Reporting: use of ‘Grab’

You can make easy graphic elements to drop into your Web site using Microsoft Word or any other computer software to create information and then using Grab software to capture an image of that and insert it as a drop-in art element. Grab is part of the applications package on any Mac that has OS X, and it is available in all Mac labs at Elon.

Make your chart/art in Excel, Word, or PowerPoint or any software package with which you are familiar and include any art elements you like. You can also use Grab to take a still frame from a video piece and use it as a still photo in your layout. ALWAYS be sure to credit anything made by anyone else to them as the originators of the content.

When you have the piece of art you want to use completed and you are absolutely certain every detail is accurate, save the file. Make sure the file you want to grab as an image is open on your desktop and sized to fit the space you would like to have it occupy in your web layout.

Open the Grab application (to find it, you can use the Spotlight tool on your Mac – the little magnifying glass on the top-right toolbar, and just type in the word “Grab” and select it from the menu of hits that pops up). Go to the top left toolbar in Grab and select “Capture” and pull down and choose “Selection” – this will allow you to select any part of anything you want to capture as an image from your desktop. Your cursor now becomes an arrow and you can move it to one corner of the document you want to grab. When you have it in position, click and drag over the surface of the portion of the screen you want to grab as an image and only let go when you have captured and centered that piece. When you let go, it will take a second or two for the software to make its copy of that part of your screen. Wait. When the copy pops up on your screen, you can save the image. If you are not pleased with how you grabbed this piece, you can simply kill this version and try again to capture what you want.

This image is a TIFF file, and TIFF files are pretty huge and slow to download, so you should now open up Photoshop and save this image as a JPEG file instead. You can find Photoshop easily by using the search tool if it is not already open. Then open your grabbed file in Photoshop and select from the toolbar “File” and pull down to “Save as.” You will get a palette of choices here, and you want to look down in the lower third of this dialog box, where it says “Format” and go to where the arrows are and click there and pull down to select JPEG and then SAVE that. You will get another dialog box that asks you about JPEG options and you can just select OK.

Now you have your saved JPEG of the art you want to use and it is an image, just like any photo you might place on a page. You can place it on your WordPress page in the “Write” or “Edit” mode by finding the picture icon in the toolbar where it reads “Add media.”

You can read more about Grab online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_(software)

Or you can also look at this site: http://www.ehow.com/how_2253784_using-grab-mac-os-x.html

Post 10: Photographic storytelling

A compelling still image has more lasting impact than any other communication method of our time. And you can talk all you want about angle, composition, perspective, framing and lighting, the most important characteristic of a still image is content – what is it about?

When you sift through your mind to recall most major news events taking place since cameras became a common information-gathering tool, you often think of each event from the perspective of your recall of the photo that has come to be known as defining that event. Kenny Irby, a veteran photojournalist, told Poynter workshop participants, “Audiences don’t care about form; they care about impact; great photography is about singling out a moment; photographs create context.”

He quoted former Life magazine photographer and picture editor John Loengard:

“The reader sees before he ever reads and may never read if there is nothing interesting to see.”

Irby said you should consider these points when developing effective visual coverage:

1) Understand your mission. But be flexible enough to change it if you see something more important developing as you proceed.

2) Remember the best visual communication achieves intimate impact that resonates on an emotional level. While visuals can be informational or graphical, the ones that are best remembered are emotional.

3) Understand that emotion can’t be forced and sometimes it is optimal to achieve simple, clear, honest, edited and useful information.

4) Visual coverage should be inclusive, reflecting accurately the diversity of views, community, issues, everything.

5) Your best work will be based on the trust relationships you form with sources; consider the work involved in making, not just taking photographs or shooting video.

6) Don’t just take the obvious angle when making a photograph; look for visual variety and try to make it a habit to document images from three different perspectives in each setting, location or subject. Explore options on different plains, perspectives, angles, targets for focus, etc.

7) Think in story terms while working, seeking a beginning, middle and end. Wide shots, medium shots, tight-tight-tight shots that accent specific details should be included in every set of images you record.

Multimedia online producers like Brian Storm, who produces Media Storm (http://mediastorm.org), sponsored by the Washington Post, use a mix of still and video sequences to communicate. They work to tell stories in the most effective way possible through the visual image.

Mona Reeder of the Dallas Morning News won an American Society of Newspaper Editors community service award for her series of photos that illustrate the human face of the statistics we read every day: http://www.dallasnews.com/photography/.

When you study these images, you can see how important still photography is and how vibrant it will continue to remain in a world that seems obsessed with discussing the impact of videos, YouTube and the moving image.

Another place to see great images is at the National Press Photographers Association site, where the Best of Photojournalism award winners are displayed. Irby was one of the judges in the most recent competition, and you can see the images from it at http://bop.nppa.org/2008/.

Irby suggested that you should always make at least three frames of each still image you want to capture, to be sure to cover yourself for any potential problems and to up the possibilities for the use of a sequence of photos in your communication. He added that you should look for layers of information as you assess where and when to capture images. “Look for life in its simplicity and complexity,” he said.

Another outstanding photojournalist that most teachers are using as a role model for news photography is Rick Loomis of the LA Times (http://www.loomisphotography.com/).

The three most-used software packages for working with still photos are Photo Mechanic (http://www.camerabits.com/site/index.html), Photoshop - I’m not linking it, because everyone knows it well – and Soundslides (http://www.soundslides.com/).

Photo Mechanic is used for sorting, cropping, data retention and archiving. It allows you to sort through your work, categorize and archive it easily and manage the photos well. Photoshop is still the most sophisticated and popular photo fine-tuning software. Soundslides is an effective tool that allows you to easily assemble slide shows that include an audio track. It allows you to package highly effective presentations.

Good photographers start by processing their images into Photo Mechanic, move to polishing the final images in Photoshop and – if they want to package a series of work in a presentation – they put together a Soundslides presentation.

Participants in the Poynter workshop were issued Canon Mark II cameras and worked in pairs, taking turns with the cameras in an exercise, capturing photographs and then processing them briefly through Photo Mechanic and Photoshop. No time was spent on Soundslides, but the software was discussed.

