Our cops reporter, Tahlia Ganser, just returned from Florida after spending six weeks at Poynter’s summer fellowship(7/25: link changed, here’s a new one). She returned with many observations, exciting stories and a clear vision of the future.
For reporters, that includes video. To not study video journalism as a reporter is a death knell to your career. So where do we start?
Reporters cannot afford to wait for someone else to train us. No need to reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of training resources if you look in the right places.
Two weeks ago, Skagit Valley Herald editor in chief Don Nelson sat down with the reporting staff and told us about some upcoming changes in the newsroom. (For the curious, I asked Don permission if I could blog about this and he gave me the green light.)
Reporters were handed a four-page outline of how we can incorporate the Web into our daily reporting.
Here’s a brief outline of the new Web strategy. If you want to read the entire four-page handout (culled to three pages with my excellent paper-folding-and-taping skills), read the PDF here (includes bonus doodles).
Editors will select which stories have the best potential for multimedia during their weekly editors meeting. At least two stories per week will be assigned for “multi-platform” presentation.
Editors are responsible for coordinating the production and editing of the multimedia.
Photographers must “think video” for breaking news.
Photographers are a “first priority” to train in video production and editing. Editors and interested reporters come after the photogs are trained. Training will come from in-house or online sources.
Reporters are responsible for audio recording and editing, including narration and interviews with subjects.
Reporters seemed skeptical and skittish because of the layoffs around the country. Even our own newsroom is not immune from this recent trend. Our business reporter position is frozen. Someone mumbled “do more with less,” which earned a funny statement from Don Nelson:
“I hate the phrase ‘More with less.’ It’s a despicable lie,” Don said. “I prefer ‘Different and better.’”
(For the record, I hate “more with less” with a passion, and Don’s comment has to be the most awesome comeback to it that I’ve ever heard. Cynical journalists are free to disagree, but I still love my job.) Read the rest of this entry »
I was checking my Web site on other browsers, and I realized my clips were not viewable. (Oops!) Well now they are. Click on the Clips tab at the top (or here) and browse away. I reorganized about 100 pages and hopefully got all of the links pointed in the right direction. Please let me know if you come across one that doesn’t work.
Anyway, some of my favorites from the past few months:
Nick’s editor, Steve Smith, said in his blog that this is not a plan. Smith said he thinks young journalists have fewer ties with the past and not as much loyalty to the way things have always been done. Why were older journalists not asked to participate?
The fact is there always have been opportunities for veterans to participate in such discussions. Too often it is the smart young journalists whose ideas are discounted.
I called it in and by the time I got back to the newspaper twenty minutes later the small brush fire had bloomed into a raging wild fire. I had already put in 12 hours on the maggot story, but that little voice told me this wildfire was going to be big news.
He put on his wild land firefighter gear (every reporter who expects to cover a fire someday should have some) and raced back to the scene. But he didn’t have a video camera with him (he’d left it at the office). Instead, he took a bunch of stills, one of which ran six columns across Friday’s front page.
I like how he thinks about all aspects of his job. Ideally if a reporter hears some great sound at their assignment, they could whip out their audio recorder, talk with the photographer (or take more photos if they are the photog) and lay the groundwork for Soundslides production.
I love the story behind the photo, which is not explained to the readers much in most newsrooms. He explains the composition and what makes the photo powerful. This gives the reader a deeper layer of understanding of what the photographer was thinking when shooting the photo or video.
I waste 100 minutes a day and I need your help to be more productive.
Everyone has this problem to some degree. My daily commute is roughly 45-50 minutes one way each day. Granted I am driving so I really can’t do much in my car. I just feel like I’m wasting time every day.
For the record, the reason I have such a long commute is because my husband attends the University of Washington and is studying graduate-level physics. I drive in the opposite direction to get to work. Moving closer to my work is not an option because it makes his commute longer (and he already spends roughly 60 hours a week on his studies and research). If anything we are considering moving closer to Seattle because he would have a better bus ride to school.
So let the suggestions flow. No idea is too silly or difficult for me to consider. Currently I listen to two NPR stations on the way to and from work (my commute straddles two station boundaries). Sometimes I call relatives or friends during my commute. It should be obvious that I should be able to retain my driving ability while doing whatever it is you suggest.
