She may have nothing to do with the Gators’ national championships in basketball and football, but when it comes to helping the Gators excel in online journalism, she’s all over it. Since 1999, Mindy McAdams has served as a professor at the University of Florida, teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses on the subject. Before entering the Swamp, McAdams worked as both a content developer for the Washington Post’s first online newspaper, Digital Ink, and then as the web strategist at the American Press Institute.

I didn’t mention her though to revel in her resume, however. Her real accomplishments lie in the gains she’s made for multimedia journalism courses at UF. She’s authored the book Flash Journalism, which combines XHTML and flash coding with reporting to teach budding journalists how to create their very own multimedia packages.

She’s created a plethora of helpful web sites for beginning information architects (though they aren’t labeled as such, she’s still teaching visitors how to aesthetically design and organize data to display online), which can all be accessed through her main web site, MindyMcAdams.com. She also maintains her own blog, which features her thoughts and notes on online journalism, along with tips and tutorials to help visitors learn the latest digital tricks. She also regularly links other helpful web sites and blogs for learning editing styles as well as mastering digital media. Here are some tidbits from her recent postings that may be of interest:

• She explains how Flickr could help budding photojournalists’ careers because the program has made displaying digital photography available to all. That means that photo buyers (like those for newspapers and magazines) are now sifting through the average joe’s photos to purchase the pictures that fill their pages!
  • Discussion point: Although it’s great that this program has made it easier for people to enter the field of photojournalism and become published, couldn’t this also skew people’s idea of the professionalism of photography and become less apt to hire major photographers? Or does it have no bearing on the profession whatsoever? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
• Multimedia packages are so popular right now, simply because of their multi-faceted, in-depth coverage and cutting-edge design. I know that this is the way of the future, but since each package requires hours upon hours of work, I wondered how any publication could afford to consistently create those, and how tiring that process could be. Well, possibly without intending to, McAdams answered my question by making a post for people to compare two web sites honoring the recent Virginia Tech victims. One was created by the New York Times; the other, by the Roanoke Times. Though McAdams admitted that it seemed a bit insensitive to analyze these tributes, I must agree that by comparing them we’re also learning how to handle these situations — what works and what doesn’t.
  • From there she mentioned the possibility of using templates in the future for profiles of important people.
  • Discussion point: What did you notice about the two web sites, and what do you think works best? Would templates help simplify certain multimedia packages, or do you think they’d hinder the creativity that made them so cutting edge and exciting in the first place?
• Online innovation starts small. In one entry McAdams references Web.aan.org’s 5 keywords for bringing journalism (and other forms of communication) to the world wide web: “Small. Storytelling. Experiments. Collaboration. Workflow.”
  • Want to know what those words could possibly mean to you (and how you can implement them to create great things)? Click here.