There’s a transition coming in the field of photography from image-making on separate platforms – still and video – to multiplatform cameras that can be used to capture quality images in both formats.

Photography is becoming more streamlined all the time, but multiplatform journalists still have tough decisions to make regarding gear: do you take one or two heavy, professional-model cameras out with you on every assignment; do you make that decision from assignment to assignment; do you sometimes take a consumer-model point-and-shoot that fits in your pocket and works well for web-resolution photos on a screen no larger than 20 inches?

My opinion, not Kenny’s: While the pros at Poynter say you should really take the best documentary gear with you all the time, the reality of journalism in the trenches is that a pocket-sized point-and-shoot camera is sometimes all you need for minor assignments requiring only tight close-ups with no action sequences.

Not having to lug the gear saves your energy and it also can serve to make story sources more accessible, because the more gear they see the more wary they are about talking to you. However, if you do this out of convenience you are occasionally going to get burned and miss something due to the limits of the tools you used. If you can afford the more-expensive gear, you should have it along on all assignments, keeping it available in your car but at the ready if you think it best to go without it on some occasions.

NEVER go to an assignment completely unequipped for visuals. ALWAYS expect to capture still photos and realize that you should be capturing video and sound when the source/s will allow it.

Irby offered this tip for those who use consumer-model automatic cameras: to soften the harsh light given off by the flash, try placing one or two small strips of transparent tape over it.

Irby said photojournalists for a number of top communications companies have begun using video as the dominant capture system for both still and video production. Photographers at some of the largest U.S. papers – folks who have been documenting news with “still” cameras most of their careers – are finding benefits in shooting video and stills with the same camera.

The most-talked-about tool in the industry today is the Red (http://www.red.com/cameras), 

The camera body for the Red-One is selling for about $17,500, far in excess of the standard $2,000 to $3,000 for standard professional still cameras today. The Red can record 4,250 by 2,540 pixels video at up to 60 frames per second (to put that in perspective, the best high-definition televisions today offer a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels). It is primarily used by feature filmmakers at this point because of its cost, but the cost of this kind of technology will come down in the next few years.

You know when a camera gets a big write-up in MIT’s Technology Review that it is probably something special (http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20657/?a=f).

Irby mentioned Henri Cartier-Bresson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson) several times during the week. The French photographer is considered by many to be a founding inspiration for modern photojournalism. I have always been a fan of his work, and I was fortunate to see an amazing showing of it at the Walker Gallery in Minneapolis a few decades ago that still inspires me.

Cartier-Bresson captured amazing images and is best known for the street scenes he documented – landscapes of light, form and perspective. He also did amazing portrait photography of dozens of the leading artists and politicians of his time.

He generally used a small, black Leica, wrapped with black tape to keep his tools inconspicuous; he did not use a flash; he believed in composing images in the act of capturing a scene – not in a darkroom. His work is amazing, and anyone who is serious about documenting life should study it; the most profound viewing experience is had when you see the work enlarged to gallery size. Fantastic.

Post 9: Apprehensive journalism

Chip Scanlan led a session that addressed the apprehension and fears that traditional journalists have about today’s complex challenges and the kind of comprehensive, do-it-all journalism that seems to be overtaking newsrooms. He read a “parable” he had written based on this Ezra Pound quote:

“You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables, and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences from which each according to his needs may draw his own conclusions.” – Ezra Pound

The Scanlan parable describes nearly every journalist’s concerns, but it outlines his own career. He has lived most of his professional life as a “content provider” – as a gifted writer and a writing coach. But with the expansion of hardware and software tools available to journalists in practicing their craft he “began to fear teaching something he wasn’t a professional at.”

Scanlan is highly successful in every regard and he has worked diligently to keep up as much as he can with changes in information-delivery options, yet he experienced the same fears all journalists have until he realized that few people in the world possess today’s entire information-production skillset… and he realized that he was actually doing a pretty good job of staying current and understanding the new stuff.

He realized he didn’t have to be able to do it all himself as long as he had expertise in at least one area, an appreciation of how everything else works to reach and inform an audience and the ability to team with others who have strengths where he has limited skills.

It is a tale of success and failure, showing that a person with skills in one area can keep plunging forward to expand the skillset if he or she is patient and perseveres.

Scanlan said that while he has had his struggles he learned to use a content-management system and blogging software, “fell in love with the hyperlink” and learned to leverage user metrics to see who is reading his work and when. He admitted that he has tried podcasting without success and he didn’t like his first attempt at guesting on a major national radio show, yet since then he has found success in similar pursuits.

“You don’t need to know how to do everything you can do,” he said. “Nouns trump adjectives. Journalism may be ‘online’; journalism may be ‘multimedia’; journalism may be ‘multiplatform’; but journalism is still journalism.”

He said he found that core values are still “the bedrock of communicating,” you don’t have to be able to do the technology stuff at an expert level to teach it and added that he had “found a sense of peace, hope and optimism.”

Participants in the seminar workshopped Scanlan’s parable for a while, getting into discussion groups and reporting back a few minutes later. There wasn’t enough time to delve deeply into the content of the conversations, but a few points emerged:

EVERYONE in communications has a fear of not being able to keep up. Even those who are experts with all of the new bells and whistles aren’t sure where things are going.

They worry about what audiences want now and where they will go next. There’s always yet another new form, format, version, challenge emerging in this time of accelerating technological change.

Lynne Adrine, a broadcast news veteran who’s worked with CNN, NBC, CBS and “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” said even the top communicators at the nation’s top networks aren’t certain about things.

“One of my last jobs was at ABC.com,” she said. “It is tough to know how to integrate the power of the Internet. Even the networks are flat-footed about Internet applications. All they know about is preparing television packages. They just started to recognize the need for specialists.”

We have to believe in the possibility to learn even when we fail and even fail epically the first many times we try. Scanlan brought up Samuel Beckett’s much-quoted passage: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Scanlan had mentioned in his parable that he had once felt he was being “trapped by the tyranny of expertise.” He said and others in the group agreed that you don’t have to know how to do everything.

