Teaching Online Journalism

Visual journalism: Many ways to tell the story

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:30:15 +0000

Photojournalists have stood at the center of the transformation in most newspaper newsrooms during the past 10 years. That’s not to say they always had a voice in how changes were made — but much of the new workload fell onto their shoulders.

As a staff photographer at The Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle for more than eight years, Will Yurman has added audio gathering and editing, slideshow production, and video shooting and editing to his skill set. One of the (many) things he does for the newspaper’s Web site is a weekly panorama about a local topic; the 360-degree photo is accompanied by audio interview material, making it a multimedia vignette. He also creates some packages using Flash, such as a presentation about all homicide victims in Rochester in 2007.

I asked Yurman about the differences between shooting video and shooting stills.

“In some ways, video is easier,” he said, “because you’re always gathering audio and video of the same scene with the same camera.” If you’re shooting stills and planning to produce an audio slideshow, “you’re often putting down the camera to pick up the [audio] recorder.”

But video isn’t simple. “Video is a struggle because you are constantly processing how to compress time — making sure you have all your shots. And the reality is, you’re often thinking of the image or the audio, but not both at the same time, anyway,” Yurman said.

Because he has been shooting stills for decades, Yurman said, “it’s still easier for me to do that well. But for others the reverse may be true.”

Then he made an interesting distinction. “For a simple, good-enough piece, video is probably easier in many respects. If you just need to cover the facts, a house fire, a simple news story, I think video is easier. For really good, or great, they have their own equal challenges. If you’re trying to construct a narrative, they are equally difficult,” he said.

“Some stories work equally well in both — the results are different, of course, but not better or worse.”

The difference between motion and still images

Yurman’s done a bit of thinking about the factors that distinguish video and audio slideshows.

“Both media are time-based, as opposed to space-based. A print layout is about space — the eye wanders; the viewer controls the time and rhythm. Time-based, of course, means the show is driven by the audio and is viewed over time,” he said.

In being time-based, video and audio slideshows are the same, he said. “But they are more like cousins than simply two forms of the same thing. Video is about watching things happen over time. We watch a sequence of events unfold. Stills are about moments in time.”

When audio slideshows try to be like video, they fail, Yurman said. There are some exceptions such as the flip book, “which can work if done right,” he said. But generally, “good slideshows, I think, have a very different rhythm than video — less literal. Slideshows need to lean on the strength of the still image — these punctuated moments in time that visually meld with the audio.”

Yurman produces both audio slideshows (using Soundslides) and video for the Democrat & Chronicle, although in the past year he has done mostly video (two examples: local art therapy program; man-on-the-street interviews). He said there appears to be a preference for video, coming from corporate parent Gannett. “I could do slideshows within Final Cut, but at that point I generally just do video,” he said. (Final Cut Pro is a video editing program; Soundslides is a program for creating audio slideshows.)

For the Rochester International Jazz Festival two weeks ago, he produced a daily audio slideshow on deadline using Soundslides and Flash — no video. He called Soundslides “a great tool for quick work.”

Without audio, you’ve got no multimedia

Like the other photojournalists I spoke to earlier this month, Yurman emphasized the key role of audio in multimedia stories.

“Photographers need to understand how important good audio is to the story. It’s two parts, like any process. There is the technical, of course — learning how to gather high-quality sound means understanding the gear, being aware of the space, asking good questions, and most important — listening!”

Getting audio that is engaging and compelling requires that the journalist understand what audio does best. “This medium is better suited to emotions and personal reactions and less well-suited to facts and numbers. It’s very hard to listen to a heavy number story. Hard to keep that in your head,” Yurman said. (For great examples of Yurman’s audio work, check out the slideshows he made from the 2009 Rochester International Jazz Festival. First-class work, and stories about feelings, not facts.)

Learning any of the multimedia skills — audio, photography, video, etc. — calls for both watching and doing, he said. Watching: “Look at good work, and try to deconstruct it — why do you like it, what works, listen hard to how it was put together.” Doing: “And then, go do. Try, experiment, fail, try again and fail again.”

For gathering good audio, he said, “I honestly believe THE most important skill is to truly listen.”

I asked him to expand on that: “I mean listen to your subject during the interview. Don’t assume you can just rewind the tape later, don’t be thinking about your next assignment — or even your next question. Don’t be thinking about what you need at the grocery store or how you’re going to edit the piece. I mean really listen to what they are saying and respond in the moment — follow up on what is interesting, stay engaged.”

Yurman said it is possible to get better at audio just by practicing and listening to good examples. “Of course, it helps to have teachers, mentors who can critique and guide. But for working professionals, that isn’t always possible. Yes, I think you can teach yourself that way.”

(See Will Yurman’s portfolio site.)

The reality for journalists to face, squarely, now

Mindy McAdams — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:57:22 +0000

Found via Delicious — David Schlesinger, editor in chief for Reuters News, said this in a speech to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on June 23, 2009:

We in the traditional media … must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy.

The genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting him back inside. You can wring your hands and weep, or you can stand up and walk forward. What Schlesinger said to the IOC group applies across the board to journalism everywhere — it puts a new twist on Gil Scott-Heron’s famous poem-song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970). There’s no point arguing now about whether this is good or bad.

The things to focus on — now and in the future — are value, exclusivity, insight, expertise (with accuracy and truthfulness).

Teaching students to integrate multimedia tools, storytelling

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:40:22 +0000

Today I took questions in a live chat hosted at Poynter.org on this topic. According to an in-line poll, 36 percent of those attending were college educators, and 33 percent were full-time journalists. More than 50 people logged in. The questions were really good!

You can read a complete transcript of the archived chat.

You can leave comments here if you have additional questions. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to answer all the questions that were posted, but we only had an hour for the chat.

The new visual journalist

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:24:12 +0000

To find out what’s needed in today’s newsrooms, in mid-June I asked photo editors and multimedia producers at four newspapers which skills are still in short supply. Video editing, storytelling and audio skills led the list.

Even though his newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, has pulled back from its earlier online ambitions, Colin Mulvany said today’s visual journalism students must be prepared for an online future. That includes both gathering and editing audio, as well as posting stories and photo galleries from the field.

Video remains important even though it’s time-intensive; Mulvany, a photojournalist/multimedia producer, said he’s confident that video “will pay off smartly in the future.” All visual journalists need to have strong video production skills, he said. “You might not use them every day, but big news stories will demand video attention.” (Here’s a blog post Mulvany wrote after layoffs at his paper.)

Tom Burton, photo editor and multimedia producer at the Orlando Sentinel, concurred. “We could use more people who can easily work with nonlinear video editing programs,” he said. Experience with Final Cut Pro is preferred, but someone who understands a different editing system could learn FCP “in an intense four-day course.”

The traditional j-school approach, which “teaches you to have a single skill set that fits into a larger organization,” doesn’t cut it today, Burton said. “Those organizations are falling apart, and the jobs for a single skill set are gone.”

Every journalist needs multiple skill sets “to be their own publisher, in a sense,” Burton said. “In our newsroom, you can get your work on the Web quickly if you can gather the assets (words, photos, video), process them and build the page yourself. Otherwise, you have to wait for another overworked person to help you.”

Jen Friedberg, a multimedia producer at the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, said a journalist’s attitude counts for a lot. “Your curiosity and desire to tell the story should be paramount. Every visual journalist should know how to write a basic story in inverted pyramid form, shoot and edit a video that tells a complete story in about 1:30, gather and edit audio, shoot great images with everything from a cell phone to an SLR, turn it all out fast and get the information to where it needs to go online and to the people at your paper.”

Friedberg says today’s journalists should know some Web coding. Basic HTML will allow a photojournalist to add tags in video players and embed photos and videos in blog posts. Even though the newsroom content management system (CMS) shields the journalists from most of the code, “sometimes there are workarounds in the CMS, and if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, you can use them,” Friedberg said.

“Also, that way of thinking helps you understand what’s possible online and how to take advantage of the tools that are out there,” she said. “Not being afraid of HTML is a leg up.”

J-schools should teach students about the potential for innovative coding, Burton said. “If they have ideas, they can always find someone to collaborate with,” he added. Journalists who know how to code will find opportunities. “Almost no one in a newsroom has these skills today, but they are needed,” Burton said.

Tom Priddy is the multimedia editor at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal. “I don’t envision everyone requiring a one-size-fits-all journalist all the time,” he said. “But for the average working photojournalist, you’d better be able to write a caption accurately, handle a blog, edit audio and video, post directly onto the content management system and send back five grafs on a house fire.”

All those interviewed used words such as ingenuity, creativity, versatile and flexible when describing “the right stuff” for a journalist today.

“The most critical part is how to tell a story — and knowing when a story IS a story,” Priddy said. “Recognize when you come across a good story. You need to know that before you can know which tool is best to use for which story.”

Mulvany suggested that educators should lead students to “look deeper into the ways a story comes together” — what works, and what doesn’t. “They can take the photos, gather the audio, but they fail to make it into something compelling.”

Both Mulvany and Priddy have been training journalists in multimedia reporting in their newsrooms for a few years. Mulvany said we can teach storytelling only after the students feel comfortable with the tools, but Priddy said we can’t really teach them mastery of the tools. “They have to do it over and over and over again,” he said. The only way to feel truly comfortable with the tools is to use them — a lot.

Beyond knowing how to use the tools, a journalist must be able to assess whether a particular story will work well or badly in different formats. “A school board story is lousy for a photo gallery, but it could be perfect for a mash-up of schools facing closure,” Burton said. “A story that has compelling people can make a perfect audio slideshow or video, if you can get them in an interview. And that interview is going to be different than an interview conducted for print.”

