Teaching Online Journalism

Photojournalists have stood at the center of the transformation in most newspaper newsrooms during the past 10 years. That’s not to say they always had a voice in how changes were made — but much of the new workload fell onto their shoulders.

As a staff photographer at The Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle for more than eight years, Will Yurman has added audio gathering and editing, slideshow production, and video shooting and editing to his skill set. One of the (many) things he does for the newspaper’s Web site is a weekly panorama about a local topic; the 360-degree photo is accompanied by audio interview material, making it a multimedia vignette. He also creates some packages using Flash, such as a presentation about all homicide victims in Rochester in 2007.

I asked Yurman about the differences between shooting video and shooting stills.

“In some ways, video is easier,” he said, “because you’re always gathering audio and video of the same scene with the same camera.” If you’re shooting stills and planning to produce an audio slideshow, “you’re often putting down the camera to pick up the [audio] recorder.”

But video isn’t simple. “Video is a struggle because you are constantly processing how to compress time — making sure you have all your shots. And the reality is, you’re often thinking of the image or the audio, but not both at the same time, anyway,” Yurman said.

Because he has been shooting stills for decades, Yurman said, “it’s still easier for me to do that well. But for others the reverse may be true.”

Then he made an interesting distinction. “For a simple, good-enough piece, video is probably easier in many respects. If you just need to cover the facts, a house fire, a simple news story, I think video is easier. For really good, or great, they have their own equal challenges. If you’re trying to construct a narrative, they are equally difficult,” he said.

“Some stories work equally well in both — the results are different, of course, but not better or worse.”

The difference between motion and still images

Yurman’s done a bit of thinking about the factors that distinguish video and audio slideshows.

“Both media are time-based, as opposed to space-based. A print layout is about space — the eye wanders; the viewer controls the time and rhythm. Time-based, of course, means the show is driven by the audio and is viewed over time,” he said.

In being time-based, video and audio slideshows are the same, he said. “But they are more like cousins than simply two forms of the same thing. Video is about watching things happen over time. We watch a sequence of events unfold. Stills are about moments in time.”

When audio slideshows try to be like video, they fail, Yurman said. There are some exceptions such as the flip book, “which can work if done right,” he said. But generally, “good slideshows, I think, have a very different rhythm than video — less literal. Slideshows need to lean on the strength of the still image — these punctuated moments in time that visually meld with the audio.”

Yurman produces both audio slideshows (using Soundslides) and video for the Democrat & Chronicle, although in the past year he has done mostly video (two examples: local art therapy program;  man-on-the-street interviews). He said there appears to be a preference for video, coming from corporate parent Gannett. “I could do slideshows within Final Cut, but at that point I generally just do video,” he said. (Final Cut Pro is a video editing program; Soundslides is a program for creating audio slideshows.)

For the Rochester International Jazz Festival two weeks ago, he produced a daily audio slideshow on deadline using Soundslides and Flash — no video. He called Soundslides “a great tool for quick work.”

Without audio, you’ve got no multimedia

Like the other photojournalists I spoke to earlier this month, Yurman emphasized the key role of audio in multimedia stories.

“Photographers need to understand how important good audio is to the story. It’s two parts, like any process. There is the technical, of course — learning how to gather high-quality sound means understanding the gear, being aware of the space, asking good questions, and most important — listening!”

Getting audio that is engaging and compelling requires that the journalist understand what audio does best. “This medium is better suited to emotions and personal reactions and less well-suited to facts and numbers. It’s very hard to listen to a heavy number story. Hard to keep that in your head,” Yurman said. (For great examples of Yurman’s audio work, check out the slideshows he made from the 2009 Rochester International Jazz Festival. First-class work, and stories about feelings, not facts.)

Learning any of the multimedia skills — audio, photography, video, etc. — calls for both watching and doing, he said. Watching: “Look at good work, and try to deconstruct it — why do you like it, what works, listen hard to how it was put together.” Doing: “And then, go do. Try, experiment, fail, try again and fail again.”

For gathering good audio, he said, “I honestly believe THE most important skill is to truly listen.”

I asked him to expand on that: “I mean listen to your subject during the interview. Don’t assume you can just rewind the tape later, don’t be thinking about your next assignment — or even your next question. Don’t be thinking about what you need at the grocery store or how you’re going to edit the piece. I mean really listen to what they are saying and respond in the moment — follow up on what is interesting, stay engaged.”

Yurman said it is possible to get better at audio just by practicing and listening to good examples. “Of course, it helps to have teachers, mentors who can critique and guide. But for working professionals, that isn’t always possible. Yes, I think you can teach yourself that way.”

