Adding transitions and audio/video fade in/outs in Final Cut Pro and Express. I recommend watching this in full screen and HD, as I do not zoom in at any point as I have done with the other screencasts.
More screencast tutorials made for my staff. This time on the basics of Final Cut.
Last Wednesday I took part in a chat on Twitter about web journalism. One thing that became clear early on, even within “web journalism” many roles and responsibilities are highly specialized. Answers to questions regarding what a web journalist is, what responsibilities people have, and what titles people hold varied greatly depending on their role in their organization. There were back-end tech people who manage databases and work with code, reporters who were starting to use Twitter and still cameras, editors who help to produce packages and train staff, etc.
This may have been the reality for many of last week’s participants (working in dedicated, albeit small, web/online teams) but it is not mine, and I doubt it is the reality for other Web editors in many small market, rural areas. So what do I do on a typical day at work?
From 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. my day usually involves pagination and copy editing.
Copy editing: The aspect of my work most foreign to me, I will typically read through all of the days stories at some point in the day for content and/or for grammar/spelling.
Pagination: This usually involves paginating two local pages and, at times, two or three wire pages.
After 1 p.m. (we are an afternoon paper) my days usually involves a mix of posting content to the Web, blogging/social media management, training, podcasts, a mix of either shooting stills, creating audio slideshows or video, and the ever-present meeting.
Posting to Web: Fairly straightforward and not much different than any other CMS I’ve used it in the past whether it be College Publisher, Wordpress or SaxoTech. The new AP Marketplace does add a slight hiccup to my workflow and, on the off chance that some other Web editor reads this, if you know of a way to publish select content to Marketplace without auto publishing everything, but also without having to enter each field manually, I would love to hear it.
Blogging/Social Media Management: Upkeep of the Telegram’s photo blog (soon to be multimedia blog as soon as I finish this post). Keeping content fresh and interacting with users on Twitter, Facebook and our SWKTalk forums.
Training: Weekly new media training for reporters and photographers. I also maintain www.danielsato.com/gctelegram, where I recap our training sessions and provide links to other tutorials and examples.
Podcasts: I have even gotten in to the podcast world, hosting “Talk of the Town,” where I discuss some topic that is pertinent either to Garden City or southwest Kansas each Wednesday afternoon at our local coffee house.
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Photos, slideshows and video: Every now and again, I also get to go and play outside of the office.
The potential upside the amount and variety of work I do: I have experience in 9 of the top ten areas of expertise sought after by online media, and 17 of the 23 skills listed. Mark Shaver, who maintains the blog Depth Reporting, mentioned that his areas of expertise, computer programming and database management, were well down on the list, though I imagine they have gone up in demand since Serena Carpenter’s 2008 study, which the rankings originated from.
This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work:
Multimedia is a relatively new endeavor for newspapers, and The Telegram is no exception. As an industry, we are still feeling our way around in the dark, trying to find what works and what does not work. What was once the golden bullet can quickly turn in to a resource black hole.
Here at The Telegram, there has been an emphasis on shooting video when possible, however, according to Richard Koci Hernandez, founder of Multimediashooter.com and current Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at UC Berkeley:
Unless your org has advertising dollars waiting for video content, then stick with the marriage of audio and still images.
first, research shows a bigger *bang* in terms of hits and time on site for, let’s call them *soundslides* on news sites over video. video itself gets better number on the web, but not on newsites. the public doesn’t traditionally come to news sites for video anyway.
second the ROI return on investment is very minimal for video. the $$$ and time to produce and train is never made back in terms of revenue. this is why you see most papers beginning to scale back. Not the biggies like Wapo and NYT, because they have the advertising dollars waiting for content.
At The Telegram, we will not be shooting video for video’s sake. Nor will we shun the medium as time and resource intensive. Instead, we should evaluate what media we choose based on what the story lends itself best to.
I will use two examples. Currently, I get the sense that video is associated with sporting events. However, many sports are about peak action. It is about moments such as a spectacular catch, exuberant celebration, or painful collisin … moments which have a far greater impact frozen in time for viewers to digest, as opposed to played through in a video.
I think the best example of this is the great Neil Leifer photo of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston.
Most certainly this is an iconic image but, in reality, the moment itself lasted less than a second. Watch this YouTube clip below and you will see what I mean. Pay close attention at two seconds in.
Did you catch it? That was how quickly that iconic moment was over. In video, it doesn’t even feel memorable.
That being said. There are times when video works far better than stills. Rachael’s Culling the Herd video comes to mind. Even with audio and a sequence of shots, video of the bull struggling in the chute is much stronger than and stills.
When deciding what media you want to use for your story, ask yourself, How is this story best told? What effect will telling it with stills have? With video? What images/clips can you expect to get each way and which produces a greater variety of content and/or stronger content? On the news side, we should be concerning ourselves with providing the best content to our readers in the most appropriate ways, not with what the magic bullet of the day is, because that will no doubt change.
Next,