Cross posting to Wired Journalists, so you can comment either here or there. I’ll post a follow up with suggestions sometime next week.
The survey asked each journalists what took up the biggest percentage of their time out of 24 duties in the past three months.
Writing Original Stories - 16%
Other Duties - - 9%
Editing Text for Content - 6%
Project Management - 6%
Blogging - 6%
Photo/Image Editing - 6%
Staff organization/administration - 5%
Training or teaching other staff - 5%
Writing headlines or blurbs - 4%
Working on business issues - 4%
But if you look at the tasks as a measure of frequency:
Training or teaching others in their newsroom: 39 journalists said they’d done this at least once during the last three months.
Writing headlines or blurbs: 37 said they’d done this.
Photo/image editing: 36 journalists.
Editing text for content: 33.
Project Management: 32.
Editing for grammar/style: 32.
Hmm, looks pretty traditional to me. Here’s a table of the skills these journalists have. From the list you can see there’s a variety of expertise in various programs, from Soundslides, to audio and video editing and production, HTML, Photoshop, Flash programming and much more. Notice news judgment and grammar and style? Those are the highest rated of the whole bunch.Thornburg questions whether the results are skewed due to a high population of Gannet papers in North Carolina.
If your news organization has not produced video much, or sold video ads, the Newspaper Association of America is here to help.
Check out the new online primer for video production. It’s got advice from B roll footage to equipment purchasing guides to how to promote your online video. There is even a guide on how to market video ads (because, face it, news is a business in most places in the country).
“Zooming In on Online Video: A Development & Growth Guide for Newspaper Web Sites” is intended to help newspapers of any size develop profitable video applications. As competition heats up for online video mindshare, newspapers have an excellent opportunity to leverage their skills and content and capture an even larger share of online advertising spending.
Also from the ad front, what makes an online video ad less annoying? Read what Mark Glaser wrote on MediaShift (hint: keep it short, silly).
There is so much information here that I’ll likely spend several hours surfing the links. I am glad to see a news tutorial that applies to the ad department.
I’m not sure if I’m creating a blasphemous analogy on the anniversary of our nation’s founding by saying this but here goes.
It may come as a shock to some that newspapers need to make money. Yes, we are the guardians of the First Amendment, a voice for the voiceless and the afflicters of the comfortable.
Newsrooms everywhere are in a downward spiral. Tampa Tribune editor in chief Janet Coats, according to blogger and news intern Jessica DaSilva, decided to reorganize the newsroom and reprioritize the newspaper’s coverage.
Essentially, it’s a shakeup of the traditional beat system. From Mindy McAdams’ blog:
Managing editors
5-6 audience editors — keep in touch with what the print, TV, online audiences want/need
5 sections of reporting (all the reporters for print, TV and Web are mashed up together in these groups):
Deadline — for breaking/daily news
Data — specifically for database stuff
Watchdog — for investigative reporting
Personal journalism — stuff for people’s every day lives like weather, health, entertainment
Grassroots — citizen journalism
Outside of these groups are three “finishing” groups for print, TV and online to determine what stories should be covered and with what medium.
Read more of McAdams’ blog. I really like how she lays out the system for news coverage.
It is difficult for me to maintain my optimism about the industry when I see a layoff from somewhere around the country literally every day. So far the count for this year alone is nearly 6,000 newsroom jobs, and that’s just the announced amount. Assuredly the real total is much higher.
I thought community newspapers were relatively immune. But this downturn in the economy (not a recession?) has proved me wrong. Something is happening, and even my paper is not immune.
I do appreciate my editors’ candor. They give us regular updates on how the paper is doing with ad and subscription sales. Without giving away too many details, reporters have been told to watch their mileage (41 cents a mile now) and watch the number of hours they work past 7 p.m. (we get a 50-cent boost in pay for each hour between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m.). We also have an open business reporter position that may remain open for quite some time.
But I am not one to complain without attempting to find a silver lining — or a solution. The silver lining: We are holding steady on circulation.
One thing is clear: we cannot keep doing the same thing and expect different results (Einstein quote). I’m not so sure about the solution. Read the rest of this entry »