The skills in storytelling and the use of the tools go hand in glove. Students will be inexperienced at both, so they’ll simply have to learn both at the same time.

The current crop of interns “could be better at audio,” Burton said, “but that is the weakest area I see throughout the industry. You wouldn’t have to be all that good to be the best audio person working for a newspaper. Bad audio is very, very difficult to fix in the edit.”

All the photojournalists at the Star-Telegram are good at both gathering and editing audio, Friedberg said. “That has been sort of a long battle, but they’ve had to do it now for several years. They are pretty quick with it.”

Mulvany pointed out that for video or audio slideshows, both reporters and photographers need to write scripts and voice their own narration. “Yes, some sound awful at first,” he acknowledged. “But I am amazed at how fast people find their voice. I have pushed a lot for producers, both reporters and photographers, to voice their multimedia. It has not been a battle at all.”

One thing seems very clear: There is no place in the newsroom for a photojournalist who doesn’t also report, write detailed captions, file copy from the field, and work on the Web.

“I firmly believe there will be no more just reporters or just photographers,” Mulvany said. “We all need to have crossover skills. The Web demands it.”

This article was originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Viewpoints, the newsletter of the Visual Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Multimedia training for journalism educators

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:19:35 +0000

Two different opportunities:

Who: Freedom Forum Diversity Institute
Where: Nashville, Tenn.
When: Aug. 9 – 14, 2009
Cost: $850 (some meals included)
Housing: “Reduced-rate lodging at additional cost”
Registration: here

The other one is not hands-on; it will focus on how projects are produced:

Who: MediaStorm
Where: Brooklyn, N.Y.
When: July 27 – 31, 2009
Cost: $2,500
Housing: “Participants are responsible for their own room and board”
Registration: here

Note: I’m not associated with either one of these.

Why does anyone major in journalism?

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:35:25 +0000

We have college classrooms full of young people who have chosen journalism as their major. One question is: Do they actually intend to pursue journalism? Another question: Is our curriculum preparing them to be journalists in the years ahead of them?

A couple of things I read over the weekend fed into the ideas I’m going to lay out here:

In ‘There is an element of fraud in journalism education,’ says leading professor, a British journalism educator and longtime newspaperman said that a lot of today’s students “have no realistic prospect” of ever becoming journalists. He was not referring only to the shrinking number of journalism jobs — in his opinion, many students are just not sharp enough. He raised a question about the fairness of universities accepting all these students into journalism majors — is it right to admit hundreds of students when their chances of working in journalism are small, and getting smaller?
In Notes from the VisCom Classroom: Integrating Video into the Curriculum, an American educator and photojournalist outlines the kind of struggle familiar to every journalism professor nowadays — how the heck can we adjust the content of our courses to prepare these kids well and properly for journalism work in the future? How many diverse and wide-ranging skills should they be exposed to? How can we balance that with the need to make them competent in at least one or two specific areas? It’s a continuously moving target — Web video, programming languages, Twitter — what to include, what to skim over, what to offer in depth?

So I was slicing these ideas up and rearranging them somewhat (remixing, I guess), and here’s what I came up with:

Lots of students who choose to major in journalism do not intend to become journalists.

This seemingly simple statement has many dimensions. Some journalism majors change their minds in the midst of their undergraduate years, deciding against a career in journalism, but stay in the major and graduate with a journalism degree anyway. Others know at the outset that they don’t want to “do” journalism, but they’re aiming at law school or some other goal, and they see a journalism degree as a steppingstone to that. Some of them think they want to work in journalism, but their youthful idea of what journalism includes does not align with what the curriculum teaches — that is, they have never desired to check facts, investigate public records, attend school board meetings, or interview experts about difficult topics.

However, these students have chosen to major in journalism, and while they are free to change to another major, they choose not to do so. I have to counter Tim Luckhurst’s allegation of university “fraud” with the observation that we can’t force the students to change to a more suitable major, or to choose one in the first place. The same kind of thing certainly goes on in other majors, from physics to fine arts. No one is guaranteed a job or a career in the field they chose for university studies. That is true also at the (post-)graduate level.

What a student learns in a journalism major is useful in many other fields.

I don’t need to belabor this, because someone already wrote a good blog post about it: Dear May 2009 Graduate, Here’s 40 Reasons to Still Study Journalism. The 40 include:

“Journalism teaches you to be a writer, and a good one.”
“Journalism teaches you how to ask questions, including the tough ones”
“You will learn tangible skills.”

That brings us around to the contents of the curriculum.

A graduate with a degree in journalism ought to be competent in certain tasks, practices, skills.

