Journalism 2.0 - Knight Citizen News Network

Chapter 1: FTP, MB, RSS, oh My!
Introduction:
Today’s special? Acronym soup
Get ready to go digital.
Think of the many difficult concepts you have mastered in your reporting, your
photography or your management. Technology is no more complex than growthmanagement
standards, the open-meetings act, or computing the earned-run average
for a pitcher in baseball. You’re smart — you just have to open your mind to
something new.
If you’re reading this, you’ve won half the battle. More than half, actually.
One of the barriers that prevent people from more deeply understanding how the
Internet and other technologies work is the slew of acronyms that are used. This
chapter will break those apart and define the basic concepts of technology that
will be helpful to your daily work life now that your work includes a Web site.
Digital information: Megabytes,
gigabytes and terabytes
In the ensuing chapters, you will learn to create several types of digital files:
Audio files, photograph files and video files. It is important that you understand
how to “weigh” these files since, as we will soon discuss, the larger the file size,
the longer it takes to download over the Internet.
When it comes right down to it, this whole digital evolution can be explained in
bits and bytes. A byte is a unit of measure for digital information. A single byte
contains eight consecutive bits and is capable of storing a single ASCII (pronounced
as-kee) character.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) first published a
standard in 1967. It defines the 95 printable characters that are the text in computers
and communications devices. Essentially, it’s everything on your keyboard:
letters, numbers and basic symbols like % and &.
To make it easier to talk about a lot of bytes, we use prefixes like kilo, mega and
giga, as in kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte (also shortened to K, M and G, as in
KB, MB and GB). The table on the next page shows the number of bytes contained
in each.
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Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive