Skagit County has been swarming with state and national media since the attacks. Our paper, the Skagit Valley Herald, has been packed with stories since the day after the attacks.

Nothing like this has ever happened here. People are in shock. It is times like these when communities need their newspapers most. As gruesome as the details are, people want to know why this happened. People need to be able to process the tragedy.

Yesterday as I walked into a church that held an open prayer service, someone told me that they appreciated the newspaper and what we are doing. Before that, a barista at a coffee shop said the same thing when we were making small talk. People are also visiting our forums to talk about the tragedy and what the community has lost. This is why quality journalism will never die.

Information is part of the grieving process, too.

Since Tuesday, I’ve produced two videos (here and here), helped other reporters uncover hard-to-find sources, shot still photos, ran to court to get essential documents, made copies, written or contributed to three or four stories and helped other reporters produce audio and video. It’s been a wild and heartbreaking week.

Yesterday I wrote my first education story since Tuesday. It felt comfortable to write about something other than the killing spree that drew the nation’s eye to Skagit County.

Reporters were handed a four-page outline of how we can incorporate the Web into our daily reporting.

Here’s a brief outline of the new Web strategy. If you want to read the entire four-page handout (culled to three pages with my excellent paper-folding-and-taping skills), read the PDF here (includes bonus doodles).

• Editors will select which stories have the best potential for multimedia during their weekly editors meeting. At least two stories per week will be assigned for “multi-platform” presentation.
• Editors are responsible for coordinating the production and editing of the multimedia.
• Photographers must “think video” for breaking news.
• Photographers are a “first priority” to train in video production and editing. Editors and interested reporters come after the photogs are trained. Training will come from in-house or online sources.
• Reporters are responsible for audio recording and editing, including narration and interviews with subjects.

Reporters seemed skeptical and skittish because of the layoffs around the country. Even our own newsroom is not immune from this recent trend. Our business reporter position is frozen. Someone mumbled “do more with less,” which earned a funny statement from Don Nelson:

“I hate the phrase ‘More with less.’ It’s a despicable lie,” Don said. “I prefer ‘Different and better.’”

(For the record, I hate “more with less” with a passion, and Don’s comment has to be the most awesome comeback to it that I’ve ever heard. Cynical journalists are free to disagree, but I still love my job.)

To bring you all up to speed on the history of the SVH, the Web has been secondary to the dead-tree edition for some time now. Last July, the SVH rolled out its new Web site, www.goskagit.com. Before that, the Web site hosted only one story per day, and had a two-sentence description of other stories that were in the paper. If you wanted to view the other stories, you had to buy a paper or subscribe online. We still don’t publish every story online. The reasoning is “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

I really love our new Web plan, which states that reporters should write for the Web before the paper if it is breaking news (see examples on page 3 in the PDF). One editor said “it doesn’t matter if it starts online or in the paper anymore.”

If a reporter finds herself swamped, she is to go to her editor and ask for a triage of duties. If a story doesn’t get covered, the reporter should try not to worry about it (though the ones who care about their beats do anyway). Editors also stressed that reporters would be trained on company time and that it would happen fairly soon.

The only barrier to our strategy is our Web site, which is currently unable to display SoundSlides presentations. I’ve been creating audio for some time now, and there are some unpublished SoundSlides in a folder just waiting for the Web site to be ready. A minor hitch, I’m sure, but if anyone has suggestions I’m happy to forward them to an editor.

I’ll post updates on this transition whenever I’m allowed.

Anyway, some of my favorites from the past few months:

• Regifting: The art of ditching those bad gifts
• Feature on a local production of the Nutcracker and the search for a man to play the Prince
• How many valedictorians do you really need?
• City government rules against home for troubled boys

Enjoy!

Reporters asked how they would ever find the time to learn this new style when many of them have story quotas. The short answer was prioritize your work and realize that not every story deserves your full attention. The long answer was learn at home, read books, try new things with your copy on your own time.

The same can be said for multimedia. I know a number of reporters who want to wait on the company to teach them multimedia skills.

Colin Mulvany, the multimedia editor at the Spokesman Review, says reporters should train themselves on their own time.

For you to be successful, you’ll need to take ownership of your evolving career. I’m always surprised at how many journalists in newsrooms demand training, but when their newspaper fails to deliver, they refuse to invest any of their own time in reinventing themselves. This is not a time for complacency.

Why should you bother? Easy. If you are valuable you won’t lose your job:

The problem is that many smaller newspapers in these lean times do not have the money or staff knowledge to provide training to their employees. Why invest your own time in training yourself? If you want to stay relevant in the journalism world you’d better have new media skills. This latest round of personnel shedding by newspapers will not be the last. When all the volunteers and those near retirement are gone, where do you think the next round of people targeted is going to be? If I am a publisher or senior editor and I have already cut to the bone, I’m going to probably start icing employees with the least amount of online skills.