Working journalists and journalism educators all debate (endlessly) which tasks, practices, and skills these should be. But I’d like to offer a simple idea here: The decisions about which ones to teach should never rest on the previous two statements:

Lots of students who choose to major in journalism do not intend to become journalists.
What a student learns in a journalism major is useful in many other fields.

There is a practice recognized as journalism, and most working journalists and journalism educators can agree on a basic outline of what that is, and what it requires.

If a student decides to stay with a journalism major and graduate with a degree in journalism, then that graduate ought to be competent in the fundamental practices required to be a journalist. It does not matter one bit if the kid says, “But I don’t actually want to be a journalist.” If he or she can’t master the fundamentals of journalism, then he or she should not be given a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Unlike Tim Luckhurst, I do not think universities commit fraud if they admit hundreds of new journalism majors each year. I do believe that a journalism program commits fraud if it hands out journalism degrees to students who can’t write, can’t fact-check properly, or can’t use the necessary tools of journalism in the 21st century.

Students will continue to major in journalism if the j-schools stick to their guns and require competence in the fundamentals. I am arguing that the fundamentals now must include the newer tools that are used to produce journalism products today:

A laptop computer that the journalist maintains and for which the journalist takes responsibility
A digital still camera capable of shooting video that’s usable on the Web
A digital audio recorder capable of high-quality sound for use online
A blog or content management system to which the journalist can upload reports from the field, including audio, photos, and video
Social networks, blogs, RSS, and other means of staying connected to the community and the world
Software applications used for editing audio, photos, video, etc.; also software used for managing projects and information

It’s not appropriate today to say that these tools are somehow specialized or marginal. These are essential tools for doing journalism.

(Note that I’m not saying every student needs to be an expert in using each of these, and also, I’m not saying it’s sufficient to have ONLY basic knowledge. You’ve got to be really good at one or two skills, at least.)

If journalism majors are permitted to graduate without basic competence in the use of these tools, it seems to me that something’s not right. It’s irrelevant whether the graduate intends to work as a journalist. If someone is awarded a journalism degree, that person ought to be capable of doing journalism.

Some thoughts about photo galleries

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:16:40 +0000

I was looking at this Iran protest slideshow from The New York Times today. It does not have audio, and so I would normally call it a gallery — not a slideshow. But it is carefully captioned, with factual material that goes beyond what we see in the photos, and there is a story of sorts, so it is really more than a simple gallery.

I think these distinctions are helpful for journalists to make. If you know you’re just putting together a bunch of pictures of baby animals, then you also know it’s not a story, and all you have to do is get the date and location and attribution correct on each photo. If you’re actually curating — if you’re going to add value and filter and offer up a story — then you should be culling the images carefully and adding real information in the captions.

Above: New York Times photo gallery

I was impressed by the page design of this slideshow. It really places the emphasis on the image, and yet the caption is nice and big and easy to read. I did not have to scroll, ever, to read the cation or view the full photo. The dark gray background enhances the experience. The ad is easily visible but does not detract from or compete with the photograph. (Although I have cut the bottom half off the ad here, on my screen I saw the full ad, also without any scrolling.) The page loads very quickly.

Earlier this week, I interviewed several photo editors and multimedia producers at U.S. newspapers of various sizes. (The largest was the Orlando Sentinel; the smallest was the Spartanburg [S.C.] Herald-Journal. Stay tuned for a future blog post about this.) They all said photo galleries are extremely popular on their Web sites — much more so than video. They also said they are more likely to produce a video than an audio slideshow nowadays, for a variety of reasons — most of them having to do with newsroom technology and workflow rather than story considerations.

Compare the Times photo gallery design and functionality to the photo gallery template used by the New York Times Regional Group newspapers:

Above: Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal photo gallery

Above: Gainesville (Fla.) Sun photo gallery

One thing you’ll notice if you click through these galleries is that you wait for some time before you get the next photo. Compared to the Times’s own gallery page, this wait seems like an eternity. I find it amazing that the galleries are so popular with site visitors when they are this slow — I would never have the patience to look at even eight photos at this glacial pace.

Another thing I learned from my interviews with photo editors and multimedia producers this week: Every graduating journalism student should know enough about photojournalism and the Web to be able to construct galleries like these, including resizing (in Photoshop), proper and accurate caption writing, and adding credit information. It doesn’t matter if you’re an online producer or a reporter — this is part of the job now.

RGMP 13: Edit your video with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:03:42 +0000

This is the 13th post in a series titled “Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency.” In the 12th post, I discussed storytelling principles and shooting techniques for Web video. In this post, I will explain how to edit video in a very simple editing program.

Let’s take a quick look at the steps:

Capture or import clips
Trim the clips and put them in order
Add and/or adjust audio (narration, interviews, music)
Add title(s) and credits
Export movie file

This set of steps is basically the same no matter which program you use for editing video. I will explain each one below. But first …

Which editing program is best?

