Michael Becker's List: Multimedia Journalism

• Instead of thinking "first part," "second part", "third part", "fourth part", think "this part", "that part", "another part", and "yet another part". It helps to avoid linear thinking.
• Video is the best medium to depict action, to take a reader to a place central to the story, or to hear and see a person central to the story.
• Still photos are the best medium for emphasizing a strong emotion, for staying with an important point in a story, or to create a particular mood.
• Bad audio makes video seem worse than it is and detracts from the drama of still photos. Good audio makes still photos and video seem more intense and real.
• Animated graphics show how things work. Graphics go where cameras can't go
• Often, text is what's left over when you can't convey the information with photos, video, audio or graphics.
• A little overlap among the different media is okay. It's also useful to have some overlap among the story's nonlinear parts, as a way to invite readers to explore the other parts of the story. But try to match up each element of a story with the medium that best conveys it.

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• I think that if you just started to do them, the audio slideshow is gonna take about four or five times what it would have taken just to do the assignment visually.
• There haven't been a whole lot of ... hard news stories done in audio slideshows.
• Most of the people [who] are using Soundslides are not online journalists. They're people in print papers who want to see their work online.
• I think they key, number-one thing is that [most audio slideshows are] too long. ... They'll create a three-minute audio slideshow, and because it's three minutes long, they'll have to use so many photographs. Well, I'm sorry, there just aren't that many good photographs in your edit.
• If you have a really great image, leave it up there for a little longer.
• The most important thing is not your photojournalism. The most important thing is not your audio journalism. The most important thing, overall, above anything else, amen, to the end of it, is the story and how well you communicate that to the human being who's on the other side of that computer.

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• Tighten, tighten, tighten. Don't be seduced by the perception that there is unlimited space available on the Web. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you should use it.
• One way to plan your story is to storyboard. A storyboard will give you a sense of the timing, pacing, and energy of the project. Good storytellers keep the audience engaged by using the high and low points to change the tempo of the story. Storyboarding allows you to see where the highs and lows are and helps with timing the audio and image.

• It was not a gimmick, not an add-on, not forced or contrived, but a fully integrated piece of interactive, multimedia journalism, as user-friendly as a spoon, and it quickly became one of the most-viewed stories ever to appear on washingtonpost.com.
• "How to tell really powerful stories on the Web, nobody knows how to do that yet in what I would call a sustainable way. To do that every day is really hard. It's going to be awesome, though."
• "They're really meant to be seen in context with print stories," he says--although once in a while a reporter will turn in a video that can stand on its own.
• "Virtually every paper in the country is, if not diving head first, at least dipping their toes into video."
• Video offers them the prospect of deliverance from print-centric thinking, and perhaps a more prominent role to play in newsrooms. For more than a decade, photographers have suffered as their papers economized by cutting newshole. Squeezed for space, news editors ran fewer photos and ran them smaller. Also, given that newspaper display is nearly always driven by the written story, a photographer's best pictures have often been discarded because the right people weren't in them or they were otherwise irrelevant to the text. But now, says Josh Meltzer, a young multimedia photojournalist at the Roanoke Times, "I can go to the desk and say, 'Well, I have your picture, but I also have a video story on something else that was going on there.'"
• Some people argue that Internet video, which is shown mainly in small boxes on small monitors, can get by with fewer pixels and a less polished appearance than TV visuals. Some think a less smooth quality actually looks more "real" online. "It's overstatement to say the rougher the better," says the Tampa Tribune's Janet Coats, "but there is a certain veracity if you haven't spent so much time making it refined." (That Washington Post piece about the violinist in the subway is an example. It was shot surreptitiously, with a camera that was duct-taped to a ceiling; it looks more like police surveillance than professional videography, but it gets the job done.)
• "conspicuous dumbing down" of journalism images online. In an August column, Van Riper blamed this trend on the Web's demand for "deadline-every-minute" reporting and on the "near-continuous availability of images from amateurs, cell phones and God-knows where."
• "The learning curve is very steep," says Fadely. "I've been at the Miami Herald more than 24 years as a still shooter, I'm a bright guy, I'm a technology geek, and it is still very hard. It is a completely different way of thinking, to structure a video, and in addition it's technically very different."
• That's pretty much how most newspaper people are learning the technique: through word of mouth, a dash of formal workshop training and a whole lot of trial and error.
• Even if the visuals are poor, she says, good audio can often save the day.
• Another revelation for the neophyte is how much time it can take to shoot and edit a short piece of video, especially when the poor photographer or reporter also has to bring home still shots or a text story.

