Soundslide in an interesting place…

I have come to enjoy Soundslides as a form of journalism, but I have an admission: I had, to this point, though of them primarily as a form to be used by a print publication to take advantage of photojournalists at a news scene. I was surprised to find a very nice soundslide package on a barrista competition

at CNN.com. It’s a great package, but as I look at it I keep wondering how they got the images — are these stills from a video shoot, or does CNN have still photographers on staff? If they’re stills from a video, why did they choose this form?

You know, I may just have to make time for a couple of calls to Atlanta…

A Flash journalism experience

For the second blogging assignment in Journalists’ Toolkit II, I spent some time with Lebrow Jones and the Death of Micki Hall, an on-line feature of the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York. The feature is a true multi-media package, with text, photographs, video segments, and interactive graphics combined to tell a complete story.

When I look at packages such as this one, I’m always fascinated by how (or even whether) the journalist is able to lead me through the story. I’ve seen many multi-media presentations that don’t so much tell a story as present bucket-loads of information for the reader to sort through. In the first seconds of looking at this story I was afraid this was the case, but I fell back on our cultural organizational standard — I went to the top left of the screen — and I was led logically through a compelling story.

We’ve looked at many on-line article packages that told their stories through video or a combination of photographs and text. For me, one of the most successful parts of this particular story was the addition of interactive graphical elements like the on-line time-line shown here:

This story has a correct understanding of the sequence of events as a critical part of the narrative, so the time line with buttons at crucial junctures is a very useful tool to help the reader understand the flow of events — versus the flow of the narrative that came out in the trial.

While I felt the overall organization and layout of the story package was superb, not every piece of the story worked equally well. For me, one of the pieces that worked most poorly was a video of the Elk Hotel, a downtown hotel that was one of the last places Micki Hall was seen alive. The video, reached through a link in the text narrative, has no voice-over, no interview, and ultimately nothing to provide context to the images that we see. It is all atmosphere in a story that is very direct and straight-forward. The image here is one frame of the video, but it provides no less context than the entire piece.

I found this video especially puzzling in light of another video clip that I found incredibly effective. Lebrew Jones, as it turns out, is the son of a well-respected big-band drummer, Speedy Jones. In one video segment, clips of the father and son are intercut to great effect and substantial exposition. I was taken with the production of this piece, and moved by the extent to which it rounded out my perception of Lebrew Jones as a complete human being.

Overall, this piece worked for me because it combined the traditional methods of leading me through the story with facilities that allowed me to dig deeper into the information on points that I wanted to explore. In many ways, that combination exploits the strengths of the Web and leads us in the direction of a complete on-line, interactive journalistic package.

With that said, I don’t think it’s a perfect story package. There are things I’d like to keep exploring (it would be great, for example, if there was a way for the site to let me sign up for updates as the story of the possible re-opening of the case proceeds), and individual pieces (like the video I mentioned above) that don’t move the story forward. Those pieces should either be improved or jettisoned. Taken all together, though, I think this is a piece of journalism that is very good. Very, very good.

Video Storytelling at the Toronto Star

The assignment was fairly simple: find two videos at any one of several newspaper web sites, then compare and comment upon them. I looked at some of our options, but was impressed by the very rich (and easy to find) options at The Toronto Star.

The first video I chose at covered the opening of a snowboarding venue in downtown Toronto.

Urban Rail Park

You expect plenty of action in a video about snowboarding, and there is a lot here, with different angles and points of view. The snowboarding action is interspersed with interviews of snowboarders, and the very static setting of the interviews plays nicely against the movement of the snowboarders.

Does Urban Rail Park tell a story? I’m not sure it does, in the classically-constructed sense. It does, however, report nicely on a new venue in the city.

The next video I chose covers the process by which an animated character was created.