(See Will Yurman’s portfolio site.)

Found via Delicious — David Schlesinger, editor in chief for Reuters News, said this in a speech to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on June 23, 2009:

We in the traditional media … must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy.

The genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting him back inside. You can wring your hands and weep, or you can stand up and walk forward. What Schlesinger said to the IOC group applies across the board to journalism everywhere — it puts a new twist on Gil Scott-Heron’s famous poem-song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970). There’s no point arguing now about whether this is good or bad.

The things to focus on — now and in the future — are value, exclusivity, insight, expertise (with accuracy and truthfulness).

Today I took questions in a live chat hosted at Poynter.org on this topic. According to an in-line poll, 36 percent of those attending were college educators, and 33 percent were full-time journalists. More than 50 people logged in. The questions were really good!

You can read a complete transcript of the archived chat.

You can leave comments here if you have additional questions. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to answer all the questions that were posted, but we only had an hour for the chat.

To find out what’s needed in today’s newsrooms, in mid-June I asked photo editors and multimedia producers at four newspapers which skills are still in short supply. Video editing, storytelling and audio skills led the list.

Even though his newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, has pulled back from its earlier online ambitions, Colin Mulvany said today’s visual journalism students must be prepared for an online future. That includes both gathering and editing audio, as well as posting stories and photo galleries from the field.

Video remains important even though it’s time-intensive; Mulvany, a photojournalist/multimedia producer, said he’s confident that video “will pay off smartly in the future.” All visual journalists need to have strong video production skills, he said. “You might not use them every day, but big news stories will demand video attention.” (Here’s a blog post Mulvany wrote after layoffs at his paper.)

Tom Burton, photo editor and multimedia producer at the Orlando Sentinel, concurred. “We could use more people who can easily work with nonlinear video editing programs,” he said. Experience with Final Cut Pro is preferred, but someone who understands a different editing system could learn FCP “in an intense four-day course.”

The traditional j-school approach, which “teaches you to have a single skill set that fits into a larger organization,” doesn’t cut it today, Burton said. “Those organizations are falling apart, and the jobs for a single skill set are gone.”

Every journalist needs multiple skill sets “to be their own publisher, in a sense,” Burton said. “In our newsroom, you can get your work on the Web quickly if you can gather the assets (words, photos, video), process them and build the page yourself. Otherwise, you have to wait for another overworked person to help you.”

Jen Friedberg, a multimedia producer at the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, said a journalist’s attitude counts for a lot. “Your curiosity and desire to tell the story should be paramount. Every visual journalist should know how to write a basic story in inverted pyramid form, shoot and edit a video that tells a complete story in about 1:30, gather and edit audio, shoot great images with everything from a cell phone to an SLR, turn it all out fast and get the information to where it needs to go online and to the people at your paper.”

Friedberg says today’s journalists should know some Web coding. Basic HTML will allow a photojournalist to add tags in video players and embed photos and videos in blog posts. Even though the newsroom content management system (CMS) shields the journalists from most of the code, “sometimes there are workarounds in the CMS, and if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, you can use them,” Friedberg said.

“Also, that way of thinking helps you understand what’s possible online and how to take advantage of the tools that are out there,” she said. “Not being afraid of HTML is a leg up.”

J-schools should teach students about the potential for innovative coding, Burton said. “If they have ideas, they can always find someone to collaborate with,” he added. Journalists who know how to code will find opportunities. “Almost no one in a newsroom has these skills today, but they are needed,” Burton said.

Tom Priddy is the multimedia editor at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal. “I don’t envision everyone requiring a one-size-fits-all journalist all the time,” he said. “But for the average working photojournalist, you’d better be able to write a caption accurately, handle a blog, edit audio and video, post directly onto the content management system and send back five grafs on a house fire.”

All those interviewed used words such as ingenuity, creativity, versatile and flexible when describing “the right stuff” for a journalist today.

“The most critical part is how to tell a story — and knowing when a story IS a story,” Priddy said. “Recognize when you come across a good story. You need to know that before you can know which tool is best to use for which story.”

Mulvany suggested that educators should lead students to “look deeper into the ways a story comes together” — what works, and what doesn’t. “They can take the photos, gather the audio, but they fail to make it into something compelling.”

Both Mulvany and Priddy have been training journalists in multimedia reporting in their newsrooms for a few years. Mulvany said we can teach storytelling only after the students feel comfortable with the tools, but Priddy said we can’t really teach them mastery of the tools. “They have to do it over and over and over again,” he said. The only way to feel truly comfortable with the tools is to use them — a lot.