• This fall, Andy Dickinson, who teaches online journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in England, did a survey on his blog to see exactly how time-consuming a newspaper video shoot is.  

  His findings: 

  The average video, after editing, is two to three minutes long. 

  The average production time is two to four hours. 

  Dickinson concluded that, typically, it takes one hour to produce one minute of video. But no sooner had he posted that result than the e-mail reactions started rolling in. One photo editor thought the survey should take into account not just editing time but also the time it takes to shoot a video on assignment.  

• Video requires roughly 10 times more work on an assignment as [still photography] and then 100 times more work as you're editing it. Imagine filling a 16-page special section with a hundred pictures--out of a routine city hall meeting assignment. That's shooting video. You have to shoot every detail in the room, every angle, every expression--just to get a few seconds of video to put on top of the few seconds of audio that you've edited down from two hours of tape. 

  When I asked Fadely to elaborate on this, he said he was talking about "narrative video that stands alone as a story"--in effect, mini-documentaries. More modest videos that illustrate a text story "do not take nearly as much time to produce but can't stand by themselves," he says.  
• "I got the camera, popped the tape in and went and found my dog," he says. "I shot a video of the dog, and I pulled a frame grab off of it. I uploaded it within minutes and sent it to the news-paper as a test, transmitting it just as I would be doing from Katrina, and the results were astonishing." The picture's quality was good enough for a four- or five-column photo on a news page.

  • One solution to trying to take both still photos and video at the same time: use an HD video camera that makes it possible to grab high-quality screenshots from within the video, screenshots that can be used as still photos.
  Add Sticky Note
• As newspapers move deeper into the world of video, Leeson argues that frame grabs will keep photographers thinking and seeing just as they always have. Frame grabs, he says, will help to preserve the traditional arts and skills of great photojournalism. He thinks the day is coming soon when someone will win a Pulitzer Prize in photography from frame grabs. That would be a milestone.

• In an ideal world, a reporter would be able to shoot his own video, bring it back, "capture" it from the camera onto the editing computer, organize all the clips in a "bin," lay out a rough assembly on a timeline of the best bits of the interviews (the A-roll), work that assembly into a coherent story, cover the interview segments with other, more illustrative images (the B-roll), get a consistent overall sound balance, fix any exposure or color balance problems, compress the finished video to make the file small enough to play on the Web, upload it to the Web site server, write the online text describing the story, give the video a name and link it to the print story that accompanies it. 

  But no reporter can do that and also write a story on deadline. So Contreras and his two colleagues do the bulk of this editing and production work, with the reporter or photographer checking in as time permits, either to confer or just to sit and watch and, hopefully, learn.  

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• The goal should be to learn to tell stories visually, with audio that complements the images, edited with a pace and rhythm appropriate for the piece. Dumping a folder of pictures over top of some bad audio does no one any good.

  • written in a comment by commenter Chuck Fadely
  Add Sticky Note
• Most multimedia stories run about two minutes, maybe two and a half. Limiting yourself to that length imposes discipline. Not only do you need to know what you intend to communicate; you also need to ruthlessly cut away anything that does not advance the story. Keep it simple. Don’t try to do more than one thing in two minutes.
• you’ve got to have your ending firmly in mind. You have to know exactly what the closing is before you edit the rest of the material for the slideshow.
• You need to shoot a lot of variety (distance, angle, and subject), including a heck of a lot more detail (extreme close-ups) than you ever would for print.
• I suggest that you consider the normal interview as a kind of dress rehearsal for the “real” interview — the one from which you will draw the audio content. Decide what you intend to communicate, start recording a fresh file, and re-ask the questions that will tell the story in the slideshow. Don’t ever tell the subject what to say or how to say it — but you can explain that you will now ask some questions a second time so that you can record for the slideshow.
• When you sit down to edit, be patient. Accept that this is a repetitive process. You can start with either the audio or the photos, but you’re going to go through each set of assets more than once.
• It’s easy to use music to cover up the lack of audio you should have gathered, but didn’t. It’s a lazy option, often used by people who don’t care enough to conduct interviews and do real reporting.
• music in a slideshow plays on our emotions in a way I would say is distinctly un-journalistic. For that reason, I’d advise against using music, unless your story is about people playing music or dancing.
• Narration can be wonderful, but only if it’s both well-written and well-voiced. Few things are more boring to hear than a reporter obviously reading from a page. If you can allow the subjects to tell their own story, do it.

