Gabriel Dance

The presentation by Gabriel Dance at CUNY was an interesting perspective on multimedia journalism. I think the edge that Dance has in the field of multimedia journalism is his degree in computer science. What I enjoyed best about the presentation was when Dance talked about the level of experimentation a student has with journalism at the university level. He made a great point when he talked about not having to deal with advertising, different levels of editing, turning a profit or even losing your job. The university level allows you to experiment with journalism, be more creative and take chances.

Dance also spoke about his master thesis project that he did back in 2006. I thought it was interesting that he said there are things in his project that are not even being done today. Not because people at the working level are not bright enough, but because of all the restrictions that come into play when working for a company. Dance also made it a point to talk about competitive analysis. Dance said that in order to be good at what you do, you have to know what others are doing.

Dance also talked about transparency. He gave the example of the debate analyzer, which allows the user to watch parts of the debate that are most important to them and read the transcript of what is being said alongside the video. There are also tabs pertaining to different issues that a user can click on to learn more about specific topics. He said the most important thing about transparency is that the user gets to engage in the content and there is no editorializing.

Overall I enjoyed the presentation. What I did find a bit discouraging is that it seems having a degree in computer science would be extremely beneficial to a multimedia individual. Unfortunately that is something that I do not have, so I feel that I am at somewhat of a disadvantage when it comes to entering the world of multimedia.

Questions:

1) You said earlier in the presentation that "If you don't fail then your not trying hard enough." Can you give an example when you failed and what you did to pick yourself back up?

2) I know you stated that it is not necessary to have a degree in computer science to work in multimedia, but obviously it has been extremely beneficial to you. Any advice for those without a computer science degree?