Beyond knowing how to use the tools, a journalist must be able to assess whether a particular story will work well or badly in different formats. “A school board story is lousy for a photo gallery, but it could be perfect for a mash-up of schools facing closure,” Burton said. “A story that has compelling people can make a perfect audio slideshow or video, if you can get them in an interview. And that interview is going to be different than an interview conducted for print.”

The skills in storytelling and the use of the tools go hand in glove. Students will be inexperienced at both, so they’ll simply have to learn both at the same time.

The current crop of interns “could be better at audio,” Burton said, “but that is the weakest area I see throughout the industry. You wouldn’t have to be all that good to be the best audio person working for a newspaper. Bad audio is very, very difficult to fix in the edit.”

All the photojournalists at the Star-Telegram are good at both gathering and editing audio, Friedberg said. “That has been sort of a long battle, but they’ve had to do it now for several years. They are pretty quick with it.”

Mulvany pointed out that for video or audio slideshows, both reporters and photographers need to write scripts and voice their own narration. “Yes, some sound awful at first,” he acknowledged. “But I am amazed at how fast people find their voice. I have pushed a lot for producers, both reporters and photographers, to voice their multimedia. It has not been a battle at all.”

One thing seems very clear: There is no place in the newsroom for a photojournalist who doesn’t also report, write detailed captions, file copy from the field, and work on the Web.

“I firmly believe there will be no more just reporters or just photographers,” Mulvany said. “We all need to have crossover skills. The Web demands it.”

This article was originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Viewpoints, the newsletter of the Visual Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Two different opportunities:

• Who: Freedom Forum Diversity Institute
• Where: Nashville, Tenn.
• When: Aug. 9 – 14, 2009
• Cost: $850 (some meals included)
• Housing: “Reduced-rate lodging  at additional cost”
• Registration: here

The other one is not hands-on; it will focus on how projects are produced:

• Who: MediaStorm
• Where: Brooklyn, N.Y.
• When: July 27 – 31, 2009
• Cost: $2,500
• Housing: “Participants are responsible for their own room and board”
• Registration: here

Note: I’m not associated with either one of these.

We have college classrooms full of young people who have chosen journalism as their major. One question is: Do they actually intend to pursue journalism? Another question: Is our curriculum preparing them to be journalists in the years ahead of them?

A couple of things I read over the weekend fed into the ideas I’m going to lay out here:

1. In ‘There is an element of fraud in journalism education,’ says leading professor, a British journalism educator and longtime newspaperman said that a lot of today’s students “have no realistic prospect” of ever becoming journalists. He was not referring only to the shrinking number of journalism jobs — in his opinion, many students are just not sharp enough. He raised a question about the fairness of universities accepting all these students into journalism majors — is it right to admit hundreds of students when their chances of working in journalism are small, and getting smaller?
2. In Notes from the VisCom Classroom: Integrating Video into the Curriculum, an American educator and photojournalist outlines the kind of struggle familiar to every journalism professor nowadays — how the heck can we adjust the content of our courses to prepare these kids well and properly for journalism work in the future? How many diverse and wide-ranging skills should they be exposed to? How can we balance that with the need to make them competent in at least one or two specific areas? It’s a continuously moving target — Web video, programming languages, Twitter — what to include, what to skim over, what to offer in depth?

So I was slicing these ideas up and rearranging them somewhat (remixing, I guess), and here’s what I came up with:

Lots of students who choose to major in journalism do not intend to become journalists.

This seemingly simple statement has many dimensions. Some journalism majors change their minds in the midst of their undergraduate years, deciding against a career in journalism, but stay in the major and graduate with a journalism degree anyway. Others know at the outset that they don’t want to “do” journalism, but they’re aiming at law school or some other goal, and they see a journalism degree as a steppingstone to that. Some of them think they want to work in journalism, but their youthful idea of what journalism includes does not align with what the curriculum teaches — that is, they have never desired to check facts, investigate public records, attend school board meetings, or interview experts about difficult topics.

However, these students have chosen to major in journalism, and while they are free to change to another major, they choose not to do so. I have to counter Tim Luckhurst’s allegation of university “fraud” with the observation that we can’t force the students to change to a more suitable major, or to choose one in the first place. The same kind of thing certainly goes on in other majors, from physics to fine arts. No one is guaranteed a job or a career in the field they chose for university studies. That is true also at the (post-)graduate level.

What a student learns in a journalism major is useful in many other fields.

I don’t need to belabor this, because someone already wrote a good blog post about it: Dear May 2009 Graduate, Here’s 40 Reasons to Still Study Journalism. The 40 include:

• “Journalism teaches you to be a writer, and a good one.”
• “Journalism teaches you how to ask questions, including the tough ones”
• “You will learn tangible skills.”