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• make yourself remember what a story really is: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Aladdin and his lamp, the tortoise and the hare, the Iliad and the Odyssey. A story is not a relaying of facts — that’s a report, not a story.

• First go in without your camera.

   

  Walk around and look, with just your eyes. Talk to people. Ask questions. Don’t record anything, don’t stick a microphone in anyone’s face. You might take some handwritten notes about what you see or what you learn, but that’s all. What you’re looking for is the action and activity that will make interesting video images. Remember, this is not breaking news — this is a story. People will be doing these things later; it’s not a one-time action that you are going to miss without your camera.
• Before you go back to the car to get your camera, or take it out of the bag, you need to know what the story is.
• I like to call them “action or activity”; emotion; and “you’ve got to see it to believe it.”

  • A trio of things that McAdams says work well in video
  Add Sticky Note

• So you’ve identified an activity that’s worth recording with video. Great! Now be sure to get five different shots of that one activity:

   
   
  1. Extreme close-up of action detail, e.g. hands fondling a cantaloupe
   
  2. Close-up of the face of the person doing the action
   
  3. Medium shot, face and action together
   
  4. Over-the-shoulder view of the action (point of view of the person doing the action)
   
  5. One more different angle — be creative!
   
   

  It’s not that you will necessarily use all five shots in the final edit, but if you’ve got them, you’ll find that editing is immensely simplified. You always have enough shot variety to put together something decent.
• Train yourself to frame the action, then freeze solid. Press the button. Count silently to 10, at least (this ensures that you have enough to allow clean cutting) — and then press the Record button again to STOP RECORDING. Never swing the camera around to the next thing. Always stop the recording.

• These rules are particularly important for Web video, but also, they are really good for helping a beginner to progress and learn how to shoot well. When you’re vastly experienced at shooting, then you can break the rules (because then you’ll know when it’s okay to do so).

   
   
  1. Don’t pan (don’t move the camera horizontally)
   
  2. Don’t tilt (don’t move the camera vertically)
   
  3. Don’t zoom
   
  4. Press the “Record Off” button — often
• NEVER ask the subject to perform actions for you. You’ll need to learn how to anticipate the action and run ahead to get these shots.

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• If you have a microphone, you don’t want to have it on the table, you usually want to have the microphone about five inches away from the chin underneath it.
• A lot of reporters are a little skittish about wearing big headphones in an interview situation, but for me there’s a Murphy’s Law. If you’re not wearing headphones anything can go wrong and you won’t know.  It’s like trying to take a picture without a viewfinder. You don’t even know what you are getting.
• And then the third thing is just to make sure that — and this is different for every device — but that the volume you’re recording at, the recording levels, are not too high.
• At The New York Times, we use this Edirol R-09 Recorder, but the piece of equipment that I really love that I would recommend to anybody to buy is a shotgun microphone. They’re a longer microphone. I use the Audio Technica 835b, which is a great microphone.
• With a shotgun microphone, it works like a flashlight, you can point it at what you want and it is going to get the sound to the side or behind you.  And so you don’t have to stand as close.
• a lot of print reporters are a little skittish about being on tape or performing in any way, but one of the things about audio is that you can’t hide. You’re there.  I mean some of the most revealing moments in an interview is not what someone says but the length of pause before they answer the question.  And unless you have the question there in the tape, you don’t get that interchange and the full richness of the interview.
• I think the problem is, is not that print reporters are asking questions in a sloppy way. I think they’re just uncomfortable with themselves. I think it’s great to hear a reporter try three different approaches to the question. And I think that can really work, when you hear a smart, lively interchange with an interview subject. And if the reporter is being honest and thoughtful and smart about the interview, I don’t think there is anything to hide.

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• First off, no one really has a history to look back to. Everyone is making it up as they go along. My first recommendation is to start shooting video as soon as possible. Today if you can. As soon as you start, make mistakes. Learn from them and get better.
• They can use relatively cheap consumer-grade camcorders for the job–but I do recommend cameras that at least have mic and headphone jacks. It’s important to provide training for these new videographers (for my job, they brought in experts for three separate day-long workshops). Teach them what all the buttons on the camcorders do. Teach them to use a tripod. Teach them basic shots and shooting techniques.
• I think it’s mandatory for EVERYONE in the newsroom to start to think about video from the very beginning. Sometimes reporters know about stories before they ever get on the budget radar…At this point reporters need to be thinking: Could this be a video?

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