Electric Fishwrap has moved

A couple of years ago I went to a narrative writing workshop with Tom Hallman, a Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter from the Oregonian. Just like anything else, narrative writing takes time to learn. (There is a form to narrative writing. Just read “Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction” by Jon Franklin and you’ll see what I mean.)

Reporters asked how they would ever find the time to learn this new style when many of them have story quotas. The short answer was prioritize your work and realize that not every story deserves your full attention. The long answer was learn at home, read books, try new things with your copy on your own time.

The same can be said for multimedia. I know a number of reporters who want to wait on the company to teach them multimedia skills.

Colin Mulvany, the multimedia editor at the Spokesman Review, says reporters should train themselves on their own time.

For you to be successful, you’ll need to take ownership of your evolving career. I’m always surprised at how many journalists in newsrooms demand training, but when their newspaper fails to deliver, they refuse to invest any of their own time in reinventing themselves. This is not a time for complacency.

Why should you bother? Easy. If you are valuable you won’t lose your job:

The problem is that many smaller newspapers in these lean times do not have the money or staff knowledge to provide training to their employees. Why invest your own time in training yourself? If you want to stay relevant in the journalism world you’d better have new media skills. This latest round of personnel shedding by newspapers will not be the last. When all the volunteers and those near retirement are gone, where do you think the next round of people targeted is going to be? If I am a publisher or senior editor and I have already cut to the bone, I’m going to probably start icing employees with the least amount of online skills.

I read Mulvany’s blog whenever he has a new post. In this post, he says “three more reporters are being outfitting with Macbooks, Final Cut Express and video cameras.” That would be huge for my paper, but we are under a hiring freeze and couldn’t afford to buy one Macbook for the newsroom unless we won a chain-wide contest (which we did).

For now, my paper has one laptop for seven reporters, three audio recorders that the ME had me purchase last December and two lav mics. They also have two copies of SoundSlides on a photographer’s computer (makes sense), a few copies of GarageBand installed, but no audio conversion software (the recorders tape in WMA and GarageBand doesn’t like that).

Training means nothing unless you practice. My learning process will be incredibly enhanced because my husband is buying a new laptop (he’s a graduate student in physics at UW, where he is working on an experiment to figure out the mass of neutrinos or something). Therefore, I get his old computer, an Asus F3F. I have a decade-old point-and-shoot digital camera, an Olympus DS 40 audio recorder, a lav mic and headphones. I plan to install my Adobe software onto the computer, including CS3 Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. I’ll end up buying SoundSlides ($40) and Switch ($19.40, unless someone else has an idea for cheap file conversion). I’ll also need an audio editing program, and I know about audacity, but I’m really addicted to GarageBand which is what we use at work. I hear Mixcraft is a good substitute for PC users. So all in all, I’m out probably $60 for software after all is said and done. Video will have to come later. Editing programs are out of my reach for my personal budget, as are video cameras.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under audio, equipment, multimedia, training, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.