This is usually the wrong question — or the wrong way to ask it. There is no reason to delay your video editing education just because you do not have a fancy, expensive program. Every Mac has iMovie. Every Windows computer has (or can get) Windows Movie Maker. Both of these are free. This also means that every university, college, and high school has them too. Everybody can learn how to edit video!

Some people prefer to buy a top-of-the-line software program with a big price tag — for all kinds of reasons. This is fine if you are really going to learn how to use it. But what if you find it to be too much work? The learning demands of a high-end program are greater than those of a simple program. You can always upgrade later, if you find out you love editing video.

Rather than invite a big flame war over which program is better, I’m going to stick with the basics. Remember that Web video is often shot with cheap cameras (even cell phones), and it’s not going to look like a Hollywood blockbuster no matter what you use for editing.

The computer you’re using

Some computers are under-equipped for video editing. If you buy a new computer, pay close attention to: (1) processor speed; (2) amount of memory; and (3) capacity of the hard drive. If you start editing video on your old computer and it locks up, freezes, or crashes a few times, that is the computer’s way of telling you it is too old and tired to handle the task.

Another thing you need to check is the transfer method from your camera to the computer. Some cameras use USB 2.0 for transferring video; your computer can probably handle that, unless it’s ancient. Some cameras use FireWire (also called IEEE 1394) or FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) — note these are two different standards! — and your computer may not have that built in. If not, you can add a FireWire card to a desktop computer for very little cost. You probably can’t add it to a laptop that lacks it.

Capture or import clips

“Capture” refers to transferring the video directly from your camera to the video editing program. “Import” is what we do when the video files are already on the computer’s hard drive. For example, if you shoot video with a little point-and-shoot still camera, or with any of the Pure Digital video cameras (such as the Flip), you can easily copy the files over to your hard drive. In that case, you would later import the clips into your editor.

When you capture, your camera is connected to the computer, and you have two general choices: Bring in everything you shot, or use the editing program to select the good footage (clips) and then bring in only the good stuff. The “everything” method sounds easier, but in fact the “select good stuff” method is more efficient — plus it takes less space on your hard drive.

The simple editing programs will automatically split your “everything” into shorter clips unless you select an option to prevent it. When you are a beginner, you might as well accept the splitting. You will find it harder to work with one gigantic file — trust me.

Trim the clips and put them in order

Here’s where the technical action is simple, but the cognitive action is challenging. Clips are separate pieces of video (see RGMP 12). Your clips are visual vignettes that propel the story. If they are redundant or overlong or simply dull (e.g., lots of talking heads), they will not hold a viewer’s interest. If they are random or seemingly unrelated, they will alienate the viewer.

The old rule “garbage in, garbage out” applies: What you shot is all you’ve got. Is it enough? Is it the right stuff? Can you tell the story with these clips? Some video news stories are visually very uninteresting, because basically all we see are some people talking (reporters, witnesses, officials) and some pathetic B-roll (empty streets, yellow police tape) to fill in the gaps. (Don’t forget the five-shot method from RGMP 12!)

(You might want to review RGMP 11: Tell a good story with images and sound and think a bit about the structure of your story.)

The good news is, you will get better at shooting the right stuff after you’ve practiced editing a few times. Your failures in editing will teach you what to look for the next time you go out to shoot.

Now, for the technical part: As a beginner, trim something off the beginning and something off the end of each clip. Do not try to get more than one thing out of any single clip. (You can break this rule later, when you are more experienced.)

So, when you play the clip, before cutting, you’re looking for the best bit in that clip. After you have decided on the best bit, cut twice: Once to discard the part before the best bit, and a second time to discard the part after the best bit. In Windows Movie Maker, you’ll see three thumbnail images where there used to be one (the middle thumbnail is the one you drag down to the Storyboard). In iMovie 09, you’ll drag a yellow frame around the best bit, excluding the two discarded parts (before and after). When the yellow frame is positioned as you want it, you’ll drag the framed bit into the Storyboard.

How long should an edited clip be? That depends on the content of the clip, but in general, a lot of clips are good at 4 to 6 seconds. Beginners tend to leave in too much material. However, when you’re trimming, be careful NOT to cut into the middle of an action. If you have a tight close-up of someone pouring water into a glass, for example, start with the glass before the pouring begins, and end it after the pouring stops.

A common newbie editing mistake is the jump cut. For a good example of a bad jump cut, and suggestions on how to avoid jump cuts in your editing, see this post by videographer Angela Grant.

Another newbie error occurs when you fail to cut matching action correctly. This article at Videomaker explains matching action — make sure you click through the photos at the top to see and understand the visual sequence.

Add and/or adjust audio

In addition to the audio that is part of your clips, you can add additional audio on a separate track in both iMovie and Windows Movie Maker. However, there is only one separate track for audio in these editors. (In a sophisticated video editing program, you will have more than one audio track to work with.)

