Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Too bad we were inside all day. I did manage to get out briefly around sunset. This image of the library was made with my Canon G9.

We have about 5 more hours of instruction on Thursday (on nothing too complicated, just Flash and Dreamweaver) before we can really get to work on our multimedia projects. My five-person group was fortunate enough to get assigned a profile of Dr. Chung-Pei Ma, an astronomer at Berkeley, and we’re all excited to get to work.

Of course we’d better be excited since we have to produce all our multimedia and build a web shell by 5pm on Friday.

Voice coach Marilyn Pittman spent some time with us this morning, making a valiant attempt to teach the print journalists in attentance the very basic concepts of broadcast speaking. Obviously, we don’t do much voice work at the Daily News but I still had some “aha” moments during her presentation. Easy stuff, too:

Warm yourself up. Practice what it is you’re going to say. Sound conversational in the read.

I thought her advice for critiquing yourself was wonderful: get your ego out of it and ask instead if this person looks authoritative. The audience doesn’t care how you think you look: they want a trustworthy source of information.

Our final exercise was to read a paragraph of text, TV-style, on camera and in front of the class. In line, practicing, I realized that I did this stuff every single night reading bedtime stories to my kids. Plane crashes are not Dr. Suess, but practicing voice inflection is practicing voice inflection.

I did OK when my turn came, but I could really stand to work on it a little more (so Murphy, can I end my shift a little early when I get back?).

After her presentation, I asked Regina for a video critique of my Kenai River dipnetting piece. Her gently given advice:

Use more close-ups and details! As I shot it, the video contains only wide and mid range shots (I take myself to task: A still photographer should know better! Bad photographer!). Regina pointed out we see the grandfather’s face only during the A roll and we don’t see the boy’s face at all. Details provide depth, just as they do in picture stories, but in video they also provide material for cut-aways. And using cut-aways prevents …

… jump cuts, which is where the same subject performs actions in sequence without a logical connector (my words). In addition to cutaways, I could have (and should have) allowed my subjects to move into and out of the frame to provide some continuity.

Crossing the 180: This is a new concept to me. In video there’s an imaginary line splitting the scene in half and the videographer should shoot from only once side of it. Why? Because crossing the 180 makes people do things from different directions, which can cause confusion as the viewer tries to figure out what the subject is doing in each shot. In the dipnetting video, watch as they enter the water. They walk down the beach moving right-to-left but enter the water moving left-to-right.

Regina McCombs, senior producer for Multimedia at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, presented the evening’s keynote on “A Multimedia Approach to Covering Breaking News,” specifically the collapse of the 35W bridge in Minneapolis this summer.

What the Star Tribune learned in the field:
•Cover spot news like we did in the old days. Journalists should be prepared before the disaster happens. Get out fast. Make sure there’s a phone list to contact people in the field
•Cell towers fail during big events. The Trib found that text messages could get through and the shooters, for the most part, were able to transmit photographs with their laptops using cell cards.
•Use team journalism. Reporters paired with videographers and, later, videographers paired with an editor. Reporters can help with stand-ups and editors help speed the turn-around.

What the Star Tribune learned in the newsroom:
•Be in the middle of it. Editors should be right in the mix.
•Use audio/video editors to produce material. Speeds turnaround and prevents duplication
•Look for other multimedia sources.
•Blog from the newsroom or the field. Consider having a breaking news blog ready to go in case a big event happens.
•Make sure each reporter knows where to file. In Minneapolis, reporters files to their regular team leaders (editors), who then moved the material to the online editor.
•Have a plan for reader submitted photographs and information.
•Collect and organize data. That night an editor created a spread sheet of sources, which included people who were on the bridge when it collapsed. That file became the basis of a major, on-going project, “13 seconds in August.”

“13 seconds” is an incredible piece of multimedia story telling which includes stills, video and interactive graphics all tied together with Flash. Watch it. Be inspired.