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.
