OK, I’m a nerd when it comes to anything in Periodic Table format (such as the Beeriodic Table). This is a great way to brainstorm visual ideas for your online stories.

Some of the visualizations could work in print, but many of them take up a lot of space or are interactive and might not work for a print version.

(via the 10,000 Words blog)

McNerthney went over some basic tips about video from his personal experience. It is worthy to note that he does not have any fancy equipment and all of the software he shared is free. In this realization lies the value of his training: You don’t need expensive equipment. Anyone can do this.

His equipment/tools:

• Canon Powershot
• Windows Movie Maker (WMM tutorials on YouTube, or iMovie)
• A computer for editing, nothing too fancy

Most importantly is the attitude he brings to every story. McNerthney said he bought his Powershot about a year ago. Since then he appears to interview most, if not all, of his subjects with his Powershot running. His reason for videoing everything: “Sometimes daily stories turn into something big.”

(Note: I record audio of almost every interview I conduct. Not only does it help me keep quotes straight, I also have the option of using the audio later for a multimedia project. Obtaining audio in this way requires no extra effort on my part and I can only imagine if I had a small video camera with me all of the time, it would be just as easy.)

He shared one particular example of video he shot recently, about a crane operator who helped police nab a fleeing fugitive:

McNerthney talked about what shots you need to get if you’re going to record your interviews. Check out the crane video. It only takes a few seconds to get b-roll (the flavor shots of the crane in the middle of the story).

A few other tips he shared:

• Pay attention to lighting and don’t be afraid to move your subject to a more favorable location.
• If it is breezy outside, try to shield the camera’s microphone from the wind with your hand. You can also try to aim the microphone at the subject to get better sound quality.
• Everyone has a couple of seconds to talk to you. The man in the orange shirt said he didn’t have time, and yet McNerthney still got a great interview out of him.
• Evaluate who will care and why. If the video does not generate hits, then editors will be reluctant to approve projects in the future. Examples of videos many people will watch include technology, events with lots of participants and breaking news.
• Some people are not used to media exposure and shy away from the camera. Try to keep examples of your work on the camera you carry to convince them to consent to an on-camera interview.

How does he shoot video and write the story? He practiced with his friends by holding the camera and notepad at the same time, at about lower-chest height. Then he would watch the resulting video and adjust the camera angle accordingly. Now that’s multitasking!

For me the most valuable item out of the training was a free Web site he shared: Media Convert, which converts dozens of file types. This site saved my bacon a few times when editing audio for a SoundSlides last week. He also shared, Picnik is a photo-editing Web site with the functionality of PhotoShop.

A final note. McNerthney said there is a time and a place for quality multimedia. He frequently called his video “crappy,” and from a quality standpoint, I suppose it is. But his videos are interesting and, most importantly he said, they keep people on the site for a few minutes longer than they otherwise would have. Video is another layer to the reader experience.

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.

I called it in and by the time I got back to the newspaper twenty minutes later the small brush fire had bloomed into a raging wild fire. I had already put in 12 hours on the maggot story, but that little voice told me this wildfire was going to be big news.

He put on his wild land firefighter gear (every reporter who expects to cover a fire someday should have some) and raced back to the scene. But he didn’t have a video camera with him (he’d left it at the office). Instead, he took a bunch of stills, one of which ran six columns across Friday’s front page.

I like how he thinks about all aspects of his job. Ideally if a reporter hears some great sound at their assignment, they could whip out their audio recorder, talk with the photographer (or take more photos if they are the photog) and lay the groundwork for Soundslides production.

I love the story behind the photo, which is not explained to the readers much in most newsrooms. He explains the composition and what makes the photo powerful. This gives the reader a deeper layer of understanding of what the photographer was thinking when shooting the photo or video.

Good job, Colin!

The survey asked each journalists what took up the biggest percentage of their time out of 24 duties in the past three months.

• Writing Original Stories – 16%
• Other Duties – - 9%
• Editing Text for Content – 6%
• Project Management – 6%
• Blogging – 6%
• Photo/Image Editing – 6%
• Staff organization/administration – 5%
• Training or teaching other staff – 5%
• Writing headlines or blurbs – 4%
• Working on business issues – 4%

But if you look at the tasks as a measure of frequency:

• Training or teaching others in their newsroom: 39 journalists said they’d done this at least once during the last three months.
• Writing headlines or blurbs: 37 said they’d done this.
• Photo/image editing: 36 journalists.
• Editing text for content: 33.
• Project Management: 32.
• Editing for grammar/style: 32.

Hmm, looks pretty traditional to me. Here’s a table of the skills these journalists have. From the list you can see there’s a variety of expertise in various programs, from Soundslides, to audio and video editing and production, HTML, Photoshop, Flash programming and much more. Notice news judgment and grammar and style? Those are the highest rated of the whole bunch.Thornburg questions whether the results are skewed due to a high population of Gannet papers in North Carolina.

I don’t think an online journalist necessarily needs to know how to write for the paper to be a good journalist. But whether they create video, edit audio, blog, or develop Flash presentations, they need to know how to tell a story. David Postman, the political blogger from the Seattle Times, writes all of his content for his blogs (his editors occasionally use his material for the dead tree edition).