How Laurie Maher became MMe. Tutli-Putli

This is a very deliberate video that does tell a story of an actresses process for creating a character — from emotion to eyes to costume. The music behind much of the video increased the deliberate mood of the piece, and enhanced the connection between the video and the film. This is a much slower-moving video visually, concentrating on two characters, those of the actress and her animated creation. It was interesting to see a recurring artifact in the video screen behind the actresses head during some of the interviews: it’s almost impossible to synch the video refresh rate of a video camera and a monitor, and the moving shadow we see is the result. It doesn’t distract greatly, though, and the video we see with the actress is worth the bother.

Now, the very first thing I looked at on the Star site didn’t really qualify for this assignment, but it was very powerful, nonetheless.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution

Airsick is the work of Lucas Oleniuk, a Toronto Star photographer who, we’re told, took 20,000 images in a span of 20 days. The images were used to make a stop-action video. The music behind the images and narration through titles give the video a Koyaanisqatsi feeling that’s very powerful. It is astounding to see what can be accomplished with a camera, a computer, and the commitment to a vision. It’s not like either of the other two video presentations, and doesn’t tell a well-formed story, but the overall effect is quite powerful and completely unambiguous.

The Very Short NFL Documentary

During the Super Bowl, we watched for the commercials as much as for the football game (hey, none of the Florida teams made it), and finally saw a great NFL commercial in the fourth quarter.

The ad, titled “Mr. Oboe”, is the story of an NFL lineman who didn’t play football until he reached college. It’s a complete story told in about 55 seconds, and a great example of cutting video to tell a compact story.

You can see a “Making of…” video here, at the Houston Texans’ web site. It does a good job of describing just how much work (and how many minutes of raw footage) went into the commercial.

Together these two are a great example of telling a solid story in a brief time — a good lesson for on-line video journalists.

New Tool to Start the New Term

Boy, the break was good. Now, though, it’s time to get back to work, and the folks at Lifehacker just introduced me to a very cool (free) tool that should help in a bunch of different situations. MediaCoder Audio Edition converts to and from a whole bunch of different audio formats — this should make moving files back and forth from various sources much easier.

Given the work I’ll be doing this term, I’ll probably also play with the full MediaCoder edition, which converts to and from a huge number of video and audio formats. You can get rather fine control on the encoding parameters (which should come in handy when trying to balance quality/size issues) of various formats, and it seems a very well-supported package.

I’ve found some other great tools I’ll blog about soon…ahh, the fun of talking about gadgets, tools, and toys.

Thoughts on the Journalists’ Toolkit

My first thought (and, I think, the most important) is that this has been the sort of course I hoped I would have in graduate school, but didn’t expect. I am a practicing journalist who wants to get better at his craft, and this course has helped me do that. How? Let’s look at some of the ways:

The Course Gave Me Permission

There’s no news value in the fact that photographs can tell a story. There’s no news value in the fact that audio recording can be a useful journalist’s tool. In the early weeks of this course, though, the assignments gave me permission to practice both still photography and audio recording from a journalist’s perspective. It was important for me to have a reason to carve out time to practice these when I didn’t have a paycheck riding on the results, and when the feedback I received wasn’t from someone who saw me as a content-creation asset.

The Course Gave Me Tools

By the middle of the term, I was being introduced to tools and techniques I hadn’t used before. The SoundSlides package was a revelation, a structured way of telling a story using still images and audio. I had used each piece alone, but I was shown a way to use both together to tell a compelling story. I’ve already begun using SoundSlides in my professional work, and I have a feeling I’ll continue to stretch with these tools as I move into the next course.

As we moved toward the final package, I gained another new tool in embedded Google Maps. I knew it was possible to embed these, but I hadn’t done it, and was bowled over by the simplicity of the process. I’ve had the first discussions with an editor about using these techniques for stories, and can see great possibilities for the future.

The Course Gave Me Feedback

Notes from Mindy and comments from my fellow students were critical to my improvement. In a fortunate turn of events, they were also enjoyable. Honest feedback from people with judgment you trust is invaluable for progress. I’m indebted to my colleagues who took the time to talk with me about projects and provide comments on this blog.

