The Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism are usually won by prominent TV and radio organizations. Yesterday, for the first time, a duPont Award went to a Web-based entry. 
MediaStorm's winning entry was Intended Consequences, "a moving multimedia presentation about Rwandan children born of rape," with photographs and interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik. In painfully intimate interviews photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik explores an unfathomable question: can a mother love a child born out of rape. The women profiled in this haunting multimedia presentation were caught in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when mass rapes resulted in the birth of an estimated 20,000 children. It spotlights an issue which had not been as widely covered as other war crimes in Rwanda, and is the first Web-based production to win a duPont Award. The women speak simply about their brutal experiences, their isolation and suffering, and the way forward. The producers made excellent creative choices that contributed to the impact of the reporting without resorting to sensationalism.Well deserved kudos to Brian and his MediaStormtroopers!
Jonathan Torgovnik; photography and interviews; Chad A. Stevens, producer; Jules Shell, on-location video; Bob Sacha, Chad A. Stevens, studio video; Pamela Chen, Sherman Jia, composers; Tim Klimowicz, graphics; Brian Storm, executive producer
Many of my old posts that deal with tips about how to do video storytelling and audio slideshows get linked on a lot of blogs used by college professors who teach digital media classes. Most of these posts are buried amongst my pontifications about the changes facing the newspaper industry. So for anyone interested, here is a roundup of my best multimedia suggestions and useful tip posts in one place…Topics include:
What are some of the ethical issues facing videojournalists? How do they compare to ethical considerations confronted by print reporters and photojournalists? 
Some good news about the National Press Photographers Association Advanced Storytelling Workshop, coming up in April in Texas. They've just added Kathy Kieliszewski (pictured) of the Detroit Free Press as an instructor. She's the newspaper's four-time National Emmy Award winning multimedia producer. Though she and her team have worked closely with a local TV station, her roots are in newspaper video production, and her staff has grown organically from the paper's still photography department. This exciting week-long program is designed for experienced TV and newspaper photojournalist, reporters, and video journalist (VJs) - anyone who tells stories with moving pictures, sound and words. We pick up where the Oklahoma NewsVideo Workshops leaves off. We have broadened our scope to include journalists working for newspapers and one-man-bands. Several of our faculty were working solo and winning Photographer of the Year awards long before anyone used the term VJ.Participants must bring their own equipment -- including camera, tripod, microphones, lights, battery charger, laptop, and DVDs to burn assignments for critiques.
Everyone is a participant. Working solo or in teams, you will develop story ideas, research, report, shoot, edit and produce complete packages under real world deadlines. Critiques and one-on-one sessions abound.
You will participate in regular assignment meetings where story ideas are evaluated and refined. Great emphasis is placed on developing a clear focus BEFORE the shooting process begins. Shooting, writing and editing is conducted under real world deadlines.
Finished stories are critiqued with an emphasis on constructive suggestions for improvement.
We're fond of the Kodak Zi8 pocket videocamera for reasons we've previously delineated here. At the Consumer Electronics Show, Kodak unveiled its successor, newly christened the PlaySport Zx3. 
Several world-class photographers, including Mary Ellen Mark, are donating the use of their works to create a special edition of a magazine that you can buy as a fundraising effort to provide medical and disaster relief to Haiti. All proceeds will be donated to the International Red Cross. “The news of the disaster in Haiti deeply touched me, both as a person and as a photojournalist. I wondered what I could do to help, and spoke with my friend and colleague Peter Pereira, who had the privilege of shooting in Haiti in November 2009. The idea began with his essay, but others quickly came forward with generous contributions and before we knew it we had a magazine. We started on the morning of the 13th and had it available before midnight on the 14th."This 40-page special issue is available at magcloud.com
With massive layoffs at newspapers and TV news departments, photojournalists and videojournalists are legitimately complaining that their industry is passing them by. Even the best and brightest are being sent to pasture. Top newspapers in our nation's capital have recently lost the award-winning talents of luminaries such as Travis Fox and Pierre Kattar (Washington Post) and Mary Calvert and Janet Reeves (Washington Times) -- a horrifying scenario that's reverberating in newsrooms throughout the land.The Marx Brothers were great at vaudeville. Live comedy in a theatre. And then the market for vaudeville was killed by the movies. Groucho didn't complain about this or argue that people should respect the hard work he and his brothers had put in. No, they went into the movies.OK, all you visual storytellers. Now that your stock photos sell for pennies, media staff positions are drying up, and "citizen photographers" are cornering the market with shoddy goods at the right price (free!) -- what are you going to do with your talents?
Then the market for movies like the Marx Brothers were making dried up. Groucho didn't start trying to fix the market. Instead, he saw a new medium and went there. His TV work was among his best (and certainly most lucrative).
It's extremely difficult to repair the market.
It's a lot easier to find a market that will respect and pay for the work you can do. Technology companies have been running this race for years. Now, all of us must.
If some cultural shift has turned what you do into a commodity, don't argue. Find a new place before the competition does. It's not easy or fair, but it's true.