When you have added audio that overlaps with the audio in your clips, you will usually need to adjust the volume of the audio in the clip. Instead of muting it completely, it usually seems more natural if you just lower the volume sufficiently so that it does not compete with the added track. If there is natural sound such as a door slamming or a fire truck’s siren in the video, then leave it alone, or increase the volume if necessary.

Music. Many beginners like to take the easy way out and just lay down some music in this track. I’ll admit I’ve done it myself, for vacation videos. But that’s NOT journalism! In fact, a lot of journalists say any added music is ethically questionable in a journalistic video. Obviously, music is almost always used in professional documentaries, so there’s still debate about this. But my advice to new video journalists is: Do not add any music!

Narration. Beginners are often very reluctant to add narration to their videos — but narration can really enhance some stories. You should script your narration and practice reading it before you record it. It will be better to record it in a stand-alone file and add it to the video, instead of using the narration tools included in the editor — this allows you much more flexibility.

Interviews. It’s going to be difficult to cut to and away from a talking head in iMovie or WMM, because you have only one video track. (In a sophisticated video editing program, you will have at least two video tracks to work with.) You can compensate for this by conducting your interview with a good-quality digital recorder, editing the best sound bites and saving them as individual audio files (see RGMP 4), and importing these audio files to the video project. By creating discrete audio files, you will be able to slide them left and right on the audio track and position them with precision so that they match the visuals well.

Note: To add these discrete audio tracks in iMovie, treat them as if they were sound effects. Add your audio files to the “iLife Sound Effects” folder (see video tutorial). In WMM you can just import the files as you would any other audio (see PDF tutorial).

Add title(s) and credits

All video editing programs have a variety of options for adding a title (at the beginning) and credits (at the end). You can change the background color, the font family and its size and color, and the animation effects. To give your video a journalistic feel, you should avoid cheesy effects. Keep it simple, and your work will appear more professional.

You can also choose to lay the title or credits over your video or over an imported still image (or sequence of stills) instead of having a solid-color background.

You can stretch the width of the title or credits on the Timeline to make them stay onscreen for more (or less) time. Everything on the Timeline is a little rectangle that can be manipulated by clicking and dragging. (Note: iMovie 09 does not have a Timeline per se.)

A word about typos: How stupid do you think you look when you have an error in spelling, punctuation or grammar in your video titles or credits? (You can always type the text into MS Word if you are a total pawn to spell-check — and then copy and paste it into the editor.)

Transitions and effects

Avoid these for Web video. First, they usually look unprofessional for journalism work. Second, they will increase the file size of your final video file — sometimes by a lot! Just use straight cuts between clips.

If you import still photos, keep the zooming and panning to a minimum. These effects are trite and amateurish most of the time, and again, it makes your journalism work look unprofessional.

Export the movie file

While you are editing, you must save the project file often. I suggest that you can never save often enough! If your system or the program crashes or freezes, you will lose your edits. (Note: iMovie 09 will auto-save your project.)

Note that your original video files are NEVER changed by the editing process. This is because the project file you are saving (when you are editing) is essentially a small text file that saves information about your editing actions. The project file does not contain ANY video or audio. Thus if you gave the project file alone to someone else, that person would not be able to see your video.

You will create the actual video file after you have finished editing the project. (Make sure to save the project one last time!) In iMovie 09, you’ll open the Share menu and select “Export Movie.” In Windows Movie Maker, you’ll open the File menu and select “Save Movie File” (in the Windows Vista version, select “Publish Movie”).

The best practice is to save the video file at the highest possible quality. Ignore all the options for “Web,” “YouTube,” “iPhone,” etc. — these will be lower quality video files. After you have exported the highest quality file, you can then convert it into any low-quality type you might need. The high-quality file can be uploaded “as is” to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Exporting the high-quality file might take several minutes — even if your project is only about two minutes long.

The final video file out of WMM will be in the AVI format. The final video file out of iMovie will be in the MOV format.

Tutorials and tip sheets

For a short list of video editing tutorials and other help, see Journalist’s Toolkit: Video. There are links to very nice step-by-step tutorials for both iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.

Project file management

Many of us move around from one computer to another, working on the same project on different machines. This can cause a huge problem with any project-based editing program (including Audacity and Soundslides, as well as most video editors).

Remember that the project file does not contain any of your video or audio. Therefore, you cannot take the project file alone to another computer and continue working. You need to take ALL the related files every time you change to a different computer.

Equally important: The video clips and audio files must have the same relationship to the project file whenever you open the project file to start working. This means, basically, keep it all in one folder, together. The project file AND the clips. That way you will be able to make changes to the project on a different computer.

If you have blank or missing thumbnails in your project — or in WMM, red X’s — it means you didn’t follow this advice.