Just do your best and keep trying and respect and work well with people who know how to do what has to be done to communicate your message effectively. 

Post 8: Strategic story planning

People juggle small concerns and large ones in every profession. In comprehensive journalism – communications work practiced using all the tools that fit the job – strategic planning for a major project is called storyboarding.

Vidisha Priyanka of Tampa Bay Online says the software tied to Web developing is getting so user-friendly that people with little news-design experience can do some fairly extensive projects by simply bringing files processed in Photoshop (pictures), Audacity (sound),  etc., into a content-management system.

“If you know a little HTML and CSS, it’s OK,” she said, “but everybody has a content-management system.”

She said communicators should work in advance to build frameworks for major news projects that they can return to regularly, building templates of sorts for various recurring content themes such as:

- The profile story

- The advance or scene-setter

- Event coverage

- Man on the street, pulse-takers

- Pro and Con issues pieces

“Once you have a pattern to start from it is much easier to do this work,” she said.

With time tight in our Multiplatform Journalism Seminar at Poynter this particular day, Priyanka zoomed through a few lists she had prepared to help define and describe good storyboarding techniques for large communications projects.

Priyanka said you begin by defining the key element, the focus; next you identify the media you might bring into the storytelling; storyboard the concept by actually DRAWING it out on paper – don’t just talk about it; determine the sources you will consult – this helps drive the definition of the elements you will employ in your news design; focus and organize the questions you want to answer with the project; determine which medium will best serve each project element – you don’t want to use five video elements, you want to mix in slide shows, timelines, still photos, print writing, etc.; identify the holes in the plan; equip yourself to carry out the plan.

She said some common elements expected in a good project are the headline, nut graf, coverage of key players, description of main action/issue, a show-and-tell on process (how something works or doesn’t work), pros and cons, a backgrounder (the story so far), and other items that are dependent on the story concept.

Priyanka provided a nice checklist you can tick down when you are storyboarding – remember to ask reporters to gather content to use for these BEFORE they leave the office and start interviewing people:

Text:  Headline, Summary or Nut Graf, External Links, Audio Transcripts, Documents, Photo Captions, Blogs

Audio:  Interviews, Nat Sound, Narration, Music (use music carefully or sometimes not at all – it can turn people off)

Video:  Clips, Historical Footage, Animation, Video Blogs (Vlogs) – remember to see if you can get your sources or your audience to provide these and other elements that help grow the project and bring in community

Images:  Still Photos, Graphics, Maps, Panoramics, Slide Shows, Photo Galleries, Historical Photos

Interactivity:  Timelines, Discussion Threads, Feedback Section, Polls, E-mail, Games, Mash-ups, Searchable Databases, Calculators, Obits/Guestbooks, Quizzes (there are many freeware or inexpensive resources online producers can find online to use for this content, such as mortgage calculators)

Data: Numbers, Statistics, Spreadsheets, Lottery Results, Archives

User-Contributed Content:  Anecdotes, Comments, Photos, Cell Phone Content, Videos

Mobile Content:  RSS Feeds, iTunes, Music, Videos, Podcasts

Site Exposure:  Going Viral: Digg, Reddit, fark.com, YouTube, del.icio.us

She said everyone has to understand how the content is divided, so there’s no redundancy in the information-gathering or the final product. “We can talk about convergence,” she added, “but it doesn’t happen unless people communicate.”

The more you storyboard and retain good ideas about flow, the better you get at it. Observing good project teams in the process is a great way to learn about it. You can also do envisioning exercises to try to help your communications outfit set up a series of storyboard templates for the types of major projects you are most likely to encounter.

“When you are storyboarding you think of it in a vast way first,” Priyanka said. “Then later you face the realities of staffing, time and equipment. Also, in the process you should think of shelf life. How will elements hold up over time?” Maybe you can put more resources into something that has more long-lasting value.

Multiplatform Journalism Seminar leader Chip Scanlan joined Priyanka to talk participants through a practice exercise. Spending about 10 minutes laying out a story set-up, allowing 15 minutes for two-person teams to brainstorm and do a storyboard, and allowing each team 2 minutes to explain their plans and to express in one word the deepest, most resonant focus to the story.

The outcome of an envisioning exercise should be a visual presentation, a storyboard that will explain how your communications team will answer the following five questions about your story:

- What’s the slugline?

- Why does this matter?

- What’s the point?

- Why is this story being told?

- What does this story say about life, our world, our times?

Asking these overlapping questions and going through the storyboarding brainstorming should help refine and isolate your one-word focus, allowing everyone to concentrate on optimal communication of that point as you carry out your information-gathering, project building and the dissemination of the message.

At the workshop, team members were asked to do an exercise in which they developed a major-project storyboard tied to the anniversary of an accident in which a 3-year-old boy was struck and sent into a traumatic coma. Teams met and drew up plans for coverage. Among the one-word descriptions for their projects were Vulnerability, Fragility, Perseverance and Cheated.

A clear point of this entire exercise was the need for communicators to force themselves to step back and do visioning work.

In busy communications companies and newsrooms it may sometimes feel as if there’s no time for planning, but it can save time in the long run.

“When you do this well and carry it out a few times, you get the idea of how to do it well in the future, and it becomes a matter of habit,” Priyanka said.

Scanlan likes to remind people to ask three questions just after going through any sort of task or exercise, to help them cement in their minds valuable experiences, including the epic failures that teach them so much. The three questions:

What surprised me about this?

What did I learn about it?

What do I need to know more about it?

This was an action-packed day. There was a long discussion of podcasting led by Harold Bubil of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. After this, seminar participants were tasked with editing the audio interviews they had recorded earlier with Marantz recorders – the gear used by National Public Radio reporters – using Audacity software. Ellyn Angelotti of Poynter gave people a few pointers on the software and then facilitated the workshop.