The Course Gave Me Ideas

I knew, before the first day of class, that on-line journalism is a significant part of our profession’s future. I knew, before I stepped through the lab door for the first time, that audio, visual images, and text working together could tell a powerful story. As I’ve worked with all the elements of the stories, though, I’ve begun to think about how I can use these techniques and tools to tell better, more complete, and more compelling stories in the future. I’ve started to think about whether I can build a studio at home to help me with story production. I’m looking forward to telling new stories in new ways — that’s a result you can’t count on from any given class.

The material in this course is a collection of survival skills for anyone who wants to be employed as a working journalist in the coming years. For the vast majority of us, the days of toiling over words — just words — is over. The good news is that we get to keep telling stories under the same contract to people who want to hear the news. The more difficult news (I won’t say it’s bad) is that we have to become proficient in new ways of telling those stories. I am already using the skills taught in this course to pay my bills. I can think of no more ringing an endorsement to give the course.

Now, on to Toolkit II…

Why Journalism Must Change or Die *

Reading Adrian Holovaty’s blog post from 2006, it’s almost impossible not to start thinking about one of the most critical questions facing journalists today. “What can we give readers that makes them want to read our publications now, and at least once more in the future?” The same question from a different angle is “What can my publication give readers that they can’t get anywhere else?”

Publications have always been pushed toward relevance, but in the past the primary competition for readers’ attention was often nothing at all — at least, nothing in the form of another publication. Sure, big cities had multiple daily newspapers, but in smaller cities and towns the competition generally consisted of the morning paper versus the afternoon paper. Today, competition comes from every direction, and a dizzying array of media types. Given that reality, what can we do to make our publication critical to the reader’s life?

I think the first thing we have to do is figure out why the publication exists. What’s the mission of our publication? Back in the dot-com bubble days, people were always asking for your “elevator pitch.” That is, if you got on an elevator with a venture capitalist in the lobby of a skyscraper, what could you tell him about your business before he reached his floor? Think about your reader — what would your elevator pitch to them sound like? If you can’t get the mission of your publication down to a sentence or two, then you need to sit down and do some serious thinking about what you’re trying to do. You (and all the writers and editors of the publication) should have a crystal-clear idea of who you’re going to reach, and how you’re going to do one thing better than any other publication.

Once you know what you’re trying to do, you can set out to do it using the best technologies and techniques you can muster. Keep your stories fresh and meaningful, base them on information that isn’t well-aggregated anywhere else, and give the reader plenty of ways to deeply explore the issues on their own. I’m convinced we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of how the Web can be used to tell stories: go out, define your mission and tell your stories. Your readers are waiting.

* With apologies to Bishop John Shelby Spong. This title is based on the title of his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

"We’re Packaging for Google"

Once upon a time, we designed pages to draw readers into a story. There were story meetings, then meetings with the art department, all intended to create a page (or a two-page spread if the needs of the well and the advertising budget allowed) that would convince a reader to spend time reading the story. Sometimes, you would get to see illustration proposals that the art director had commissioned from an artist. It was enjoyable, and the layouts created were occasionally spectacular.

Recently, I took part in a conference call for a publication I write for. The editor outlined a process much like the one in the last paragraph, then told us it was no longer the case. Instead of packaging articles for readers, he said that we’re now packaging for Google. He meant that studies have shown that getting readers to your story is far more critical than precisely how it looks once they get there. I’m still trying to figure out precisely how I feel about that.

It must be said that, in a very important way, how I feel doesn’t matter at all. The research is there to support the view that high search-result placement brings more reader. Full stop, end of story. Still, while I understand the importance of putting your story in front of the reader (and that’s what search engines do), I can’t help but be uneasy about all the ramifications of designing pages for search engine optimization, even the sort of enlightened SEO discussed in the reading for Week 12.