Previous posts in this series:

RGMP 1: Read blogs and use RSS
RGMP 2: Start a blog
RGMP 3: Buy an audio recorder and learn to use it
RGMP 4: Start editing audio
RGMP 5: Listen to podcasts
RGMP 6: Post an interview (or podcast) on your blog
RGMP 7: Learn how to shoot decent photos
RGMP 8: Learn how to crop, tone, and optimize photos
RGMP 9: Add photos to your blog
RGMP 10: Learn to use Soundslides
RGMP 11: Tell a good story with images and sound
RGMP 12: Learn to shoot video

Social journalism: Back to the future

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:44:30 +0000

Engagement — one of three legs needed to support successful social media projects. (The others are inclusion and aggregation.) What does this mean for journalists, for news organizations?

Paul Gillin, a social media consultant and former technology journalist, says journalists have to play “to people’s particular interests” if we hope to engage the public. I know, that doesn’t sound very new or different. But think on it for a moment:

… the special interests that they have in what’s going on in their town, on their block, in their school system, in their local businesses, at the chamber of commerce, in the park system, in their local museums, that’s what gets people really excited, that which touches them at a very personal level (source).

Some newspapers still put these things front and center, focus their resources on these, and perhaps hold their circulation numbers steady. It used to be the way newspapers were structured, and it’s part of what changed as newspapers were bought up by big corporations and clumped into feedlots like so many over-doped beef cattle. Newspapers stopped covering the day-to-day factual matters that concern people — the details about where they work, live, attend schools and churches/mosques/temples. As circulation numbers were pumped up by expanding the supposed “coverage area,” what really happened was that less and less of what matters to people was, in fact, covered.

Then the public no longer experienced a sense of engagement with the newspaper.

Over the weekend, Mark Glaser tweeted a list of 10 steps to help local newspapers to survive and thrive. His No. 4 is: “Find out what the community wants in real face to face meetings, not focus groups. Then do what they want.”

That struck a chord with me, because every time I have watched a newspaper focus group, I felt like it never got at what people truly think and feel. The artificiality of the focus group affects what the participants say, and in the end, it’s just not the real deal. It isn’t that they’re lying, but they are trying to make a good impression — not only on the people asking the questions but also on the other participants, who are strangers to them. Also, the questions asked lead the results into places that the newspaper already wants to go — or already does go. The potential for hearing something actually new in a focus group is, in my opinion, pretty minuscule.

So, back to this idea of engagement. How should journalists really and truly engage with members of the public?

Talk to people whom you really don’t know. And not just poor people, or criminals, or addicts. Make an effort to find a regular, run-of-the-mill working or professional person who is quite different from you in some distinctive way — maybe an immigrant (your M.D. maybe, or your dentist); the woman who rings up your groceries at the giant supermarket; some guy in a bar whose boots are white with cement dust; a teacher in a public school that your kids have never attended. Don’t talk to them about their job — ask them about their life. What is the city doing wrong, or right? What would they change if they could? What have they been curious about lately? What has frustrated them like crazy?
Ask the public to contribute ideas. Then let the public vote on the best ones. John Robinson of the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record tweeted that when he asked readers for suggestions for investigative stories, he received six within a day. He didn’t say whether they were good ideas, but I’ll bet that at least a couple had some potential. And even if they aren’t suitable for a full investigative treatment, they let him know what people are concerned about.
Be more humble. I don’t know what it is about journalists, but as a group we seem to have a kind of arrogance/insecurity aspect to our personality. We come off as arrogant and kind of know-it-all and even brusque to many others who are not journalists. Among ourselves, we are comfortable with this personality and tend to overlook it. (We’re used to it.) I think even some of the best interviewers can strike their subjects as somewhat uncaring, some of the time. After all, we are doing a job, we have a deadline, we need to finish this thing and get on to the next one. But if you want to learn something new and unexpected, you’ve got to be less in a hurry, less focused on the short-term goal, the finish line, and more open to randomness. You have to honestly believe that the average person you’re chatting up might be able to tell you something you don’t already know — and you need to have the patience to allow that something to come out on its own.

Journalists can do some of this online more easily than they could have in the pre-Internet days, and some of them are doing it already, through blogs and other means. But I think it might help a lot of news organizations if they made a serious commitment to engagement, if they swallowed some of their professional “we know what news is” attitude and said, instead, “We need to find out what people really want to know about their communities.”

Does journalism create value?

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:30:13 +0000

Robert G. Picard impressed me as an awesomely smart person when I first saw him speak at a small online journalism conference a few years ago. Later I found out that he’s well-known and respected in the field of media economics. Last month an essay of his was published with the headline Why journalists deserve low pay — provocative, yes, but not exactly representative of the full contents of Picard’s argument. (A more enticing headline than mine here, surely.)