Audacity doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it does a nice job of allowing you to package audio the way you’d like to hear it, and it’s much easier to navigate than the extremely complex professional video/audio editing software like Final Cut Pro. It allows you to fade in and out of edits with ease.

Kenny Irby talked about teamwork in communications. “Good teams respect each other,” he said. “They get along. They get things done.” His handout said the major attributes to uphold if you want a high-performing team are:

- A common vocabulary

- Shared meaning

- Joint planning

- Coordinated action

-  A communal workspace

He said the culture of a place is important in team-building – an integrated pattern of knowledge, beliefs and behavior that requires learning and the distribution of knowledge to succeeding members and generations. You can’t build team if there isn’t a feeling of tradition, excellence and continuity.

He also talked about getting excellent results through coaching. On great teams, all people in the culture work together, coaching each other. He said there are some people who try to be “fixers” instead of coaches. Fixers are focused on content, just correcting errors themselves quickly to improve things in the short term – they get shallow results and put themselves into a situation where they are just continually having to go around and fix things.

Coaches focus on the other individuals in the group and what can be done to empower them for success. They look to improve things over the long term, pointing out ways individuals can correct their own performance. This happens gradually, but the payoff is much bigger because it improves the people and their work.

In the evening, there was a two-hour session “Covering the War at Home: The Story of Our Time,” featuring Pulitzer-winner Anne Hull and her editor David Maraniss, key leaders of the team that produced the investigative work on the harsh conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center for the Washington Post. The session was led by Poynter ethics director Bob Steele. You can view them by going to the Poynter site:

http://www.poynteronline.org/column.asp?id=122&aid=143507

Post 7: Recognizing multimedia potential

Vidisha Priyanka, an online production team leader for Tampa Bay Online (http://www.tbo.com), is incredibly animated and dynamic when discussing the multimedia potential in communications storytelling. I wish I had captured some video of her talk; I’m learning the hard way about keeping batteries charged and taking extras along.

She reiterated the fact that the tools of communication are changing so quickly that communicators need to carry on constant conversations about the best approach to getting messages out effectively, then she backed that up with suggestions.

Just to get things rolling, she showed an example of a Flash project produced by MSNBC that incorporated a variety of new-media elements, including a survey, a game and more.

“Battle of the Bags” can be found at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23358591/

“The biggest thing in online journalism is that you give the audience choices,” she said, as she showed how the MSNBC package also includes an audio/video essay, audio slide show and other elements. “They can interact and play with the project.”

She said that revenue online is not just based on page views; the data assessed include the amount of time consumers spend on a site and how often they return to the site. “Those numbers draw advertisers,” she explained.

She divided the types of multimedia support into two categories: continuous news and special projects. “Continuous news coverage (providing extra elements to supplement spot-news stories and events) can be handled by one person, but special projects require teamwork and generally take more time,” she said. 

Tampa Bay Online has about 11 online production people, divided into two teams. Priyanka leads one of them. The salary range runs from about $35,000 a year for a Level One producer to $70,000 for a Level Three producer – a person who has extra abilities with animation and specialized graphic design.

While she’s an advocate for giving the audience the information it needs, she said extra, added elements shouldn’t be forced. “There is pressure to bring multimedia to the table whether or not the story demands it,” she said. “If your story will suffer, if you’re being asked to do things that will not contribute to it, put your foot down.”

More key points:

- Handheld computers are the new competition for traditional online news.

- People use the Web for information and for something to do. Keep it fresh and keep it interactive.

- Keep feeding people fresh information as soon as you get it, bumping the old version with updates as you gather more details or adding to the version with fresh leads. “People want to know, ‘Why is that helicopter hovering over my local grocery store,’” she said. They want to feel a sense of control over their lives.

- Online producers have to keep asking themselves, “What do you know now, and what will you find out next?”

- You need to recognize the needs and news patterns of the local audience, including the “Bored at Work Network.”

- Today’s audiences for television, online and print news do not overlap a lot. “If you put the three in a Venn diagram there is some overlap, but not with all three.”

- Think simple concepts, easy to approach and use; sometimes just adding a link with related coverage or extra information is enough.

- Learn to listen and understand your audience.

- Giving people added information adds value and keeps the audience coming back for more. Establish your site as the one people go to get local information and layer on national and international links so they know they can come to you for comprehensive details. TBO has 10 zoned community websites, catering to local schools, governments and events.

At Poynter sessions, other faculty sit in on sessions, to learn from Poynter seminar participants and from the faculty leading the sessions. Al Tompkins piped up at this point about the concept of “aggregation versus generation.” He said 20 years ago communicators went out and got information – they generated the news – and then presented what they found. “Those days are over,” he said. “We should aggregate and generate. The successful sites do both. Most success comes out of being an aggregator AND a generator.”

Priyanka said communicators need to work to “own” their local turf, the local market. They have to provide neighborhood news, and they have to make it hyperlocal. “Own your local market,” she said. “That is where your strength lies.”

She showed a slide titled “The Dilemma of the Medium.” It included a list of pressure points. Among them were:

1) The legacy medium’s loss of audience (television and print newspapers)

2) The need for speed in doing constant online updates

3) Competition

4) Extra work involved in listening to your audience – more feedback

5) The problems associated with using user-created content

6) Photos, photos, photos

7) Video – challenges of time and lack of training

Just keeping pace with the new technology tools

9) Text – making it readable; how to present it

She said the way to generate traffic is to give people what they want. “Put stuff up as it happens,” she urged. “Put up things from everywhere in the newsroom.” She explained the headline doesn’t have to be a crime or big weather story. People flock to other news. When Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert, TBO responded with stories on disappointed fans, a check on how many times he’d canceled concerts in his career, the effects on traffic, where he would be performing next and other angles.

Priyanka said everyone in a communications organization should be expected to contribute to multimedia production and 24/7 news thinking. This is the reason behind the creation of Continuous News departments in newsrooms. The audience wants fresh content all the time, and the more you give it the more traffic you attract. She said one way to perpetuate this is to run overlapping shifts that cover more of the day and night. TBO goes from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily.

