Digital Journalism Website Presentation

1. • The event we chose to attend was the PETA demonstration. The event took place at 12 PM in
Trafalgar square on November 1st 2014 and was to celebrate World Vegan Day and to mark the
start of World Vegan Month. The protest featured roughly 100 people taking their clothes of,
laying on the floor and being covered with fake blood. They did this to highlight cruelty towards
animals around the world and try to convince that animals and humans alike are all flesh and
blood and that eating animals is wrong.
• We chose to cover the PETA demonstration because we were aware that PETA’s demos are often
very visual and also controversial. This was confirmed to us after doing research on their past
activity. Knowing this, we felt that this event would be a great opportunity to capture visually
powerful images and video, which would likely capture an audience. An added bonus for us was
that it was on a Saturday, at an ideal time of day, whilst the sunny weather made the event all the
more enjoyable.

2. • After initial research on which event to attend, we then delved further into the history of PETA and what
they stand for. We also researched veganism as we were certain to encounter plenty of vegans on the
day, so knowing about their ideals and beliefs was essential.
• We looked at the website examples of The Berlin Project and Dame dash to help inspire and give us
ideas for our own website. We looked at how they combined audio and visual multimedia with
significant and relevant text.
• After much debate, and numerous suggestions for a name for our team/website, we decided on ‘PETA:
Laid Bare’. We felt this title apt as to lay something bare is to uncover or reveal, which is what we
wanted to do with PETA, whilst the actual event was literally protesters laying bare.
• We had a rough plan of what our website would look like as soon as we had been assigned our groups.
As well as a home page, we both agreed on having separate pages devoted to both videos and pictures.
We also wanted an about PETA page and a vegan page.

3. • We knew what pictures and content we wanted to capture and what tools we wanted to
use. The plan was that the three of us would all capture as much footage of the event as
we could, we would all upload to the live report on the go and then come together to make
sure we had used all the tools and got the material which we had came for. It was to be a
team effort with shared and equal responsibilities. This was made more difficult by news
on the morning that one of our team mates would not be attending, which meant the two
of us would have to make up for her absence by trying to capture even more.
• When we first got to the event we straight away went over our plan and decided on what
our priorities were; what did we have to capture on the day and what could be done at
home. We then assessed the situation and picked out people who were likely to talk to us.
Although It turned out we were pushing our like trying to get an interview with the police.

4. • We managed to use all the tools which were asked of us for the task. These were: Vine,
Instagram, AudioBoom, Timeline JS, ThingLink and Bambuser. We also used YouTube and
Flipagram on our website. We used the majority of these tools using our smart phones on the
day.
• We arrived an hour early so we could gain an insight on the preparation and to capture some
footage before it got busy. This allowed us to interview Press Officer, Ben Williams, who informed
us as to what exactly was going to happen and why.
• Identifying what to film was a relatively easy one as the majority of the hour-long protest was the
‘die in’, which was obviously our main focus, but we also made sure to capture some of the
preparation as well as the aftermath.

5. • We chose Weebly to build our website on as Larry had used it before so knew how to use it, whereas Tumblr
and WordPress both seemed a lot more troublesome and complicated in certain design aspects. Our website
consists of a home page, an about PETA page, a page devoted to veganism, a photo gallery and a video vault.
• We linked our Page to Twitter, Email and YouTube, while some of our features can be shared on Facebook. We
also provide a link to our Instagram.
• We wanted to make our website interactive, entertaining and also some what humerous while also keeping it
informative and newsy. Through our use of our Timeline, ThingLink, Hyperlinks, Twitter feed, our poll and our
celebrity Peta follower section, I feel we achieved that.
• Something we wanted to avoid doing was making our website look as though we were promoting PETA and
their cause. Although we weren’t able to capture a video of somebody who was against the demonstration, we
did include some text on the arguments against PETA and their radical methods. We included a poll on our
website so people could themselves vote on weather they thought PETA good or bad.
• In regards to drawing traffic to our website we did not have the best of times. We did follow relevant pages on
Twitter, however, we didn't receive any followers back. Our Instagram page got a few followers with some of our
posts on there getting a measly five or six likes. One of our Bambuser videos did well though and had almost
100 views on it, not long after publishing it live.

6. • We split the responsibility of Multimedia between us evenly. In addition to us both using Vine
and Twitter, Larry Used Timeline, Thinglink and Bambuser while Sosan created our Instagram,
Flipagram, Audioboom and YouTube channel.
• Larry produced the introductory text on the home page and the vegan page, giving insights into
what the event was about and what vegans stand for respectively. Larry also produced the
Timeline names and text, as well as the anti-PETA text. Sosan produced the text on the About
PETA page, the second block of the text on the home page, and the text in the video page whilst
also writing the captions for most of our photos.
• You can see who took what photos in the gallery by reading the by-lines. Sosan captured and
cropped the image which features on our Home page while Larry took the ThingLink picture.
• Larry Interviewed Tina the ethical Vegan however it was Sosan who did most of the interviewing
as Larry filmed. People Sosan spoke to included The Press Officer, PETA organisers and two girls
who took part in the ‘die-in’

7. • We think that the assignment went to plan. We overcame the initial setback of losing a team member which, if anything,
made us both work harder and better as a unit. We shared responsibility between us in equal and fair measure.
• Something that worked particularly well on our assignment was that we managed to use all the tools to good effect to
create a website that was both informative and interactive
• One of the things we found difficult on this assignment was the live reporting. We feel we could have done a lot more of
it and possibly have used Storify whilst at the event. We also tried to use Storywheel but this didn’t go to plan either. Of
course only having two people made it more difficult than we had planned. Another difficulty arose when embedding
our content onto our website. We found resizing and re-positioning our content both troublesome and frustrating at
times. We would also would have liked to have had more videos on our video page.
• Unfortunately, at the beginning of the event, we captured some footage and photos landscape instead of portrait,
although we did manage to capture most of our videos landscape thereafter. There were a few videos that still remained
portrait, however, including one of our Youtube videos and one of our Bambusers.
• One thing we could have done to improve on this assignment, in addition to improving our live report, would have been
to find a perspective of somebody who was against the protest in order to give both sides of the argument.
• As well as learning a lot more about PETA and veganism, doing this assignment has taught us that interviewing strangers
is not as daunting as first thought. We also learned how to use a variety of multimedia, which before we had never used.
• The most obvious way of improving our website and making it more successful would be getting better at drawing traffic
to our website so that more people see it and share it. Learning how to use Weebly more effectively would also improve
the site as we could make it look far better aesthetically