What is the Star Car?
The Star Car is a mobile interactive newsroom. Reporters drive it to wherever something is happening that you need to know about, turn on the equipment, and they can report live online.

You can even track the Star Car and see where it’s been, and there’s an in-dash camera so you can watch the car as it’s on the way to news! How cool is that? How incredible and innovative!

The Wichita Eagle in Kansas also used some technology to blog about a murder trial — live from inside the courtroom. In this incredible post by the technolo-j blog, the reporter explains his work process during the trial.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigations so liked the reporter’s work that they are using one of his SoundSlides presentations about manufacturing meth as training material.

The writer, court reporter Ron Sylvester, talked about how much time it actually took to write the stories once he got back to the newsroom. The results surprised me:

On workflow, the stories for print were actually easier, because of the live updates I’d filed all day. After court ended, I could go online, take the best of what I wanted to use, cut and paste it into a story, write a new lead and smooth out the transitions. Basically, the updates saw me writing out my notes live. I knew I had the audio for backup, recording the entire trial.

With the time I would have used writing stories from scratch, I added multimedia components with the slide shows and some audio clips of phone calls made the day of the shooting by the sheriff and his deputies.

I got emails from readers who called the updates “addictive.”

A recent murder trial covered by my paper had incredible hits on the Web site. If we could have gotten permission to blog live as the trial was happening, the site probably would have generated a ton more hits throughout the day as people were looking for up-to-the-minute updates.

I am so excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities, but I have to keep reminding myself, slow steps and deep breaths. Not everyone welcomes technology.

Monday I went to a training sponsored by Western Washington SPJ about how to create compelling Soundsides presentations. For those not in the know, Soundslides is a flash-based program where you can combine audio and pictures into a melded project.

The talented Casey McNerthney of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer taught the group of us what goes into a great Soundslides.

First off, the length of the Soundslides is rigorously determined by the length of your audio clip, so make sure the audio is tight. Use of natural sound is incredibly important. Casey suggested checking out the multimedia archive at the Seattle-PI for examples of great Soundslides presentations. A good example of natural sound is the Soundslides about 110 parakeets that were up for adoption at a local animal shelter. Note that this is only 49 seconds long. The photographer, Mike Urban, recorded sound of the parakeets chirping, then likely recorded the interview with the animal shelter official in a quiet room.

A production that took Casey a long time was a Soundslides about the legendary high school football game of Blanchett vs Garfield, a game in 1975 that lasted 2 hours, 55 minutes and went into four overtimes. He took hours and hours of interviews and boiled it down to almost a four minute slideshow. I think he said it was his first Soundslides presentation. Listen to the audio. About midway through he does an interview with two players in a bar, and you can really tell the difference. So be sure you are in a quiet place when collecting audio.

Other points Casey made:

• Have an editor listen to the audio before you compile the pictures together in the Soundslides program. If you have to change the audio afterward, it messes up the pacing of the pictures if the sound track is off by even a tenth of a second.
• Talk with the Web people who will put the Soundslides and the story on the Web site. Make sure your story will get good play or it won’t get good hits (which will make editors and others think Soundslides is a worthless time investment).
• If this is a reporter/photographer team, make sure the photographer is as enthusiastic about the project as you are.
• Photogs need to take bunches of extra pictures for a Soundslides to work. Casey suggested about 40-50 pictures for long projects (3 minutes or more). It’s better to have too many pictures than not enough. Keep the opening shot in mind (like for this presentation by Joshua Trujillo about a sailboat called the Adventuress) as well as a closing shot. Any little detail is fine. Better to have too much than too little.
• It doesn’t take much time to do some Soundslide presentations. He mentioned a breaking news presentation by the News Tribute after a school shooting that was up two hours after the shooting took place (sorry, I looked for it but couldn’t find it on the Trib’s site). Conversely they can also take a long time to get the pacing right.
• When editing audio, have a program open like winamp so you can order and re-order the clips and get a good idea for where they should go.

I like Soundslides presentations because they help journalists do their job: to tell a story.

Here’s a resource page for more the more mundane information, like how to edit audio, what programs to use and what equipment to buy (not linked to Casey McNerthney).

Finally, here is a truly amazing piece of work by Jim Sheeler and Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News. This is their Pulitzer prizewinning piece, Final Salute, the story of a casualty assistance officer with the Marines whose job is to tell the loved ones of fallen soldiers that they have died. To view the slide show, click on the tag that says audio slide show. The story is equally impressive and utterly heartbreaking. While this is not a Soundslides presentation (it’s Flash based), it does show the potential for such projects. Keep in mind, Sheeler spent the most part of a year doing this project and this project alone.