City noise fills the street as you wait in line for a small box of food. An argument breaks out over the last of the food distributions. A man collapses right in front of you, and you stand there suspended in time. You can’t do a thing to help.

Created by Nonny de la Peña, “Hunger in Los Angeles” is a 3D retelling of a scene outside of a Los Angeles food bank housed in a church. It’s the kind of scene we read about every day in newspapers, but the virtual audio and visual put you right into the world, seemingly while it is happening.

This is part of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Laura Amico, along with her husband, Chris, is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

Last week, Chris and I presented Homicide Watch at ONA’s DC meetup. You can watch the video here. In it, we discuss a lot of the technical and editorial specifics of what we do every day.

Our kicker from the presentation is the subject of this blog post (minute 35 on the video). These 11 “lessons learned” are meant to be somewhat inspirational, both for those going it alone, like I am, and for those in traditional settings.

I expand on each below, but in brief:

• Do what you can — now.
• Use what you can — now.
• Build what you can — now.
• Take risks.
• Evaluate.
• Be public.
• Think creatively.
• Trust that things will fall into place.
• But do what you can to make them fall into the right places.
• Never stop looking forward.
• Find your purpose, define it, and live by it.

More and more journalists are using images and other types of materials found on the web to create stories and multimedia packages. Without a dedicated media department, independent journalists in particular can easily run afoul of existing copyright laws. Fair Use provides a small haven by allowing exceptions to strict copyright laws for reasons of critique or news reporting. But how many reporters or media makers truly understand their rights? Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University, recently co-authored Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright and agreed to speak with ONA about free speech rights, documentary filmmaking and SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).

This post is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences, projects and sharing their knowledge with the ONA community. Fellow Lucas Timmons is a data journalist and web producer for The Edmonton Journal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The Progressive Conservatives (PCs) have ruled Alberta for the past four decades. First elected in 1971, the Tories have formed the government ever since. With no legitimate threat to their power, Alberta’s provincial politics and elections can be very boring.

When Premier Ed Stelmach announced he was stepping down, the race was on for a new leader of the PCs and the new Premier. Six contenders put their names forward.

As part of the coverage for the leadership race, the Edmonton Journal decided to find out where the six candidates stood on four issues. We were looking for a way that would:

1. Let the candidates outline their positions
2. Allow our readers to get just the information they wanted
3. Add to our online coverage, and bring people to our website
4. Be interactive
5. Look cool

This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Lam Thuy Vo is a multimedia journalist based in New York. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she developed “Dissecting China’s Housing Market,” a project that won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers award.

When I was asked to teach a workshop at Hong Kong University a year ago, I consulted a friend and colleague about what he thought would be the most useful advice for print reporters venturing into the wild territory of multimedia journalism. I was to instruct print freelancers from across Asia in multimedia storytelling, a craft that’s still in its nascence on that continent.

My friend gave me very practical advice. He said that many classes he took in graduate school were very theoretical, and few gave explicit instructions and checklists to students and reporters. When you’re juggling photography, video, data research and good old-fashioned print reporting, there’s nothing that will save your overloaded mind better than a good checklist.

This is part of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. MJ Bear Fellow Laura Amico is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

The query went out Nov. 2: What should Homicide Watch include in our look back on 2011?

I wanted to build a comprehensive year-in-review package that showed off the data and reporting that my team and I had done over the past 12 months and that captured the way people across D.C. felt the impact of violent crime over the year. While I had my own story list, I wanted to hear from readers about what was meaningful to them.

Almost immediately the messages, in comments, emails and Tweets, started rolling in. “Please write about my boyfriend,” wrote one woman. “His case hasn’t been closed.” “Write about transgender murder victims,” wrote someone else. “My neighbor was killed and I think that this is a problem.”

This is the first in a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Lucas Timmons, a 2011 MJ Bear Fellow, is a data journalist and web producer for The Edmonton Journal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

^{Edmonton homicides – 1999 – 2011}

It was a particularly rough year for homicides in Edmonton. In 2011, the “City of Champions” was Canada’s homicide capital with a record-breaking 47.

As the year was wrapping up, we decided that the standard year-end wrap-up wouldn’t suffice for such a dreadful year. The Journal decided to publish a larger year-end project on homicides, and I was to supply a way to visualize it online.

This map is what I ended up creating. It fit in as a piece of the larger project.

There are many schools of thought on how to improve commenting on the internet, most of which focus on trying to convince commenters to be more civil. But ReadrBoard turns that idea on its head, asking commenters to be more specific. And doing that, it found a whole new way of looking at the process. Co-created by Porter Bayne, Tyler Brock and Eric Chaves, ReadrBoard aims to change the face of online conversation as we know it. After a successful beta test on news site Hypervocal and (full disclosure) Latoya Peterson’s site, Racialicious, Bayne, Brock and Chavs decided to revamp the overall design and user interface in 2012. Here Bayne explains the concept behind ReadrBoard, discusses redesign on the fly, and shares a visual history of ReadrBoard’s evolution.

What was the main idea behind ReadrBoard? How did you and your cofounder come up with the concept?

At ReadrBoard, we all think that all reader engagement — a share, a Like, a comment, a bookmark, a copy-paste, anything — is preceded by some emotion or thought: “That’s funny,” or “no way,” or “really?” or “my friend would love this,” and so on and so on. And we’re sure that far more readers have a reaction to content than are currently Liking, commenting, etc.

So, ReadrBoard is working to make it simple for readers to do that: react to content, with just a click. Sort of like a Like button … but any emotion or thought. And you can react to the whole page, or any part of a page.

Correction: This post originally referred to the player as the “Infinity Player” — the error has been corrected.

ONA took a few minutes to talk to Michael Yoch, Director, Product for NPR, to figure out the genesis for the player, project inspirations and creating small concept-focused products in a major organization.

Al Jazeera English was looking for a fresh take on global issues and culture, with a decidedly modern spin. After a year or so of incubation, the Doha-based network launched The Stream, a web-integrated show based completely around user-generated tips and feedback, across platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and Google+. Here’s an average day at office.

9:50 AM
MORNING PITCH MEETING

This is the monster pitch session, where all staffers come in with news they are following. Demographics are fairly evenly split — seven women and seven men are in attendance this morning.

Topics proposed: Coca-Cola using gamification on Japanese vending machines; Kenyan University Strike; Jawbone’s motion sensor bracelet; African rural radio broadcasters get a social network called Barza.

Members of the team provide justification for selecting stories. In general, The Stream prefers stories that are relevant to an international audience, covered enough to be buzz-worthy but not necessarily in the mainstream media. Direct requests from viewers are highly ranked.