It’s also important for everyone in an organization to share skills and help each other continually learn to use new tools and take on improved approaches.

She had a list of suggestions for tackling a planned project, saying you should ask yourself:

- Is the story complex?

- Can it benefit from a fresh approach?

- Why would the audience have an interest? (Does it affect safety, health, family, community – why?)

- Does it have a shelf life?

- Does it allow you to entertain as well as inform?

- Can each component of the story be a story itself?

- Is retention of information by the audience important?

Priyanka said making a photo gallery of stills takes less time than compiling a slideshow. A mash-up takes less time than a Flash piece. Audio is easier than video – much easier. It takes one hour to produce each minute of finished video (not including capture and convert). Databases can enhance interactivity. She mentioned Caspio.com (http://www.caspio.com/) as a useful database solutions provider.

She said when you want to add extra interactive elements or multimedia you have to “think simple, think resources” and ask yourself some questions:

Who will report and write? Who has the equipment to do this? Who will edit it? Who will publish it online? Who will provide tech support?

Seminar participant Dave Davies, news director for Texas Public Radio, responded to that, “What if the answer to all of the questions is ME?”

Priyanka answered that you just do what you can to handle it as well as possible.

“A simple map, a graphic, bullet points,” she said. “You don’t have to do everything. Think simple. Don’t think you have to do it all.”

Post 6: What would Socrates say?

Philosopher William David Ross pointed out there is often more than one value competing for preeminence in our decisions. He outlined six life principles, calling them “duties” and said no one is more important than the others. When people work and think ethically they have to balance and decide between them regularly. This Ross list includes Justice, Beneficence, Doing No Harm, Fidelity and Reparation, Self-Improvement and Gratitude.

Good professional communicators work as well as they can to appropriately address these competing values, a difficult task that has been ramped up significantly by technological change. 

The more our commitment is divided, the harder it is to see a clear path to satisfying conflicting duties. In a world of accelerating change and the ability to instantly connect with a potential audience of 1.3 billion (and growing), with the added demand of producing information 24/7 and shrinking budget lines with which to accomplish all that, we’re now expected to address additional stresses competing for our attention and balance them as well.

The first forms of communication from one to many were non-verbal and oral. While ethics came into play at that time there weren’t too many other distractions interfering with getting information from Point A to Point B. 

Then came a game-changing technology – the invention of written language systems and the ability to convey the written word in a portable document format: markings on papyrus, much more convenient than cave paintings or chiseled stone for getting your message out. Plato wrote of Socrates’ fear (expressed in “Phaedrus” in 370 B.C.E.) that the new media technology of the day would mess things up.

Plato said Socrates told him that people:

“… will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Socrates didn’t have a clue about what was going to happen next.

Of course today’s new media technologies have become exponentially more complicated, so when a person is tasked with delivering a message to an audience it is simultaneously easier and more difficult to package the message because of the new tools in play. The ease of message delivery and the preponderance of amazing tools now available at a low price have ramped up the complexity of doing communications work because individual communicators are expected to do so much more so much more quickly.

The ethical values communicators must balance are placed under stress by commonly found “feed-the-beast” and “post-immediately”  corporate news mantras and the demands for content production in multiple formats. Nearly a decade ago I worked on an ethics research project in the early days of online editions (http://facstaff.elon.edu/andersj/summary.html). Online news managers of the time (prior to the video explosion and other new demands) said small staff sizes and the need for speed and scoops erode standards.

Life hasn’t gotten any easier in the past decade.

Communicators once juggled two or three balls in the air, considering the needs of the public good, the audience and an employer while balancing ethical values and obtaining information in a basic format that allowed processing time. Two or three balls in the air we could handle. Today’s “new media” demands have tossed in a few swords (expanded responsibilities tied to ramped up video, audio and interactive production) and a chainsaw (the ability to “publish” instantly from anywhere, wirelessly).

And we’re supposed to just keep juggling without missing a beat.

Our loyalties and our attention are divided more than ever before. How many duties can we keep airborne without fumbling? Sometimes things are going to fall and we’ll just have to assess the damage, pick up the pieces and start over again.

What would Socrates say?

Post 5: It’s hard to write about Final Cut

Final Cut Pro is not really something that can be explained well in this format – a column or blog. It’s easy to write about writing. It’s hard to write about how to use video-editing software.

It’s also hard to learn to use video-editing software. You pretty much have to just listen to someone who understands it as they talk about it for a while and show you a few things, then you begin to learn the lingo, then you sit down and noodle around, make mistakes, get in up to your elbows, play with it, fail a bunch of times, take notes, about it, fail some more and finally start getting it, little-by-little.

Andre Jones has decades of experience as a television professional, so he’s seen a lot of change in film/video reporting. 

He spent 10 years with CNN before starting his own company in the Atlanta area, and he also serves as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute.

The man knows his way around timelines, viewers, browsers and canvasses. He knows his way around I, O, P, L, K, J, Q, A, B and the family of Option-plus and Apple-plus commands. He mentions the space bar so often, you would think he was an astronaut.

During an afternoon session at Poynter, seminar students watched on a video screen as Jones showed tips and tricks for editing in FCP, then they dispersed to practice video editing in pairs in the large lab Poynter uses for this sort of hands-on technology workshop.

At the beginning of the session Jones shared a six-page handout with introductory information about starting up an editing project in Final Cut. He emphasized, however, that editing excellence begins long before you sit down with this popular professional editing software. It begins the moment you are aware of the story you are going to start gathering the information to tell.

“Editing begins with the assignment,” he said. “Before you go out the door and start shooting.”

Kenny Irby (http://poynter.org/profile/resume_view.asp?user=1683), Poynter’s visual journalism group leader and director of diversity, spoke earlier in the day about interviewing techniques. He stressed that communicators should:

- Prepare in advance so they are ready to ask good questions.

- Keep the door open to the person being interviewed.

- Understand that content is determined by your questions.

- Discern the power of source over studio.

- Push toward “describe” and “explain.”

- Listen.

