Telling stories with simple tools

A suburban Indianapolis fire captain talks about what motivates people to join the fire department. Shot this to test video with a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 point-and-shoot.




A former airline pilot who's now a flight instructor at Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport talks about his love of flying. This is a test of video storytelling techniques using inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras, in this case a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 ($238).


News video cost and quality

I love the emotion and detail that video can help bring to a news story online.

When I went through Gannett’s “MoJo” video journalism training in 2007 the idea was to equip newspaper reporters and photographers with the skills to add video content to the Web.

Two years later, there’s so much more video on newspaper Web sites. Users, including the 100 million YouTube viewers (as of spring 2008), expect video.

So it’s no surprise that Nielsen Online research for the Newspaper Association of America found newspaper Web sites attracted more than 74 million monthly unique visitors in the third quarter of 2009.

The NAA points to other research in 2009 showing Internet users viewed 16.8 billion videos in April, a 52 percent increase over April 2008.

And the NAA points out that newspaper Web site visitors are 76 percent more likely to have downloaded video or audio the previous day than Internet users as a whole.

Not all video is created equal, of course: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was watched 28 million times in the first week after his death.

Page views on a local newspaper site for video about school test scores or other routine stories won’t do nearly as well.

Good video shows something unusual or compelling, introduces an interesting character or provokes emotion in some way.

Good video doesn’t have to be complex. Tom Van Dyke of The Chicago Tribune did this weather feature and found two good characters to tell a slice of life in the big city:



Van Dyke was testing out a piece of new gear when he shot that. From the quality of the audio, he probably had a wireless mic on the woman.

The question of gear always comes up when talking about Web video. How much equipment is needed and what does it cost?

The Poynter blog has an excellent look at some of the high-end video options for still photographers.

Independent filmmaker Danfung Dennis, who is finishing a documentary on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, uses what may be the top of the line in custom-made rigs.

He uses a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70 f/2.8 L lens, Sennheiser ME-66 microphone and a Glidecam 2000 mount, for starters. That equipment cost more than $5,000 – not exorbitant by photo equipment standards, and probably half of what equivalent quality would have cost a few years ago, but beyond the reach of many newsrooms.

It’s also a lot to carry. Dennis’ rig would be too much to carry for typical domestic assignments.



The question is whether that level matters to online users primarily interested in vivid moments from local news – a dramatic fire, wreck, emotional moment with people at the scene of a local news event.

For that coverage, it’s more important that as many reporters and local contributors as possible have access to useable video of some kind, not that it be documentary-grade.

I’m intrigued by the possible equipment choices when we’re thinking of Web video more as social media - video shot by people who are primarily reporters and writers

Here’s an example – an interview with a technology expert at a digital media conference. The quality is poor, but the content is meaningful to people with a strong interest in the conference.

You can guess how it was shot. The video came from the onboard camera on a Mac laptop. The reporter, because he had nothing else to shoot with, grabbed his laptop, cradled it in his arm and asked some questions. It’s not what you would plan to do, but for users with a strong interest, it was fine. In other words – newsworthiness can trump technical quality.

If the goal is to be ready when news breaks, to train more people in the newsroom to produce video and to think more in multimedia terms when planning stories, then we’ll need more equipment at less cost. More people in the newsroom have to get their hands on gear.

For limited uses, I’m a fan of the Panasonic Lumix TZ-5, a pocket-size, 10X zoom point-and-shoot that delivers 720 HD video. The two video examples at the top of this post were shot with a TZ-5. In news video as in golf, I think the swing is actually more important than the club. Here are the specs on that camera.

Panasonic’s latest model is actually the TZ-7, for about $350. It’s got a 12X lens and can also zoom out a little wider, but I’m not a big fan of the AVCHD codec it uses. If I were going out to buy something now, I’d probably pick up a TZ-5, for $238 (in November 2009).

I think we’ll see more compromises in video cost and quality. In community journalism, small, low-cost Web operations are beginning to take root. We’ll likely see them devise more ways to offer more content at less cost.

To meet that competition, we need to find cameras that produce decent video at low cost and in a way that is easy to learn. Finding stories is still the first job of reporters, but telling them well – with video when it’s helpful – is critical to keeping and building audiences for local news.