We're often asked which hybrid DSLR camera we'd recommend for shooting both stills and video, the frontrunners invariably being Canon and Nikon. Canon DSLRs have the lead in the fusion space. Comparing the video from a D3s to a Canon 1D MKIV, serious video/filmmaker types (and those who aspire to be serious like me) prefer the Canon.Read the full post here.
I’ve spoken with several filmmakers about this as well as some software engineers and other tech types. They’ve all confirmed my findings. The Nikon suffers from several drawbacks.
1) Short HD clip duration (5 minutes) – the Canons shoot 12 minutes.
2) No 1080p video – Yes 720 is fine for most situations, but serious filmmakers are all fixing their sites on 1080p, which will soon be the minimum standard for HD. The Canons shoot at 1080p.
3) Motion JPG – this codec has crippled Nikon’s video. The quality just doesn’t compare to the H.264 wrapper that comes around Canon’s video. Using a program like MPEG Streamclip, you can convert the Canon video to Pro Res. You can’t get true Pro Res out of the Nikon video. Those three letters “JPG” say it all.
4) Manual control over exposure – There are manual controls but they are far from user-friendly and you have to know the secret handshake to make them work. I’ve asked 20 or more D3s/D300s owners if they know how to get the camera to allow manual control over exposure when shooting video and none of them knew how to do it. This is not reason enough to rule the camera out for video, but it does not help. Ergonomics matter.If you’re shooting video for your kids, or for your high school film project, or something casual, the Nikon footage will work. But for serious filmmakers who want a professional caliber tool, changes have to be made to Nikon’s video. There’s a reason that major motion pictures like the latest Terminator movie are using Canon DSLR’s for video and not Nikons.
It's awards season, and we're joining the party by announcing the first annual KobreGuide Awards, for the best videojournalism projects of 2009.
If you want to learn visual editing, your best bargain is the intensive Kalish Workshop, June 4-8 at Ball State University in Indiana. Registration is only $500 to work with top pros.The 2010 Kalish is accepting applications [through May 1] for the 21st edition of this venerable workshop. It's an opportunity to learn cross-platform multimedia skills from a faculty of Emmy and Pulitzer Prize winning visual editors. Brian Storm, Geri Migielicz, Sue Morrow, Randy Cox and Kenny Irby will be on the faculty this year, along with other industry experts. The core faculty has worked together on this program for many years and most of them stay through the duration of the workshop, providing ample time to answer your questions. Last year we closed registration at 30 people and attracted a diverse group of working professionals, students and professors from six countries. It was one of our most successful workshops and this year should be better.More info here.
After much thought, and vigorous eyebrow raising, The Kalish board, with the support of the National Press Photographers Foundation, have decided to keep the registration fee for this year's workshop at $500. It's the lowest rate you'll find for a workshop of this quality. You'll receive four full days (June 4-8) of intense hands-on instruction.
The traditional Kalish values of ethical decision-making in journalism and management remain. The workshop begins with a primer in FinalCut Pro, progresses through picture selection, multiple picture editing and news judgment, to multimedia and management.
The days are long and packed with real-life decision-making exercises in visual storytelling, which you will be expected to defend in front of the group. We work hard and then we play hard. Please ask any Kalish alum about their experience with us; they are our best references. You can hear testimonials and learn more about the workshop at kalishworkshop.org .
Entries are now being accepted for the 7th annual National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism Contest, which features a slew of Web video categories.Multimedia Package*****
Highlights the use of audio, video and animation in the presentation of web-based stories. Judges will pay special attention to the use of available technology to complement and enhance the art of visual storytelling.
Entries may include single galleries, slideshows or video, as well as packages that include multiple elements that were grouped and published together as a single story or theme.
Content, usability, and interactivity are key to this celebration of cutting-edge storytelling.
Audio Slideshows
Audio-enhanced collections of still photographs presented in a gallery or slideshow format, that tell a clear story. Animation can be used only to advance from one photograph to another.
This category is for still photography combined with audio only. There is no video allowed in this category.
An entry is defined as a single gallery or slideshow; not a group or collection of slideshows. Web packages that include multiple slideshows should be entered as Multimedia Packages.
The emphasis here is on presenting great News, Sports and Feature photographs with the additional level of detail that audio can provide.
'Tis the season of "ten best" lists, and we thought about posting our ten best "ten best" lists, but that seemed too ... ambitious. So we'll bring to the party instead this forward-looking list of "Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2010," courtesy of Journalism.co.uk. 1. How to monitor Twitter and other social media networks for breaking news or general conversations in your subject area using tools such as TweetDeck. Understand and use hashtags.Read the rest of the list here.
2. You are in control. Don’t become a slave to technology, make it your slave instead. You will need to develop strategies to cope with information overload – filter, filter, filter!
3. You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious and StumbleUpon. As Publish2 puts it: “Help your readers get news from social media. More signal. Less noise.”
4. Your beat will be online and you will be the community builder. Creating communities and maintaining their attention will increasingly be down to the efforts of individual journalists; you may no longer be able to rely on your employer’s brand to attract reader loyalty in a fickle and rapidly changing online world (see 7).
5. Core journalistic skills are still crucial. You can acquire as many multimedia and programming skills as you want, but if you are unable to tell a story in an accurate and compelling way, no one will want to consume your content.
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