- Learn to trust silence and the results it can deliver.

- Develop excellent non-verbal cues to encourage interviewees while not impeding on the recording of audio and/or video.

He said building a trust relationship and practicing good ethics are keys to success when working with news and information sources. “Journalists have to demonstrate genuine concern and compassion when going below the surface,” he points out in one of his handouts.

He spoke about ethical concerns, intrinsic to all media work and certainly one of the key elements that sometimes distinguish the work of the professional journalist from other informants in the digital age. “We give voice to the voiceless, we pursue the truth, we bring context,” he said. “The process and elements are changing, but your interpersonal skills remain as important as your technical abilities.”

He said journalists have to be honest about how they gather information and how it will be used (online, broadcast, in print and where – digital information is copied and goes on and on). He encouraged everyone to be as transparent as possible in the process of gathering and sharing information.

He said journalists have to seek understanding, digging deep, not reacting too soon, asking before jumping to conclusions, giving the benefit of the doubt.

He said journalists have to challenge with passion, working toward developing a “common vocabulary and a shared mission” to serve the common good.

He said journalists have to be willing to change, practicing the “skill of genuinely considering other ways of seeing and doing things,” remaining open to improving craft and resolving conflicts.

He said journalists have to stay in the conversation, keeping the dialogue going and resisting the temptation to quit on it. “It may be the toughest thing to do when things are uncomfortable or new,” he wrote in a handout. “There is no progress without struggle.”

Al Tompkins chimed in with a quick interview tip during the process of the discussion of open-ended questions vs. closed-ended, saying a great way to nudge an elaboration out of an interviewee who didn’t come across with enough is to say, “Is that true?” or “Is that right?”

My video/editing partner, Dave Davies, news director for Texas Public Radio, and I had the opportunity to interview Poynter visiting faculty member Vidisha Priyanka during the day as part of an interviewing and videography assignment that we would later edit in Final Cut.

Priyanka is a news and special-projects producer for Tampa Bay Online, the Media General website tied to the Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV News Channel 8. She is a native of India and worked as a content writer for the web edition of India Today, the best-selling political magazine in India. She was also a content producer and reporter for the Times of India, New Delhi. 

She found her way to Poynter when she pursued a master’s degree in journalism just across the street at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. She is a fascinating young online journalist, and I will try to post some of that interview (shot with a Canon G1 HD camera) if she gives her permission for me to use it. She said she will consider it.

Post 4: Video day at the workshop

The video clip above (shot with a Flip Ultra with the .avi file compressed in iMovie to a .mov file uploaded to YouTube and linked to this blog in WordPress) is just the first five minutes of an Al Tompkins-led Poynter session about the essentials of working with video – writing, picture, sound, light, location, interviewing, character, storytelling. The still frame that shows is misleading; the video quality is much sharper. I’d like to know if someone can tell me how to improve on that still – probably not possible since it’s an import from YouTube. (Oh, yeah, and I didn’t get a well-composed, closer shot of Al due to the camera’s grainy zoom and my position in the classroom.)

Years of real-world experience have given Tompkins a great background and he knows how to tell it all well. He is known to many for his regular “Al’s Morning Meeting” column on Poynter Online (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2).

Following is a briefing from his entire morning-long Multiplatform Journalism session, missing only the excellent video clips Tompkins used as examples:

Don’t be so drawn to the big action that you miss the extremely important aspects of the story going on in REACTION to what’s happening.

Examples of vital reaction visuals can be found in all of the great coverage of events of the past, including the death of Martin Luther King (the image of people pointing toward the scene of the assassination), the funeral of JFK (John-John saluting), the turmoil in Manhattan after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center (shock and horror on the faces of ash-covered people as they flee the scene of the burning, crumpling buildings). 

Tompkins said: “Think. Where do you need to be and when do you need to be there to capture the peak action? At a fire, you capture the flames first because they might go away, but turn around and get the onlookers’ faces bathed in the light, the truck, the firemen. It’s not the action that gets the winning shot, it’s the REACTION.”

He talked about what makes a great video story. Some of the points of discussion were Characters, Conflict, Tension, Action, Surprises, Relevancy, and following a Journey of some sort.

He used the acronym COOL – colorful, outgoing, opinionated and lively – to describe the type of person who makes a great character to follow in video storytelling.

He covered the storytelling basics that hold true across platforms – for instance, the creation of tension and a later resolution, the analogy of spreading of “gold coins” along the way, little treasures for your audience to pick up as they go along as a reward for sticking with your tale. “You (as a communicator) NEVER have permission to waste my (the audience’s) time,” he said.

He listed “five motivators for consuming news,” saying audiences are compelled to consume storytelling that has to do with:

1) My money

2) My family

3) My safety

4) My health

5) My community

He added that one more motivator is innate curiosity.

Showing video examples to illustrate his lessons, he discussed natural (nat) sound and capturing the best soundbites. One clip showed a dog chasing a stick across snow and ice with vivid sound of its breathing and scruffling along the cold, hard landscape captured by a wireless mic attached to its collar. “Mic the dog” became shorthand for the seminar participants when talking about assuring that you get the best natural sound for all work you do. “You can NOT get too close to the sound,” Tompkins said.

(Point of interest: the photo at right is a still grabbed using iMovie from a .mov compressed version of a file that was originally an .avi shot with a Flip Ultra camera, and I think it looks pretty good online.)

He divided sound bites into two types, subjective and objective, and said most bites should be subjective, allowing characters to share opinions, thoughts, emotions and observations.

“Emotional content makes it all hang together and mean something,” he said. “Ask better questions and you’ll get better answers; don’t ask questions that get only objective responses.” You can use objective copy to set up the bites, but generally allow the characters to carry off the emotion and tell their own stories as much as possible.

Another favorite Tompkins line: “When your ears and your eyes are in competition, your eyes win.” He said you have to think about the visual and the aural experience and make them work effectively. 

The best bites have OTPS – another Tompkins acronym – one thought per sentence and one theme per story. The copy says something and the sound bite proves it – writing that sets up the bites perfectly. Reporters need to stay out of the way and let the people tell their stories.