Print and Online: The Balancing Act

By John Strauss
Spring 2008
On my first day of covering the Indiana State Fair, I began unpacking my gear at a desk in the press office.

Andy Klotz, a former television newsman who handles public relations for the fair, watched me unpack the Mac Book laptop, Canon S3 IS digital camera, sound recorder, tripod and other gear.

“I’m a ‘backpack journalist,’” I explained. “We’re testing the concept.”

“Backpack?” he grinned. “Are you camping out here?”

It probably seemed that way. This was the first time our newspaper had been in the field to write for online and print, shoot photos and edit TV-style video packages, all in the same news cycle.

Do that for a week and a half, and you’ll not only need a backpack for the gear, you’ll want a vacation to recover, even if you’re a former television and wire-service reporter.

But as a test of what’s possible when it comes to online-print synergy and multimedia, the state fair had everything: A busy schedule, lots of fun people to interview and great visuals.

Our Web designers built a special page: IndyStar.com/deepfried, named for the deep-fried Oreos, Pepsi and other fair delicacies.

Over a 10-day period, I posted 32 blog updates totaling more than 10,000 words; along with 26 photos and five videos about fair food, harness horses, 4-H kids, the near-record hot weather and the Midway rides.

Our City Desk picked up the blog entries for daily print coverage. Online, we posted photos with most blog entries and used the video in standalone pieces or as layering for some of the stories.

Many of the blog entries read like columns: close-up looks at the personalities and traditions that make the fair so special. But there was also breaking-news coverage of the heat, an unusually tough stretch of high temperatures that resulted in Red Cross workers treating 100 people on the opening day.

Readers loved it, judging from the high number of page views, e-mail responses and encounters at the fairgrounds. One popular feature: a call-out for favorite fair memories that yielded good reader stories and highlighted the blog’s interactivity.

But was it a realistic test of multimedia solo journalism?

Probably not. I had extensive video experience from a stint in TV, was trained in fast-filing at the AP and, as an online editor and trainer at our paper, was motivated to work 12-hour days to see what could be done. Without a doubt, the better way to generate that amount of content would be to use at least two people, with duties tailored to their specific skills.

Finding the right people and media mix for each story has become a daily balancing act in many newspapers. The tools are all there, and they’re getting easier to use and less expensive all the time.

At the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., video from reporters is now routine.

“In the beginning, we actually had job titles like ‘mobile journalist,’” Digital Editor Mark Bickel said. “There were about five of those.”

“Now we’ve gotten away from separating the pack, so to speak. Everybody in our information center (newsroom) is considered a mobile journalist.”

The News-Press had a big increase in the posting of video last year.

“A lot of those came from reporters who had never shot video in their life before,” Bickel said. “Some of the most successful video clips last year came from reporters who did not have experience doing this.”

The Fort Myers paper has one reporter, a recent UCLA grad, who works only in video. She does not write stories for the newspaper but shoots and edits her own TV-style narrated reports for the Web. One of the newspaper’s photographers has also been assigned exclusively to video.

“We’re still learning about what works and what doesn’t,” Bickel said. “What we have figured out is that people are going to click on the car accident, the fire, breaking news. That’s what drives traffic to the Web site.”

How do they balance the needs of online and the print product?

“That’s the $64 million question,” Bickel said. “I think the first thing is to understand that we’re really not asking for too much more. If you can push a button on a point-and-shoot (camera), you can get 30 seconds of video.”

One of the paper’s most-watched video clips came from a car wreck on I-75 with multiple fatalities. Police wouldn’t let the reporter stop, so she simply aimed the camera out her car window while slowly driving by.

That’s a good example of the paper’s get-what-you-can philosophy, Bickel said.

“We’re saying, ‘Look, just prioritize. If you don’t get the video, that’s OK.’”

At Newsday, meanwhile, about half of the newsroom’s reporters are being trained to shoot video, said Jonathan McCarthy, assistant managing editor/cross media. Getting the buy-in hasn’t been too hard.

“We’re in our infancy, so the people we’ve picked are the people who’ve expressed an interest,” McCarthy said. “They’re gung-ho about it. While it was a struggle three or four years ago to get people to file for the Web, we’re past that now.”

