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Teaching Online Journalism

Audience uses the tools we gave them

“Well, uh — can’t we just start blogging back at them?”

Related book: The Long Tail

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What MSNBC.com gained from the flip book

Robert Hood, director of multimedia MSNBC.com, weighed in at length in the middle of a huge discussion at Lightstalkers about the MediaStorm / Ed Kashi / Iraqi Kurdistan “flip book.”

He says his team was asked to contribute to a story project MSNBC.com was doing about Iraqi Kurdistan.

We looked into all of our traditional sources and came across a set of pictures that Ed Kashi shot there about 18 months ago. … we bought enough pictures for a tradidional MSNBC.com slideshow. That could have been the end of this discussion. … However, just as we’re wrapping up production on our slideshow, we got email from MediaStorm about an Ed Kashi Iraqi Kurdistan project. I looked at [it] right away and noticed that it was the same set of pictures.

So Hood calls up his old buddy Brian Storm (founder and principal at MediaStorm):

… and he explained this whole auction idea (that’s a topic for another thread). I told Brian that I was interested in the presentation, but that it felt more like art than journalism. … I showed it to several people in our office. The reaction was quite positive. My head began to drift toward making a bid for the project. … I went home that night and … My kids had a couple friends over. … So, I pulled each kid aside and had them watch the project. I told each one to look away, walk away as soon as they became bored or uninterested in what they were seeing. Every one of them watched the entire project. …

That’s when Hood decided to bid on it.

I can’t share specific numbers, but I can tell you that MSNBC.com made our money back in two days off of ad plays at the beginning of the piece. So, would I do a project exactly like this again. No. Would I be open to new things, experimental things, HELL YES!

Previous related post here (Nov. 8).

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Citizen journalist, citizen vigilante?

Doesn’t anyone think this is terrifying? A woman is attacked on the subway in London. I believe her. She’s right, it’s awful; it should not happen. It’s scary, and you’d think there would be some kind of protection.

That’s not what scares me, though.

She snapped a photo of one of the men who allegedly assaulted her. She posted the photo on her blog. And on Flickr. And now more than a dozen other bloggers have linked to or reposted the picture of this young person. He might be guilty — but doesn’t Britain have courts to determine that?

I live in a country with a long and horrifying and all-too-recent history of lynching. This viral photo manhunt in London scares me down to the marrow of my bones.

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If only every online newspaper looked like this

El País is the newspaper; ELPAIS.com is the fabulous, just-reinvented, marvelous home page. My God, I hope one day all newspapers will be this good.

Props to Juan Antonio Giner (now if only he would STOP USING FULL CAPS for so many things in his otherwise excellent news design blog!). Es muy difícil leer.

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Multimedia journalism cornucopia

Andrew has updated Interactive Narratives. Much nice stuff is linked there. It should keep you busy throughout the long (U.S.) holiday weekend.

He also mentioned Their Circular Life, one of those stunning Flash experiences that you won’t easily forget. It must be more than two years since I first saw it, but just reading the title, I remembered the sense of wonder I felt then. Ah, I envy you if you have not yet had the pleasure.

One slideshow package that’s not linked on the I-N blog: Blighted Homeland, with photography and audio by Gail Fisher, produced by MediaStorm. The setting is the Navajo lands of the Southwestern United States, and the images will sweep you away. The story: tragic.

From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were dug and blasted from Navajo soil, nearly all of it for America’s atomic arsenal. Navajos inhaled radioactive dust, drank contaminated water and built homes using rock from the mines and mills. Many of the dangers persist to this day.

The four-part text package is here.

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Meeting the perceived threat to visual journalism

Many people have already blogged David Leeson’s instant classic at SportsShooter, posted Nov. 16. Well, I just got around to reading it. If you don’t know David Leeson’s name, you ought to — he was one of the early newspaper photojournalists to pick up a video camera. Some excerpts just from the middle of his piece:

Today, legions of us scrape together an extra 20 or 30 images that would have never been selected for publication a decade ago. Then, we string them together to create a (shudder) multimedia package. Here’s some news for you — audio won’t make bad editing any better. …

… let me clarify what I’ve been doing. I’ve been fighting to preserve your vision. I’ve been waging war against a myriad of personal agendas while at the same time questioning my own.

I’ve agonized over my purpose and feel positive that I can declare myself purely motivated by preservation of photojournalism. Still images will remain but video has grown. … Video was a child when most of us first picked up a 35mm. Now, video is all grown up and on its way to becoming a powerful storytelling tool.

The 35mm SLR is slowly being replaced by HDV cameras at places like the Dallas Morning News but the tradition of powerful photojournalism remains through our frame grabs. Why? Because we approach video reporting in the same way we photographed essays. Video isn’t just video anymore, just like your photos stopped being “snaps.”

If you had the skills in video today — there would be a very long list of opportunities before you. To move forward in life requires a measure of risk. There is no greatness outside of risk. The future of the traditional newspaper is looking pretty risky these days but the health of solid visual reporting is getting stronger every day by those of us who value visual journalism and ethical storytelling above and beyond a 35mm.

We were lucky enough to have Leeson on a photojournalism panel at the University of Florida in 2004. The Webcast was archived; you can hear Leeson discuss his use of video in Iraq.

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Reporters shooting video redux

Howard Owens provides detailed answers to some questions I posed earlier about print reporters and video, and about non-TV journalism Web sites, in general, and their use of video. The questions stemmed from another post here that received a lot of diverse comments.

I’ve known Howard for many years, almost entirely through Listservs about online journalism. I don’t always agree with him, but I do respect his opinion. Unlike many of the people I have known in the past 13 years who work in or around online journalism, Howard does get it. And he loves it. He lives in it. So even when I disagree with him, I tend to remember what he says.

A couple of points with which I fully concur:

… sound quality is more important than picture quality. … Quality has a lot more to do with training and talent than the equipment. … Most video can stand some editing, if by that you mean cutting out some extraneous stuff, such as the reporter’s questions …

One thing I’ve been telling people in my newsrooms for three years — some day quality is going to be much more important than it is today, so I want you to get better.

He makes a good point about re-schooling the site visitors:

People aren’t used to going to a newspaper Web site to get video. We are giving them something new, so we need to help them get used to it. If you’re only posting one video project every three or four days (about the time it takes to produce a full-blown, in-depth video production), you are not putting enough video in front of your visitors to get them used to the idea that they can expect video from your site.

Plenty more over at Howard’s blog, and it’s worth your time.

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