He shared a technique learned from Pulitzer winner Jon Franklin, finding the focus for a story in three words: a noun, a verb and an object. Tompkins breaks it down this way:

Who = noun
Did = verb
What = Object

This also breaks down to the S-V-O pattern all writing teachers employ – the use of subject-verb-object order in storytelling to maintain clarity.

He added that the verb you use when you describe how a story is going to be put together or has been put together shows your angle. “The verb you use exposes your bias,” he said. 

The man is a sound-bite machine when it comes to learning about communicating messages. Here’s another one: “There’s a difference between the ‘point-you-there’ story and the ‘take-you-there’ story,” he said. Adding that we all need to show and not just tell. 

He talked about his idea of the three types of story “shapes” used in most storytelling.

1) Breaking news employs the inverted pyramid

2) Narrative form uses the “hourglass,” generally introduced through a single instance or single character representing the big picture, setting up tension and context, with a “Kaboom!” about two-thirds of the way into the story a surprise or big action. You can actually see this employed in the TV series “House” – there’s always a tragedy about 40 minutes in; it’s like clockwork.

3) The  form with many emotional peaks – he calls it a “Christmas tree” – with many points of interest introduced  followed by a huge payoff right at the end of it all. Examples of this type of work include Ira Glass on “This American Life” (http://www.thislife.org/) on public radio, episodes of “Law & Order” on television and John Grisham’s legal thrillers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grisham).

Tompkins suggests communicators should shoot video as wide as they can and get as close to the subject as possible to get the shots needed. He reiterated the need for wide, medium, closeup and supercloseup shots, talked about getting plenty of B-roll to cover and using cutaways and avoiding jump cuts in the editing process.

“You want to keep the eye (of the viewer) in the frame,” he said. “Jump cuts take the eye out of the frame. You want to move the eye around in the frame.”

He strongly recommends against using music as background in video storytelling. “Only use it on the rare occasion,” he advised.

Post 3: Theme and technique

The video embedded above shows seminar participants as they are just getting Poynter-issued video gear from Al Tompkins, broadcast and online leader at the institute.

The first six hours of the Poynter Institute’s Multiplatform Journalism seminar, led by Chip Scanlan, covered the importance of going deep to get the best theme possible and then switched over to an introduction to basics of shooting video.

Scanlan asked participants to spontaneously list journalists who make an impression with new approaches. Among those listed were Graeme Smith of the Toronto Globe & Mail (see his “Talking to the Taliban” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/talkingtothetaliban); blogger Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jlee/); journalism innovator Rob Curley (http://www.robcurley.com/); photographer James Nachtwey (http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/); Brady Dennis, the writer of “300 Words,” a series of stories about everyday life that goes unnoticed (http://www.sptimes.com/2005/01/28/Tampabay/After_the_sky_fell.shtml); Lee Hancock of the Dallas Morning News, author of a series on exploitation of the elderly titled “Mary Ellen’s Will”; and Brian Storm’s “Media Storm” (http://mediastorm.org/). 

Seminar participants said they admire these people’s work because they can analyze data and articulate it well.

Seminar leader Scanlan said there are three C’s to being an “A” journalist, pointing at a list he had posted already on the wall in his distinctive scrawl.

1) Creative work – he said to do this you have to lower your standards and do things like free writing to get yourself open to all possibilities

2) Critical thinking – he said this requires that you raise the bar, demand a lot of yourself and ask yourself the right questions (which I will list a bit further on)

3) Courage – because it takes guts and dedication to do journalism well

He emphasized the necessity to find a single theme, and participants did exercises throughout the session in which they boiled information down to a one-word concept.

It’s not enough to just pick a concept to outline with your storytelling; you need to go deep for the theme, because the central dominant message determines all of the steps you take throughout the reporting and writing process. He had seminar participants think of a story idea and express it in a one- or two-word slugline. Next, he asked the participants to really boil the idea down to its essence.

Imagine a story you can tell; now imagine a one-word abstraction of the deepest depths you can plumb to be a storyteller who goes to the true core of the matter.

One workshop participant was talking about housing issues as a story, expressed in the slugline “no home,” and she first said she believed “love” was at the true core, but a further discussion of the topic drew out the fact that perhaps this story idea is more about fear or vulnerability if it is boiled down to its essence.

Good one-word concepts can be universal without being cliche; they are specific; they can be surprising.

“Don’t just embark on a quest for information,” Scanlan encouraged. “Embark on a quest for meaning.”

He handed out a laminated business card with suggestions he drew from an interview he did with successful journalist David Von Drehle of The Washington Post. He said he teaches these “Five Questions to Find the Heart of Your Story” as a necessity when he does guest stints in newspaper newsrooms. They are:

1) Why does my/our story matter?

2) What’s the point of the story?

3) Why is this story being told?

4) What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?

5) What is the story really about? In ONE word?

He encourages people to speedwrite the answers taking just 20 to 60 seconds to answer each.

I have always told my students that CONCEPT is the most important aspect of writing. A well-developed concept is crucial to success in everything in life, not just storytelling. Going deep is a way of living; those who live this way gain at every level.

Take your next story concept and give the five questions a try. Get into the habit of applying this kind of analytical thinking to work before you go out the door and start reporting.

Tompkins, the broadcast/online leader at Poynter, handed out Canon G1 HD and Canon HV20 video cameras to two-person teams and gave an instructive introductory talk about shooting video competently and then he sent everyone out the door to do some reporting in one of the institute’s beautiful garden areas.

His Tips:

- Do NOT zoom.
- Do NOT pan.
- Keep the shot steady. No, really, keep the shot steady; think about it ALL the time.
- Hold each shot AT LEAST 10 seconds. Just do it.
- Shoot your cutaways in sequences and get supercloseup, closeup, medium, wide – all of them.
- Shoot more than you need.
- Always wear headphones – you need to know that you are capturing the audio you need.
- Seek great natural sound, and shut up so you don’t ruin it by saying “unhuh.”
- Seek the truth and try to tell it – you make your reputation over time, but you can lose it in just moments.
- Always check to see that you have a tape in the camera.
- Always check to see that you have fresh batteries.
- Don’t “double punch” – be sure you turn the camera on and then get your finger OFF the button.
- Shoot what’s going to go away first, you can get the other stuff later.
- Setting matters – make the interviewee comfortable, honor great lighting, put the camera on the shadow side of the subject.