Are these changes not happening at small and mid-market newspapers? Are they just not happening in North Carolina? Or is this whole thing just a myth perpetuated by snake oil salesmen? Are those skills not valued by hiring managers?

I have my own thoughts on this, but I’ll look for Thornburg’s next post instead.

Check out the new online primer for video production. It’s got advice from B roll footage to equipment purchasing guides to how to promote your online video. There is even a guide on how to market video ads (because, face it, news is a business in most places in the country).

“Zooming In on Online Video: A Development & Growth Guide for Newspaper Web Sites” is intended to help newspapers of any size develop profitable video applications. As competition heats up for online video mindshare, newspapers have an excellent opportunity to leverage their skills and content and capture an even larger share of online advertising spending.

Also from the ad front, what makes an online video ad less annoying? Read what Mark Glaser wrote on MediaShift (hint: keep it short, silly).

There is so much information here that I’ll likely spend several hours surfing the links. I am glad to see a news tutorial that applies to the ad department.

Thanks to Beth Lawton on Wired Journalists for the heads up on the NAA video training site.

Two weeks ago an EF-5 tornado, the biggest possible on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, ripped through the southern half of Parkersburg, Iowa. Like most communities after tragedy, the town pulled together. Neighbors searched for each other among the wreckage. People pitched in together and cleaned up the roads. So far, eight people have died from their injuries.

The Register’s multimedia presentation merges an attractive flash interface with user-submitted stories, photographer-shot video and it combines before images from the county assessor database with images photographers took after the storm.

The interface is very easy to use. There’s also video of a high school football team digging a double grave at the cemetery because the public works team is too busy repairing gas lines and other essential services.

If you scroll down you can also click on archived stories of the tornado, including footage from a bank ATM camera of a house being destroyed.

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.

[EDIT: IT guys say if you cannot view the video you need to download Flash 9.]

Years ago, my paper used to cover every graduation. Since there are more than 14 in the area (including alternative schools) it was an onerous task. The entire staff was involved. The editors scaled it down to one profile per school. The whole staff was still involved, but it did not include racing from one graduation to another, or sending four reporters out on a Friday night to cover each graduation.

My task when I came here was to pare down our coverage. We were short-staffed throughout the spring due to inevitable turnover, and editors thought graduation took up too many resources. So I had this crazy idea to invite one student from every school that we had previously covered to a panel discussion. We sat down with the seniors and started asking them questions. Are they ready for graduation? Do they want to keep living in Skagit Valley? Will global warming impact your life? How about the Iraq war?

I asked most of the questions with county reporter Ralph Schwartz helping to moderate. City editor Colette Weeks and reporter Aaron Burkhalter recorded the video.

We got some great answers, and I definitely want to do this again. But because this was my paper’s very first try with video, here’s what we would do differently.

1. Tripod. It doesn’t feel like watching the Blair Witch Project, but the first thing anyone sees is the camera shake.
2. Microphones. I’m not sure how this would work with a large group interview, but I plan to find out. Microphones are not terribly expensive. But to get the whole group we need something else. The background noise is almost more audible than the speaking. I tried to remove some of the noise in post-production, and I was able to with the introductions video.
3. Lighting. When we visited the room, the lighting seemed OK. There was ample natural light coming from the north-facing window. But it looks a little dark to me.
4. Identifiers. In one of the videos, you don’t know who is talking. In the other video, half of the time is eaten up by students introducing themselves. It would save a lot of time and create less confusion if we were to just add their names and school affiliation in a nameplate with them talking.
5. Define the story. The only thing that lets people know what the video is about is that it’s located on the same page as the graduation story. It does not stand alone. I should have introduced the package for the first 20 seconds or so with a voice over.

I am certain we will do better in the future. But we had to start somewhere. Even though I knew we didn’t have enough tripods or mics, I wanted to plunge ahead and get that first attempt under our belt.

On a side note, our intern started yesterday. Keith Chaplin is a Washington State University student who is really interested in multimedia. In high school he took a video class that I recently featured in the SVH. He’s going to be with us for 10 short weeks, and I hope we can learn from him as much as he will learn from us.

Reuters apparently sends its reporters out with this combo:

• Nokia N95 phone ~$580: Acts as 5 megapixel video camera, music player, email device and GPS mapper.
• Nokia Wireless Keyboard SU-8W, ~$110: Bluetooth capable to type up reports. Folds down to an easy-to-use size.
• Power Monkey charger ~$120: Uses our mortal enemy, the sun, to charge our electronic devices. For those times when we’re reporting from a very remote location, like Senegal.
• Tripod and mic for the camera, and assorted cords, ~$200

I could definitely see a need for the phone + keyboard in, say, a prominent murder trial. Imagine live blogging the trial, as Ron Sylvester did at his paper last year (link to blog post of his work last year. Sylvester blogs at Technolo-J. His old blog remains a treasure trove of good information).

Tip of the hat to AndyDickenson.net for the heads up. He also links a video on his site.