Picard says a lot that I agree with, and I’d like to outline some points here because I think they offer a much more useful framework for thinking about journalism’s future than many of today’s overly simplistic ideas in the field (for example, online subscriptions).

“Journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.”

What a way to raise hackles! But Picard is absolutely right. He explains that journalism “is important not in itself, but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.” Now, we all know that not all journalism is as noble as all that. Celebrity divorces and babies and so on do not enlighten the public, or support social interaction, or facilitate democracy. Neither does the crossword puzzle, or a lot of other stuff that sold newspapers.

Journalism can create three kinds of benefits for consumers, Picard says:

“Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas.”
“Emotional benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape.”
“Self-expressive benefits are provided when individuals identify with the publication’s perspectives or opinions, or when they’re empowered to express their own ideas.”

Now that we have a lot more sources of news and information to choose from, the economic value of these benefits is not as high as it once was. It costs less to produce and distribute content — in general. Picard is not saying it’s any cheaper to produce journalism. But look at those benefits again. Content and information sources other than journalism can provide these benefits to people.

It’s like the movie theater in the small town where I grew up. A small, family-owned theater, it only played second-run movies. It was open only on Friday and Saturday. There was one screen, and one new movie each week. From the time I was 9 or 10 years old, I went to that theater every week, no matter what was playing. I had very little access to movies otherwise.

Today I have Netflix, BitTorrent, and hundreds of cable TV channels.

The family closed that movie theater back in the early days of the VCR.

What is unique in journalism?

Not much, according to Picard:

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others.

However, Picard points out, nowadays “ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.”

So when journalists are doing exactly the same things, on the same platforms, they can’t make consumers pay a premium price. The consumers (who are not stupid) can get their desired benefits from others for free.

So Picard suggests that journalists will need to “redefine the value of their labor” and thus differentiate themselves from the common horde, which is providing lots of the benefits that we used to get only from the local newspaper (just as I used to see movies only at my local theater).

“Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories.”

Leaving aside, for the moment, all the amateurs, bloggers, citizen journalists, and such, we need to acknowledge that thousands of journalists at hundreds of news organizations are just replicating one another’s products.

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.

This worked as a revenue model when the only version of the day’s events was available to us in no more than one or two newspapers in our towns. We didn’t have access to the hundreds of other newspapers in the country. People in towns like mine had to subscribe to Time or Newsweek if they wanted any kind of real information about world events, because the local daily ran no more than a handful of three-inch wire stories a day from other nations.

(I remember finding a copy of The Washington Post during the week Nixon was in China, in 1972 — I was stunned to see pages and pages of coverage and dozens of photos. My local paper gave the story no more than a dozen or so column inches a day. World news was not a priority there.)

Picard’s solution for journalism

If you want people to pay you for a product, you must provide value — that is, give them something unique that benefits them and that they cannot obtain more cheaply (or free) someplace else. Picard puts it this way:

Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. … They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences.

I really like how he points out that providing “scores of disjointed, undigested short news stories about events in far off places” is not a way to create value for the audience. I have written before about the excellence of the BBC’s online coverage of breaking news in distant corners of the world; one of the greatest appeals to me is the context provided (carefully curated) in the sidebar of the stories. I would be more willing to pay for BBC Online than for The New York Times; when I want background on a breaking story anywhere outside the U.S., I always go to the BBC.

Look at Consumer Reports — with more than 3 million paid online subscriptions — if you need evidence that Picard has the right idea about uniqueness. He makes great points about opportunities for the Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Des Moines Register, and the Chicago Tribune. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who reports for Reuters — when she was based in Pittsburgh, she was responsible for covering the entire U.S. steel industry. Likewise, in central New Jersey one has unrivaled access to sources in the pharmaceutical business. In other words, uniqueness does not limit a news organization to “small” local stories.

The challenge: Creating value for the future

Here’s where Picard lays out our marching orders:

Finding the right means to create and protect value will require collaboration throughout news enterprises. It is not something that journalists can leave to management. Journalists and managers alike will need to develop collaboration skills and create social relations that make it possible. Journalists will also need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that make it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it. [Italics and boldface added.]

I must confess, here is where I stop short and scratch my head. I come from the old school, from journalism before the Internet, when no one ever said “entrepreneurial” and “journalist” in the same sentence. How do we learn to be entrepreneurial? How do we learn to build and test rapid prototypes? How do we foster innovation? How do we launch new products and measure their success? How do we set priorities for instituting these bold changes?

I have watched dozens, maybe hundreds, of failures in journalism products in the past 10 years. A lot of them can be attributed to a clear lack of uniqueness. Many were too expensive. Most were too slow — they took far too long to launch.

But above all, I would say most failed to provide real benefits that people wanted — AND could not already find elsewhere.

Source: “Why journalists deserve low pay: The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating real value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies,” by Robert G. Picard. The Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 2009.