That brings us around to the contents of the curriculum.

A graduate with a degree in journalism ought to be competent in certain tasks, practices, skills.

Working journalists and journalism educators all debate (endlessly) which tasks, practices, and skills these should be. But I’d like to offer a simple idea here: The decisions about which ones to teach should never rest on the previous two statements:

• Lots of students who choose to major in journalism do not intend to become journalists.
• What a student learns in a journalism major is useful in many other fields.

There is a practice recognized as journalism, and most working journalists and journalism educators can agree on a basic outline of what that is, and what it requires.

If a student decides to stay with a journalism major and graduate with a degree in journalism, then that graduate ought to be competent in the fundamental practices required to be a journalist. It does not matter one bit if the kid says, “But I don’t actually want to be a journalist.” If he or she can’t master the fundamentals of journalism, then he or she should not be given a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Unlike Tim Luckhurst, I do not think universities commit fraud if they admit hundreds of new journalism majors each year. I do believe that a journalism program commits fraud if it hands out journalism degrees to students who can’t write, can’t fact-check properly, or can’t use the necessary tools of journalism in the 21st century.

Students will continue to major in journalism if the j-schools stick to their guns and require competence in the fundamentals. I am arguing that the fundamentals now must include the newer tools that are used to produce journalism products today:

1. A laptop computer that the journalist maintains and for which the journalist takes responsibility
2. A digital still camera capable of shooting video that’s usable on the Web
3. A digital audio recorder capable of high-quality sound for use online
4. A blog or content management system to which the journalist can upload reports from the field, including audio, photos, and video
5. Social networks, blogs, RSS, and other means of staying connected to the community and the world
6. Software applications used for editing audio, photos, video, etc.; also software used for managing projects and information

It’s not appropriate today to say that these tools are somehow specialized or marginal. These are essential tools for doing journalism.

(Note that I’m not saying every student needs to be an expert in using each of these, and also, I’m not saying it’s sufficient to have ONLY basic knowledge. You’ve got to be really good at one or two skills, at least.)

If journalism majors are permitted to graduate without basic competence in the use of these tools, it seems to me that something’s not right. It’s irrelevant whether the graduate intends to work as a journalist. If someone is awarded a journalism degree, that person ought to be capable of doing journalism.

I was looking at this Iran protest slideshow from The New York Times today. It does not have audio, and so I would normally call it a gallery — not a slideshow. But it is carefully captioned, with factual material that goes beyond what we see in the photos, and there is a story of sorts, so it is really more than a simple gallery.

I think these distinctions are helpful for journalists to make. If you know you’re just putting together a bunch of pictures of baby animals, then you also know it’s not a story, and all you have to do is get the date and location and attribution correct on each photo. If you’re actually curating — if you’re going to add value and filter and offer up a story — then you should be culling the images carefully and adding real information in the captions.

Above: New York Times photo gallery

I was impressed by the page design of this slideshow. It really places the emphasis on the image, and yet the caption is nice and big and easy to read. I did not have to scroll, ever, to read the cation or view the full photo. The dark gray background enhances the experience. The ad is easily visible but does not detract from or compete with the photograph. (Although I have cut the bottom half off the ad here, on my screen I saw the full ad, also without any scrolling.) The page loads very quickly.

Earlier this week, I interviewed several photo editors and multimedia producers at U.S. newspapers of various sizes. (The largest was the Orlando Sentinel; the smallest was the Spartanburg [S.C.] Herald-Journal. Stay tuned for a future blog post about this.) They all said photo galleries are extremely popular on their Web sites — much more so than video. They also said they are more likely to produce a video than an audio slideshow nowadays, for a variety of reasons — most of them having to do with newsroom technology and workflow rather than story considerations.

Compare the Times photo gallery design and functionality to the photo gallery template used by the New York Times Regional Group newspapers:

Above: Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald-Journal photo gallery

Above: Gainesville (Fla.) Sun photo gallery

One thing you’ll notice if you click through these galleries is that you wait for some time before you get the next photo. Compared to the Times’s own gallery page, this wait seems like an eternity. I find it amazing that the galleries are so popular with site visitors when they are this slow — I would never have the patience to look at even eight photos at this glacial pace.

Another thing I learned from my interviews with photo editors and multimedia producers this week: Every graduating journalism student should know enough about photojournalism and the Web to be able to construct galleries like these, including resizing (in Photoshop), proper and accurate caption writing, and adding credit information. It doesn’t matter if you’re an online producer or a reporter — this is part of the job now.