Not surprisingly, some of the newsroom’s newest arrivals are the most comfortable with the technology.

“Most of the kids in journalism school have their Facebook pages, their MySpace pages — they’re all jacked up already,” McCarthy said. “They don’t even use e-mail any more; they’re texting. They expect to be doing this (multimedia work).”

Many newspapers are still experimenting, said Randy Covington, director of the Ifra Newsplex Training Center, a newsroom of the future at the University of South Carolina.

Despite fears that quality journalism will decline, the economics of the industry make it inevitable that more reporters will be given multimedia duties.

“The assumption in some newsrooms is that this will hurt the journalism,” Covington said. “It can hurt the journalism, but it does not have to.”

Covington cites the Pulitzer-winning Rocky Mountain News “Final Salute” project, about the Marines who inform families about the loss of loved ones in combat. The project used audio slideshows to help tell the story in a way that video might not have accomplished, he said.

The Detroit Free Press, marking the 40th anniversary of the song “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, combined audio, video and interactive features in an extremely artful fashion, Covington said.

“News organizations will be best served if they focus on stories. How can I tell this story the best way? Is this a story that might lend itself to audio, to a slideshow? Is this a story where you really need to have video?”

Covington is not a fan of television-style reports on Web sites.

“That format might work well in a passive medium,” he said. “In my opinion, it works much less well in an interactive medium.

“In general, on the Internet, I would rather that you deconstruct the story into its pieces. Let me decide if I want to see the picture of the mayor cutting the ribbon, hear the sound bite.”

Covington said he thinks the most powerful multimedia storytelling is being done by newspapers, using still pictures and audio. Video is relatively difficult to produce. And most video, unless it’s of something remarkable, is of questionable value.

“Most of the video isn’t very good,” he said. “So the question then becomes, why would anybody watch it? It’s a simple question, and I think we forget to ask it all too often.”

The only thing worse than ignoring the preferences of the audience might be a failure to develop any multimedia strategy at all.

“In 2008, I don’t think anybody can stick their head in the sand and say this is a passing trend,” Covington said.

“This is a reality. You either do it, or we risk not having jobs.”

spring 2008 Quill.

John Strauss is an online editor and multimedia reporter for The Indianapolis Star. He also serves as the paper’s Sunday city editor. He formerly worked for The Associated Press as a correspondent and editor, and at WNDU-TV in South Bend, Ind., as a reporter and anchor.

Accountant's dream, editor's nightmare?

K. Daniel Glover, editor of National Journal's Technology Daily, provides a good update on the debate over quality and efficiency in this Beltway Blogroll post.

Glover makes a good case for providing reporters with multimedia kits. He also gets some excellent reader feedback.

The Backpacker’s Guide

Pack light, move fast, have fun
Notes for the 2007 SPJ National Journalism Conference, Oct. 5, 2007







For years, photographers and correspondents have traveled into the field with laptops for sending back words and photos. Today’s backpacker takes that a step further - a do-it-all journalist posting digital multimedia.

This gives us the chance to use sound, photos and video to help tell the story. But for some it also raises the expectation of doing everything at once, in the same amount of time, with little training or practice.

The convergence movement has its critics. As Dick Kreck of the Denver Post writes:

Multimedia journalism has been the focus of a heated debate at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

"I resist the notion of backpack journalists because I believe it is being foisted on us by publishers who don't feel that 20 percent profit is good enough," wrote multimedia consultant Martha Stone in an online debate. "While some multimedia journalists can handle a variety of tasks efficiently and professionally, most will only deliver mediocre journalism."

I don't think that most multimedia journalists will produce mediocre work.

Most reporters will handle daily assignments as they always have. A few will have the time and training to do investigative reporting. And both will benefit from the availability of inexpensive, easy to use multimedia equipment to help tell their stories.

In the meantime, as the equipment and techniques become more widely used it’s critical to educate editors about what’s possible and what’s reasonable.

My presentation is about that dialogue, about discovering for ourselves what we can do and some of the beginning strategies for incorporating multimedia into the stream of coverage from the field.

Sample videos from a typical "backpack" assignment

For the 2007 Indiana State Fair, I was asked to take one of our Mobile Journalist kits - a Mac Book and Canon S3 digital camera - and see what sort of multimedia we could produce while updating a blog from the fair 4-5 times per day.