I’ve taken part in SEO training classes presented by people who seemed rather more expert in algorithms than in English. They told us to do things like put every key word associated with the article into the headline, with the more important and commonly-searched-for words placed earlier in the hed. Under their tutelage, the headline for his entry might read something like:

Google Blog and Article Optimization Packaging Successful On-line Publication Makes

You’ll excuse me if I don’t buy it. Now, I absolutely do buy that we should do more to make headlines meaningful (even if I dearly love the obscure hed to make readers curious), and that tagging has to be part of a meaningful scheme to help readers search for and find particular articles. These things are critical to making our on-line publications easier to read. What I will resist is the notion that the search engine is more important than the reader. We must continue to write clear, accurate, compelling stories that readers will love once they’ve been found. I’ll work hard to make that part of my craft — but I practice the craft for readers, not search spyders, so the readers will get the bulk of my effort.

Preserving Handcrafts

What happens when the last practitioner of a traditional craft dies or retires? We think of the loss in cultural or aesthetic terms, but with craft as the foundation for much of our technology, future innovations may be lost or delayed, as well.

The International Kumihimo Conference provided an opportunity to see the point where traditional crafts and modern technology meet. The value of the craft — and the potential magnitude of the loss — were clearly demonstrated by the participants from both sides.

I tell the story of preserving handcrafts through a lens of kumihimo braiding. It is, I think, a modern story told through a very old language. Click on the hands of the braider to get the whole story.

Inspiration from Ira Glass

So I was feeling particularly bad about some of my work this week (there will be particulars in a future post), and decided to go back and review the Ira Glass videos (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) on storytelling. I came away with several things, some of which even managed to help me feel better.

Part 1: When Ira Glass talks about story movement and a continuing progression of questions, he’s using different language to describe something Robert McKee covers. McKee talks about the “gaps”, those places in a story where you have a gap between what a character expected and what they got, or between what the audience thought was going to happen and what actually happened. These “gaps” are where the movement takes place, and the structure for the gap is often expressed in a question. If we know precisely what’s going to happen next as we move from one fact to another, we’re really just sliding among static positions. It’s the unexpected, the “I didn’t see that coming!” that helps turn a set piece into a story.

Glass also talks about being ruthless, something else that every good writer and editors I’ve ever worked with knew well. If a bit of dialogue, a fact, a piece of exposition about a character doesn’t move the story forward (or help create a story in the first place), then get rid of it–at best it will slow down the story, at worst, it will bring it to a crashing stop.

Part 2: “Give yourself permission to fail” is some of the best advice I’ve ever received. If everything I do meets my standards, then my standards aren’t nearly high enough. It’s critical, though, to understand why something is a failure, to recognize it as a failure, and to move on to the next story with lesson in hand–to move on and try to succeed. This is one of those situations in which a good editor or second set of eyes can be important: someone who hasn’t spent 38 hours collecting material can be much freer with a proper diagnosis of “crap” than the person who’s trying to figure out how to justify having spent all that time…

Part 3: OK, an admission: I don’t particularly enjoy writing books, and I’ve never tried to write a novel. I know quite a few successful novelists, though, and almost all have shared the same advice on getting a first novel published: start by writing a novel and sticking it in desk drawer. Then, write the novel that you’ll try to get published. Their point is that you have to write enough words to develop your craft before you have a reasonable chance of success. Glass uses the same approach here–if you have the basic “good taste” to get started, then a significant part of success is developing the craft through repetition. Don’t give up. That’s a piece of great advice.

Part 4: Characters and stories. I think the thing I really take away from this is that even in the “moment of reflection” that tells the audience why they should care, the characters should be the ones showing the audience why they should care. If I have to come up with a voice-over to tell the audience why this matters, then I either haven’t found the right character or I haven’t let them tell the right story.

I know what I want my stories to do, I just don’t always succeed in allowing the stories to do their work. Especially when I’m using new tools to tell the story, I don’t yet have the “chops” to let the craft get out of the way. Fortunately, I have time and more stories to work on getting it right.