I read Mulvany’s blog whenever he has a new post. In this post, he says “three more reporters are being outfitting with Macbooks, Final Cut Express and video cameras.” That would be huge for my paper, but we are under a hiring freeze and couldn’t afford to buy one Macbook for the newsroom unless we won a chain-wide contest (which we did).

For now, my paper has one laptop for seven reporters, three audio recorders that the ME had me purchase last December and two lav mics. They also have two copies of SoundSlides on a photographer’s computer (makes sense), a few copies of GarageBand installed, but no audio conversion software (the recorders tape in WMA and GarageBand doesn’t like that).

Training means nothing unless you practice. My learning process will be incredibly enhanced because my husband is buying a new laptop (he’s a graduate student in physics at UW, where he is working on an experiment to figure out the mass of neutrinos or something). Therefore, I get his old computer, an Asus F3F. I have a decade-old point-and-shoot digital camera, an Olympus DS 40 audio recorder, a lav mic and headphones. I plan to install my Adobe software onto the computer, including CS3 Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. I’ll end up buying SoundSlides ($40) and Switch ($19.40, unless someone else has an idea for cheap file conversion). I’ll also need an audio editing program, and I know about audacity, but I’m really addicted to GarageBand which is what we use at work. I hear Mixcraft is a good substitute for PC users. So all in all, I’m out probably $60 for software after all is said and done. Video will have to come later. Editing programs are out of my reach for my personal budget, as are video cameras.

But who is going to use them? When I got here I was the only one who recorded and edited audio. After I bought my Olympus DS-40 I sold my two-year-old WS-100 to a coworker, and she’s been playing with it for a couple of months. I don’t know if anything has been put on the Web yet, but she’s learning and so far very enthusiastic about it.

Anyway, the paper has held one audio training to get reporters and photographers used to the new devices. Only two people showed for the first training, a photog and a sports reporter who already has his own recorder. The second training was postponed due to lack of reporters.

Mindy McAdams has some great suggestions on how to get reporters used to new recorders and also the editing process. I’ve been asked to lead the reporters through the learning process in the next to-be-scheduled audio session with the recorders and I think I’ll try to use this tutorial to ease them along.

Right now the only obstacle I can see is the lack of computers with Garageband (the program we use) and also the fact that we don’t have an audio conversion program on any of our computers. Right now we have to go next door to the Web gurus and have to have one of them convert it for us (the upgraded version of Switch costs $20, and I think the editor is looking for something free, suggestions welcome). I am also not sure if we have enough computers with Garageband to do this properly, but I haven’t checked.

Then, of course, is the reporter resistance factor. I already know there are a few who are not at all interested in audio. That’s fine. When I mentioned the newsroom was getting audio recorders, one reporter complained that the newsroom isn’t providing training or headphones and that we have to learn new programs and on and on and on. Said person is not receptive, and that’s OK. I’ll teach those who want to learn and move on.

For the moment, though, I hope the editor will reschedule said learning session until after the newsroom has filled its two open positions. That way the new reporters can benefit from the session, and also, we might even have time to implement one of Mindy’s suggestions:

Tell them you know they can figure out ways to incorporate this into their normal reporting. Encourage the reporters to buddy up with the photojournalists. Then let them go. Those who will, will.

Maybe a week or two later, have a show-off session. Free pizza. Everybody who comes brings their best audio. Play them all. Everyone is asked to make positive comments about each example heard. After everyone comments on mine, then you ask me to say what is wrong with it. This is a very good method. No one criticizes negatively except the person who made it. Everybody learns and feels good. It’s worth it!

First off it’s always great to go and see the students doing stuff instead of phone interviews. I’ve always believed you get more out of seeing things in the classrooms and observing.

Second, I’m a huge weather buff. I love anything to do with weather, especially extreme weather. The more we went into the countryside, the more amazed I was. Trust me when I say the pictures you see on TV and Online do not do it justice. Just listen to the audio to hear teacher Kevin Gudgel, who is from there, talk about his incredulity.

Finally I really like telling hard stories. This was a difficult one because it’s so easy to over-dramatize what you see. It would also have been very easy to dwell more outside the story instead of focusing on the students’ reactions. I think this story has a good balance of everything. I hope you agree.

Ideally I would have learned about multimedia sooner, but I don’t think any of the papers online were even doing it in 1995, when I started college. I am certain that nobody at the college level was even thinking of multimedia as a force to tell stories.

But knowing what I know today, I would have taken the following classes:

• Television broadcasting
• Radio broadcasting
• Web development

I would have done what I could to learn about Flash development. The program was created in 1996, a year after I started at Colorado State University.

But technology has changed a lot since I was in college. Here is what students of today need to learn to be reputable — and hireable — journalists.

Mindy McAdams yet again comes forth with a great post right as I was writing this.

Journalists who expect to get a job will “walk in the door with”:

• A proficiency in Photoshop, HTML and blogging software.
• An understanding of Web publishing systems (content management systems).
• Experience in the production of multimedia — including the use of audio and video editing tools.