Our blog is at www.IndyStar.com/deepfried/.

The "Deep Fried" name is a nod to a popular aspect of our fair and others - as sort of a showcase for "extreme" fair food including deep fried candy bars and the like.

My colleagues Rob Schneider and Will Higgins also covered the fair, and you'll see their stories on the blog.

In the seven days of my assignment I posted 32 updates totaling just over 10,000 words; 26 photos and five videos about fair food, harness horses, 4-H kids, the hot weather and the rides.

Below are three of the videos. They show both the possibilities and the pitfalls of this kind of reporting: The sound and moving pictures open up terrific storytelling opportunities. But video shooting and editing are skills very distinct from traditional print reporting, and you'll notice shortcomings in these pieces that arose from the inevitable compromises of trying to do continuous updates and post multimedia at the same time.


Sample No. 1 -- Deep Fried Pepsi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQc9af6mNg

Sample No. 2 -- Harness Horse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDjrFJttLM

Sample No. 3 -- 4-H kids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIRgXmgm3eI

Getting Started: Use what you know

Here are some general guidelines:

- Start small: Shoot stills with your stories, even if that just means getting head shots of the people you interview. When it comes to video, instead of posting a full package, which can take a long time for a novice to edit, consider putting up some B-roll as one file, and a sound bite, even an edited 1-3 minute interview as another file.

- Tell the story: The story is everything. It’s all that matters. If you spend two days editing a video package but the article it runs with is faulty, you’ve missed an opportunity.

- Use what you know: If you’re a Windows person, try to stick with that OS. You can edit useable video on almost any new laptop sold today (OK, you want at least 1G of system memory).

- Go with minimal equipment: Try not to carry what you don’t need. Assuming you’re gathering digital content for the web, consider a still camera that doubles as a good video unit, like the Canon S3 IS, now less than $350. If resources are not an issue, you may wish to consider the Apple Mobile Field Editing Solution for $7,341. The key: Don’t wait until you have $7,300 to become a backpack journo...

- The medium is NOT the message. Video is just another kind of pencil you’re carrying. Just as a writer shouldn’t fall in love with a good phrase or a good quote, don’t fall in love with a technique. Video is not that big a deal to the audience – they’ve seen it before.

Convergence - Four Perspectives

KUSA's backpack journalists signal shift in TV news

By Dick Kreck
Denver Post Staff Columnist
2/21/06

Dear Boss:
Please don't read this. It could give you ideas.

Backpack journalists, also known as solo journalists or "sojos," are creeping into the television-news business.

KUSA-Channel 9 this week hired Heidi McGuire as a general-assignment reporter/photographer, putting two jobs in one body and, of course, eliminating a second job.

Patti Dennis, news director for 9News, says the trend, which began in the mid-1990s, is more of a step back. "It's actually coming full circle. Many of us started out that way."

In Dennis' scheme of things, combining a reporter's job and a photographer's job enabled her to hire a weather producer. "I had two openings. I'm adding to the staff without adding employees."

Not everyone is so enamored. Multimedia journalism has been the focus of a heated debate at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.

"I resist the notion of backpack journalists because I believe it is being foisted on us by publishers who don't feel that 20 percent profit is good enough," wrote multimedia consultant Martha Stone in an online debate. "While some multimedia journalists can handle a variety of tasks efficiently and professionally, most will only deliver mediocre journalism."

Technology, bringing print, electronic and online together, is driving the change, responds Jane Stevens, who teaches journalism at the University of California. "In a few years, backpack journalists ... will not only be the rule, they'll rule."

The bottom line other than the bottom line, says Dennis, is versatility. "The business is changing where you have to develop more than one skill." Dennis thinks McGuire is up to the task. "It has to be the right person. She's a good storyteller, a dynamic personality."



Backpack Journalism
March 7, 2006

Randy Covington is director of the Ifra Newsplex Training Center, a newsroom of the future and professional training facility at the University of South Carolina.

At the Ifra Newsplex at the University of South Carolina, the concept of backpack journalism always stirs up a spirited debate. To some, the idea of one person who both reports and shoots conjures up their worst fears about the future of our profession, confirming suspicions that convergence really is about saving money by getting employees to do more work at the expense of journalistic quality.

