Cinema Minima’s “Online Newsroom” for its Correspondents and editors has been upgraded. Interface improvements include:

• Faster
• An easy-to-remember URL for login: <cinemaminima.com/login>
• “Screen Options” buttons at tops of pages permit customization of the interface. For example, the “Write Post” page can be changed, from the standard two column arrangement, into one, two, three, or four columns.

ST LOUIS MISSOURI USA. 2009 MAY 9 (CINEMA MINIMA) — The upgrade to Cinema Minima’s Web server has been completed successfully. The posting of new stories will resume shortly. The most-recent stories have been put online. Older archives will be put online over the course of the coming months.

Benefits for readers

• Speed and reliability: The publication’s Web pages will be delivered rapidly to browsers, all day, every day.
• Syndicated (RSS) feeds will be delivered timely to feed readers.
• Web pages will accomodate “widescreen” movies in large size.

Benefits for Correspondents

• The online newsroom will be available all day, every day, without interruption.
• The interface is easier to use than previously.
• Changes — revisions — to drafts of stories are saved as separate versions which may be compared and retrieved by their authors as required.
• Tags are available to help readers to find stories.
• The publication of stories can be scheduled in advance.

Improvements in performance. In the interest of security, no details of the improvements will be offered here. What can be said is that speed, stability, security, and reliability are paramount. Features — such as widgets which hot-link to social-networking sites — will be evaluated in terms of their effects on performance.

Cinema Minima’s Web servers are hosted by Slicehost, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri USA. We recommend it.

Cinema Minima is a news service. Although its Correspondents’ stories are published on its Web site, they should be designed to be syndicated — distributed — in many media. A Correspondent’s story may be seen in a Web browser on a computer; it may be read aloud — by a machine — over a telephone; summarized as a 140-character “tweet” on Twitter; rendered into braille; or “mashed” by an automated news summarizer — It may even be printed on paper as a story in a newspaper.

The Online Newsroom

Whether coming from the worlds of journalism or filmmaking, when a reporter files a story for Cinema Minima, she should take care to follow online newsroom practice. The online newsroom differs in some important respects from print and broadcast media newsrooms — even though most print and broadcast operations have online presences. A reporter working in an online newsroom ought to —

• Understand that what she writes must be written to work well in any medium in which it might appear.
• Know how to write search-friendly headlines.
• Know how to write summary-ready lead paragraphs.
• Do her own copy-editing.
• Do her own proofreading.
• Understand — since her stories may be retrieved at any time in the future, and from any place — the importance of using full dates and place names, e.g., “2009 May 5,” not “today”; and “the American TV network ABC,” not “ABC-TV” (which could be either in America, or in Australia).

Cinema Minima News for Movie Makers Worldwide — <cinemaminima.com> — is moving to a new Web server.

• Readers will enjoy faster and more reliable performance.
• Reporters will appreciate an easy-to-understand interface, and more reliable performance.

The migration is in progress. It will be completed during the first week of May 2009.

In the meantime, please visit <twitter.com/cinemaminima> for the latest news for movie makers.

Cinema Minima has upgraded the engine by which its main Web site is published — cinemaminima.com — to WordPress Coltrane (version number 2.7). This new version of the WordPress Web application offers benefits to the editors and Correspondents who write for Cinema Minima. Chief among them, an improved, easy-to-understand writing interface.

Cinema Minima’s elves have been busy working on an upgrade to its Web server. It will look much the same as before but it should be more reliable. It will also be “hardened” against attacks by spammers and hackers.

SliceHost hosts Cinema Minima’s Web server.

No Microsoft products play any part in Cinema Minima’s Web site, its services, or its applications. Our servers — and our office equipment — run flavors of UNIX or LINUX operating systems.

To write their stories Correspondents are offered an online word-processing interface which looks like Microsoft Word; it is made using AJAX technologies — not ActiveX or any other Microsoft tools.

To keep Cinema Minima and its syndicated news feeds free of Microsoft artifacts, Correspondents are asked not to paste text copied from Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft application.

Both Cinema Minima readers and Correspondents will have safe and satisfying experiences using Web browsers such as Firefox (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), Safari (Windows, Mac OS X), iCab (Mac OS X), Opera (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), or Camino (Mac OS X). Microsoft’s own Web browsers are not recommended.

Here is something a Correspondent — you — can do which would help persons, e.g., festival press officers, to be receptive to you as a representative of the publication.

Please take care to not describe Cinema Minima as an e-magazine. That is inaccurate, and it is imcomplete. It is not an e-magazine. It is not a blog. It is not a Web site, although it uses the Web as one of its several channels of distribution.

Please describe it in this way, using these words —

Cinema Minima is a news service. Its readership is international. Its distribution is worldwide. Its stories are syndicated. It has been online since 1999.

Every day, thousands of movie makers worldwide read Cinema Minima’s syndicated news feed, get its bulletins on their mobile phones, visit its Web site, or listen to its podcast.

Cinema Minima Correspondents and stringers report from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Cinema Minima Correspondents have been accredited as Press by the AFI Fest (Hollywood), the American Film Market (Los Angeles), the Berlinale, Lola Kenya Screen, the Independent Film & Television Alliance (Los Angeles), the New York Film Festival, the Singapore International Film Festival, Sundance, and The Times/bfi London International Film Festival, among others.

You may wish to add that Cinema Minima also offers an audio podcast, distributed in Apple’s iTunes Store. It sponsors filmmaker events in Paris and — recently — in Mumbai. It is preparing a print edition for those parts of the world with limited Internet access, e.g., Africa.

Organizations like Cinema Minima are the future of the news business, and — with the help of its Correspondents — it aims to be a small but significant player in the motion-picture trade publication segment of news media.

A Correspondent needs a byline photo (a headshot, smiling in JPEG format). This is important for building relationships with readers. They may come, once, for Cinema Minima; they’ll come back for their favorite Correspondent.

By the same token, a small bio (50 ~ 150 words) is essential.

Cinema Minima is a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) online newsroom, this means …

• Cinema Minima publishes with WordPress publishing software. A Correspondent must be comfortable with posting stories online, without editorial assistance.
• As a rule, no copy editing — Correspondents must do their own proofreading.