Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

My favorite lecture at the Knight workshop was Duke economist James T. Hamilton speaking on media market economics, the pressures faced by local papers and what is to be done. He’s written a book about this, “All the News That’s Fit to Sell”, so this is much simplified (but not wrong, I hope).

Hamilton introduced four demands for information (from Anthony Downs) to describe the current frustration with MSM coverage.

The first three are met fairly well. If you don’t seek the information, you don’t get the benefit. People tend to remain rationally ignorant regarding the fourth – they don’t see a reason to seek the information. They may be interested in who wins the presidential race but they feel like their vote isn’t going to determine the outcome.

So media outlets fold public service into the first three demands, making politics a horse race or highlighting the campaign’s human foibles (entertainment), or else making the story about producer demand. No surprise here: we refer to civic coverage as vegetables all the time — and with web metrics we now know how many people do (or, more accurately, don’t) read these pieces.

What does it mean for the MSM to transition to hyperlocal? Hamilton brings the discussion back to the four information demands by asking: What decision do we want people to make with the information we provide?

On the opening day, Paul Grabowicz, director of new media for the UC Berkely Graduate School of Journalism, and lecturer Jane Stevens described the typical newspaper online package as a “Christmas Tree Story,” essentially just a text story with multimedia ornaments. We do this at the Daily News just about every time we produce a multimedia piece.

Instead, he suggests examining the story to determine the logical parts then matching the media to tell each part of the story, essentially creating a storyboard.

Ask yourself: What are the different parts of your story? Is it an event? Continuing news? Do the readers need a history or explainer to understand the context? What about financial impacts? What data needs to be included?

Once you know the pieces, start looking at which type of media is best used to tell that part of the story. Video is good for action (’If it isn’t moving, why are you shooting it?’); photos are great of reflective moments; text explains; graphics visually represent data.

This becomes the starting point for the story. You’ll have to get realistic about what can be achieved, but at least you’ll know which tool you need to properly tell the story.

This stort of pre-visualization could help the newsroom apply the new tools of the internet much earlier, giving us the time to create truly multimedia stories.

Neil Chase, former NYT online editor and current VP at Federated Media, spoke about how the Times dealt with the challenge of a continuous news desk and how the online operation impacts the on-trees edition. We can make use of these concepts at the Daily News (and we do already to some extent):

I find the last to be especially interesting, since it seems to be a way to combine what we do well (and love to do) — tell compelling stories — with the creation of community, arguably the economic heart of the internet (see facebook, myspace, youtube…).

Yesterday Mindy McAdams over at Teaching Online Journalism (bookmark her site if you don’t already visit regularly!) posted about two new editions, in Spanish and Portuguese, of Mark Briggs e-book “Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive.”

It’s a great resource if you’re getting started in multimedia story-telling.

Free download (PDF), available at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin

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.