While the argument, of course, does have a certain logic, I think it greatly oversimplifies the issue and is not necessarily true. The newsroom of the future is going to be a very different place from the newsroom we know today. It has to be.

News consumers no longer make appointments to watch our news at 6 p.m. or read our newspapers with their morning coffee. Instead, they are following stories throughout the day, catching bits and pieces from a variety of sources.

To meet the needs of this fragmented audience, news organizations inevitably will need to change the way they operate, reorganizing their newsrooms to more effectively produce content across delivery platforms.

I think you can expect newsrooms to become more collaborative as journalists work in story teams. And in the field, the task of capturing images will be shared with reporters and even your audience.

In the debate over backpack journalism, one of the common assumptions is that the quality of the work will suffer. However, from our experience in Newsplex, backpack journalists tend to be pretty good at both reporting and photography….

CONTINUED… Here




Scott Moore is the head of news and information for Yahoo! Media Group, where he oversees Yahoo! News. He was previously the president of MSNBC.com and publisher of Slate. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted for Frontline’s “News War,” on Oct. 26, 2006.
[Newspapers and other news organizations gather an estimated 80 percent of the news every day.] But the Internet has been cutting into the profitability of the economic model that supported that all this time. So who's going to pay for it?

I would take a slight issue with your statement about the newsgathering, because the reality is that the Associated Press and Reuters and other wire services actually probably do the bulk of the newsgathering for newspapers.

A local newspaper that runs national stories, international stories, the sports section -- excluding the local team coverage -- all of that is supplied by these news wire organizations. And in the case of the Associated Press, they're actually owned by the newspapers. Yahoo! News and all the other online news providers have significant partnerships with those wire services. We pay them large, several-million-dollars-a-year licensing fees, so we're actually directly paying for their newsgathering infrastructure.

If you're the Associated Press and you have a business opportunity like licensing content you're producing for newspapers and other traditional forms to a new form like the Internet, and [you] make tens of millions of dollars more a year in doing that, you're going to be motivated to do that. And that's exactly what's happening.

But the Associated Press gets to use the content that its members provide as well.

Right.

Which then you get to use. They may repurpose it in some fashion, but --

Well, the Associated Press does its own newsgathering with its own staff of writers and reporters and editors. I believe that that is the largest newsgathering operation in the United States. We'd have to check that, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's larger than any single newspaper. Then the local papers do their own newsgathering within their markets, and they do feed that content into the AP. But the AP doesn't license all that back out to online providers. They haven't done that. So they typically license the stuff, the material, the news that they're gathering and creating themselves.

So what you're paying for is the newsgathering done by the AP's own employees, not all their members?

Right. That's correct, yeah. Now, the members do supply content into it, and that kind of goes in the mix, so there's some of that. But, for example, we do not have a license at Yahoo! to content that's specifically created by the L.A. Times in Los Angeles on that market unless they choose to put it into that feed.

OK. But still, the numbers involved -- whether it's Yahoo! News or MSNBC.com and so on -- are relatively small compared to the size of the newsgathering organizations and their payroll. So in the future you may be able to help pay for newsgathering. What happens in the interim?

CONTINUED… Here



It's Not TV, It's Yahoo

By SAUL HANSELL
The New York Times
September 24, 2005

As Discovery orbited the Earth in early August, millions of people visited Yahoo, which runs the most popular news site on the Internet, to see the nail-biting conclusion to the troubled shuttle mission. Could NASA find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?

Despite the drama and the huge number of people flocking to the site, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo's media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, Mr. Braun fumed, was a white page filled with links to other sites on the Web.

He made his frustration clear to Scott Moore, who had defected from Microsoft to run Yahoo's news operation. Within a few hours, Mr. Moore orchestrated a quick fix to make the shuttle page comply with Mr. Braun's mantras: "more immersive," "more engaging," and most of all, more original programming.

Mr. Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media - both old and new - are watching carefully, if not nervously.

As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like "Lost," which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" are in the works.

There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Mr. Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit multiple war zones over the next year.

All this Hollywood frenzy still skirts a question: Is Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future?

CONTINUED… Here