freelance writing rates that I've collected and distilled over my past 6 years as a freelance writer and editor.

If you're in need of B-roll for your next YouTube opus, you're in luck. YouTube is adding tons of Creative Commons content to its video editor. The new feature goes live today at noon E

Students are using their academic credentials to leverage generous merit awards from second- or third-choice schools looking to boost their own academic profiles. Colleges are responding with record sums of merit aid, transforming the admissions process into a polite bidding war

Using copyrighted material in your video

Free use vs. Fair Use

n weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use and its economic effect. This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only necessary considerations. In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions: Did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original? Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use? Both questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.