Of course, you cannot ignore the basic journalism classes. Everyone has to learn the inverted pyramid. You cannot tell a story without some structure. Everyone has to understand the SPJ code of ethics.

Unfortunately, many journalism schools do not have these classes as part of a journalism curriculum. I would even bet that you cannot take these classes without the appropriate major, such as broadcast media for the video classes, or computer science for Web development. McAdams points this out in her post, the slow crawl of journalism education. I can confirm this from personal experience. There is pitifully little out there in the way of formal classes, even at the graduate level.

Conclusion: You have to learn this stuff on your own for the most part. You cannot wait for someone to hand it to you, and if you have a passion to tell stories you’ll gravitate to learning the Web stuff anyway. Buy the programs. Take the tutorials. Develop your own Web site. Write a blog. Take online classes at places like NewsU. Also, don’t ignore the value of networking and meeting people in person. Find an SPJ chapter near you and start going to meetings.

On their toes: One dance school’s desperate search for “The Nutcracker” Prince

Check out some of my old audio from my site (anything from my podcasts section, the further down the older it is page moved due to transition to Wordpress, 7-17-08, visit clips section instead and look for the audio icon). I’ve come a long way. The Western Washington SPJ group has held trainings throughout the fall here, and I’ve learned a lot by attending the sessions.

As far as audio goes, natural sound is the biggest change I’ve added to my audio productions, and I feel it makes a world of difference. I’ve also gotten more used to using a more conversational tone instead of that br o ke n up, highly enunciated, stiff voice that I use in some of my older productions.

My first audio for the SVH was here, about a high-school computer building class. It was a test run for editors to see how long it would take to produce the piece. (I’m not sure how long the links will last, but the Nutcracker one is better anyway.)

For the record, the first one took me about three hours from start to finish, with absolutely know knowledge of how to use Garageband (though I’ve used Audacity before). The second one, probably about 1 hour 45 minutes, but that also includes writing the broadcast script and making notes so I can write a Garageband and Switch tutorial for staff who hope to also do audio extras for their stories.

I am really, extremely excited about this and I hope I can continue to do more audio, and eventually video, for the paper. The more ways to tell a story the better, but of course, make for darn sure that you do it properly.

1. Does recording audio interfere with reporting?
2. How long does it take?

First, a bit about my background. I started helping with audio podcasts at my last paper. I didn’t actually edit anything down, rather, I marked the clips I wanted and sent it to a Web editor, who then cut the clips out for me and sent it on to a special projects editor (who then collected it all into a podcast).

So technically, I never edited audio for any newspaper. I have, however, taken it upon myself to learn Audacity (a simple audio editor) on my own. After learning Audacity, I produced some podcasts for a video game fan site I visit (which I won’t post here, but everyone seemed happy with the quality).

So the answer to the first question: Does recording audio interfere with reporting? I would say no. In fact, I think recording audio has only enhanced my reporting. As part of scene setting, reporters should pay attention to the sounds around them anyway, but I have found that recording only made me more aware of what I hear and I can choose to add those details to my story.

The second question: How long does it take? Not as long as you might think. First off, you have to go into the project knowing what you want. For instance, I recorded audio for a podcast about a landfill study. Sounds boring right? Well, I got some audio of the landfill manager on top of the landfill where all of the trucks were. You could hear the trucks moving garbage, backing up (beep beep beep) and you could also hear trucks driving in and out (unfortunately I do not have this in my clips file, I wish I did!).

It took about 20 minutes to write the broadcast script (including choosing the order of the audio clips and perfecting the flow), about two minutes to read it, and I can’t imagine it would take more than 20 minutes to piece everything together on the back end. So let’s say about 45 minutes for a 1 minute, 30 second podcast (my personal limit is 30 seconds).

Also, check out a similar analysis on video at Andy Dickenson’s blog. Be sure to read the comments too. For instance, he said it takes four hours of production for one minute of video. That seems really high. In fact, I’ve heard one hour to one minute, and I think that sounds high, but I’ve never done it so I’m not sure.

I’ve always been a gadget geek: I have owned my own digital recorder for nearly two years (and am considering an upgrade), a microphone (thinking of buying another two and a splitter), computer programs and other tools to help me learn, on my own, more about Online reporting.

But for those who are not tech-saavy, please read this great post by Mindy McAdams: First lesson in audio for journalists. This is a great summation of what you need to do to start collecting audio.

One thing I noticed after I started collecting my own audio was the ambient sound of a place. Just this afternoon I was in a newsroom meeting, and as I was thinking about audio (while the editor was talking about something else, sorry Don!) I listened to the fluorescent lights and the hum of the computers. I thought, if I were to conduct an audio interview in a place like this, I’d turn off the lights and the computers.

So to assist the newspaper’s fledgling audio hopes, I am being asked to collect audio for an upcoming story of my choice. Talk about pressure! I just hope I can convey the potential storytelling power of audio with whatever I submit.