Tompkins (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=141512) also shared his format for coming up with the framework for a good story. He said you can hinge it on the clasic storytelling patterns we learn from the time we are born. Fill in the blank after the following lines:

Once upon a time…
Suddenly…
As it turns out…

And he added, “Don’t just get the ‘what,’ get the ’so what.’ Leverage each medium for its power. Audio spurs the imagination. Video brings out emotion. We can intellectualize the print version of a story better than anything else. Ask yourself how you can leverage this.” 

Seminar participants spent an hour on an exercise in which they paired up in teams to use the video gear to cover a set-up press conference and staged participation by Tompkins, Scanlan and some co-conspirators.

Among the folks here for the workshop (some pictured in this photo from the end-of-class exercise we did in the Poynter gardens the first day) are Lynne Adrine, freelancer, Peabody winner and broadcast journalism teacher; Adam Ashton, a reporter for the Modesto Bee; Mark Brooky, multimedia editor for the Grand Haven (MI) Tribune; Stephen Hermann, director of student publications at Nicholls State; Linda Linn, a teacher at Western Wyoming Community College; Annette Blackwell, a lecturer at the University of Technology – Sydney; Dave Davies, news director of Texas Public Radio; Meg Heckman, staff writer for the Concord Monitor; Peggy Lewis, a professor at Howard University; Andrea Lorenz, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman; Dianne Penn of United Nations Radio; Adam Rodewald, a reporter for the Marshfield News-Herald; Janis Warren, a reporter for Tri-City News; Sunny Wu, a senior editor with MSNBC.com formerly of Foxsports.com and ESPN.com; Bianca Prieto, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel; Mercy Rodriguez, a reporter for the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind.; and Anna Weggel of Minnesota Public Radio’s Center for Innovation in Journalism.

Post 2: Poynter and the workshop

The workshop goes from a Sunday afternoon through the following Friday at the Poynter Institute in St. Pete. The leader is Chip Scanlan, the author of one of the top media writing textbooks and an essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. He generally concentrates his teaching on reporting, interviewing, nonfiction narrative, deadline writing, essays, coaching and productivity. He is also a regular columnist for Poynter Online. The info box at left is from the Poynter site. You can see Chip’s informational columns at: http://poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=1592

The professional journalists taking part in the seminar are staying in an affordable downtown St. Pete hotel about a 20 minute walk from the Poynter Institute. The Institute is concentrating a lot of its focus on helping old media organizations come to grips with new-media realities. I also attended a workshop here in the 1980s. The most significant change since then? While reporting, writing, critical thinking, visual communications and management remain a staple of workshops here, there are new emphases, including online, multimedia, ethics and diversity.

The course description:

Multiplatform Journalism W401B-08
Deliver News in Print and Online

After years of baby steps, multiplatform journalism is growing up. The implications are inescapable: Journalists must master new ways to gather, distill and present news across the spectrum of print, broadcast and online media. This is your chance to learn how to use digital cameras, audio and video recorders, and to edit what you gather with industry-standard software. Work in teams coached by Poynter and visiting professionals who practice and teach multiplatform journalism. The process begins with storyboarding and ends with publication or on-air delivery. Stop along the way to pick up ethical decision-making, diversity and coaching skills.

You’ll learn …

• Storyboarding and other planning and work-flow methods to produce multiplatform stories
• Industry-standard technologies, including digital audio and imaging recorders, along with production software to bring your stories alive with words, images and sound
• Writing for video and sound storytelling
  People do not have to come to Poynter to get Poynter training. Thanks to support from the Knight Foundation, News University, also known as NewsU, offers courses online. It helps you avoid the Florida humidity while still learning valuable lessons: http://www.newsu.org/  

  One of the most recent additions to the courses offered at NewsU is Reporting Across Platforms, taught by Julie Dodd, Judy Robinson and Victoria Lim. The self-directed, self-paced course is free to anyone who has registered to use NewsU. You can find the specific details at http://www.newsu.org/courses/course_detail.aspx?id=rtndf_platforms08. 

Post 1: Heading to Poynter to practice new skills

I already do a lot of writing and editing of photos and some editing of video content for the web for the research project I run at Elon University – Imagining the Internet: imaginingtheinternet.org

But just like there’s always room for Jello, it seems as if there’s always something more to learn about emerging media. In fact the amount of stuff to learn is pretty much a bottomless void, but it has been interesting to leap in and sort of glide, plummet, drop precipitously, glide and see what happens.

Equipped with a laptop computer and minimalist, lightweight equipment – a consumer-model Canon digital still camera, a Flip Ultra video camera and a small Sony audio recorder (total cost for the three and accessories about $400) – I’m heading to a workshop titled “Multiplatform Journalism” at The Poynter Institute in Tampa-St. Pete, Fla.

With these new-media tools, I can shoot about 60 minutes of simple, web-worthy video, record up to 12 hours of audio and take hundreds of photographs before recharging batteries, all without using any tape or film as we used to do not so long ago as journalists. They record digital information that can be quickly transferred directly to my computer, where it is easy to upload and share online using free Web 2.0 programs like WordPress and Facebook.

Amazingly, I can easily fit all three tools together in the palm of one hand.

I could have packed professional-style or prosumer-level equipment for this workshop, but I want to see how well a person can tell a story with the inexpensive yet functional hardware that has been emerging over the past couple of years. Much of this revolution is due to the continuing shrinkage in size and cost of computing power and memory.

At the Poynter workshop, we will leverage many tools in communicating; we will be storyboarding, employing digital audio and using images to enhance the value of the written words that tell about our world.