We’ve been having more than the usual number of meetings at the paper this week in an attempt to deal with the process of creating multimedia, and how it relates to our print product. My hope is that this period of reflection will help the Daily News transition away from a “ready, fire, aim” mentality (my #1 least favorite phrase ever), where reporters and photographers will post anything — phone interviews, shaky video — and call it multimedia to more thoughtful, professional story telling.
It’s not going to be easy.
Lack of training is a huge part of the problem, but I’m coming to believe we (read: hourly worker bees) are as much to blame as management. All the multimedia training in the world won’t make a journalist proficient if he or she doesn’t want to learn the stuff.
So here’s my short list of where to start:
Understand the process. Be comfortable with the equipment, especially your audio equipment. Know your a-roll from your b-roll.
Pre-plan. Think about your story before you produce anything. What’s the best way to present your material? Audio slide show? Video? Interactive map? How much help do you need to produce the piece? How much time do you need? Don’t bite off more than you can chew: start with the easy stuff. You can go all OnBeing once you get some experience.
Make it sound good. Audio is the foundation for your story. People will watch bad video (look at YouTube) but bad audio will absolutely kill your piece.
Shoot tight (but not too tight). You won’t have time to do much editing if it’s a breaking news story and lots of tape will only slow you down. If it’s a feature piece you’ll be able to dig through more tape. A balancing act for sure, but it gets easier with practice.
Make it short. You may think it’s the greatest thing since “Citizen Kane” but look at it critically. Be very careful if it runs more than two minutes — unless you’re truly telling a story, something with a beginning, middle and end, it’s probably too long.
Seek out information on your own. This should be at the top, and between each item in the list. With all the budget tightening in the industry right now, you’re probably not going to get any money for training so you’ll have to learn on your own. Ask your colleagues for help (I know there’s at least one geek in the newsroom) and if you don’t already check these sites, you need to start. Now. Mastering Multimedia (Colin Mulvany, Spokesman Review); Newsvideographer (Angela Grant); Teaching Online Journalism (Mindy McAdams).
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on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under journalism, multimedia.
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