Once again we're sharing some video tutorials about videojournalism from the International Journalists' Network. They're from top pros in Washington, D.C.
The first two are from Pierre Kattar, who produced Emmy-winning videojournalism for the Washington Post, and now flies solo.
*** These next two are from Bill Gentile, a pioneering videojournalist who teaches at American University in Washington, D.C., where he founded and directs the school's Backpack Journalism Project.
UPDATE:To see the archived videos and liveblog of this event, go here.
Watch this space on Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 9am ET (6am PT) for the livestream of Beet.TV's videojournalism panel, "Exploring the digital transformation of video news reporting and distribution."
The panelists consitute a veritable Who's Who of top execs at major media institutions. (See list here.)
On Twitter, you can follow Beet.TV via @Beet_TV . The hashtag for the livestream is #beetmeet.
Congrats to Sonya Doctorian, new deputy director of photography at the Washington Post. She will focus primarily on photo projects, staff development and multimedia storytelling.
Doctorian is an independent online videojournalist based in Denver who joined the Rocky Mountain News in 2003 as projects photo editor. She also worked as its first videojournalist until the paper closed in 2009, just short of its 150th anniversary. Doctorian and the video team won a regional Emmy for their online documentary, "Final Edition," which chronicled the newspaper's final weeks. After the Rocky folded, she began producing independent short-form documentaries.
"Filling the Gap" documented a weekend of free dental care for hundreds of uninsured patients who showed up at the Colorado Dental Association's "Mission of Mercy."
"Silverton Saves Its Paper" chronicled how a local Colorado historical society rescued a small town's beloved century-old weekly publication on the brink of closure. It won the KobreGuide Award for Best Videojournalism Story of 2009 in the "Media" category.
FYI, Sonya was one of Prof. Kobre's photojournalism students when he was teaching at University of Missouri. She went on to earn her master's in documentary filmmaking from American University in Wash., D.C., and has held top photojournalism positions at the St. Petersburg Times, The State (Columbia, SC), The Knoxville News-Sentinel, and the Tampa Tribune. We look forward to seeing her imprint on the Post's visual journalism.
Making the transition from photojournalism to videojournalism is a tough challenge. But making the leap from print to video -- now that's a big mountain to climb. Especially when your newspaper still expects you to keep churning out news and feature text stories.
And yet that's exactly what's been happening in newsrooms across the nation for the past few years. The assumption is that vidcam technology is sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous, and instinctive to use, that any reporter can point and shoot some footage while on assignment ... and then stitch together something in Final Cut that flickers and talks to go along with the story.
Lost in the equation is any notion that videos must constitute a) good journalism, and b) good storytelling.
Ian Shapira is a veteran Washington Post journalist who pursued a master's degree in "interactive journalism" at American University, nights and weekends, while still hammering away at his day job.
In the newspaper's Story Lab blog, he posted his first video effort online, and invited his readers to assess his progress. It's a four-minute profile of a DC-based DJ. But what caught our attention was his candid assessment of what it entails to bridge that chasm between print and video.
Excerpt:
My transition from writer to video journalist has not been comfortable. I constantly fumbled with the tripod -- right in front of my subject -- which was about as embarrassing as getting caught with one's fly open. And I spent so many hours late into the evening with the video editing software Final Cut Express that I wondered whether I was even doing journalism anymore, or computer science.
More important, I discovered that making a compelling video for a website such as The Post's requires a fundamentally different kind of journalistic skill. As a writer with a pen and notepad, I have several logistical advantages over the video folks: I can reconstruct scenes that I am physically not able to witness; I don't need to lug around heavy equipment to film or record every tiny yet important atmospheric nuance; and, perhaps most obvious, I can persuade people in sensitive situations -- often, the very people who make the essence of a story -- to be quoted in an article, while those same people might scram when you utter the words "Can I mic you up?"
As fate would have it, his colleague Whitney Shefte, an accomplished Post videojournalist, concurrently made the reverse transition -- penning her first-ever article, a profile of a blues musician (for which she shot an accompanying video). Here's what she had to say:
[W]riting is telling and not showing. A written story asks for more of my own voice. It requires me to verbalize my observations instead of just piecing together what the camera captures. I can allow the subject to tell their own story from beginning to end in video. Sure, I edit out a lot of material, inevitably inserting my voice with each cut I make. But I’m never adding anything that wasn’t there. Video feels more true to me, more objective...
Unless the video has a narrator, old photographs or reenactments, history can’t really be shown on the screen. I had to do a lot more research than I do for video to uncover that history. At the same time, subjects open up more when a camera isn’t present. There are nuggets in written stories that no photographer or video journalist has access to. And while writing, I was also able to focus in a new way.
Both Shapira and Shefte's observations are noteworthy, and offer insight into the bigger picture, as publications plunge headlong into multimedia journalism.
Does it even make sense for writers to learn how to shoot and edit video? For video journalists to become writers? Shouldn't news organizations such as The Post invest in more specialists? Or, given our industry's financial upheaval, is a more versatile staff better?
Check out Shapira's video, and Shefte's text story, and see what you think.
There's some bad blood brewing between law enforcement agents and photographers -- both professional and amateur. Though the law is generally on the side of the photographers, it's obviously difficult for them to press the issue in the heat of the moment when a burly security official is overstepping his bounds and trying to prevent him from shooting pictures or video.
The First Amendment protects the right of citizens to take photographs in public places. Even after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have reiterated that right in official policies.
But in practice, those rules don't always filter down to police officers and security guards who continue to restrict photographers, often citing authority they don't have. Almost nine years after the terrorist attacks, which ratcheted up security at government properties and transportation hubs, anyone photographing federal buildings, bridges, trains or airports runs the risk of being seen as a potential terrorist.
Reliable statistics on detentions and arrests of photographers are hard to come by, but photographers, their advocates and even police agree that confrontations still occur frequently. Photographers had run-ins with police before the 2001 attacks, but constitutional lawyers say the combination of heightened security concerns and the spread of digital cameras has made such incidents more common.
The situation has reached a boiling point.
The National Press Photographers Association this week announced its support for a House resolution to protect photographers from police interference. Read about it here.
NPPA's leadership was pleased to see that U.S. Representative Edolphus Towns of New York's 10th District introduced House Congressional Resolution 298, which recognizes that the videotaping or photographing of police who are engaged in potentially abusive activity in a public place should not be prosecuted in state or federal courts.
NPPA's leadership asked Rep. Towns to take the next step in protecting photographers' First Amendment rights by changing his Resolution, suggesting that Towns instead introduce his proposal as a Congressional Bill.
What's clearly needed is better education of rank-and-file officers on the street by the law enforcement agencies that hire and train them. Often well-intentioned police overstep their bounds and harass innocent shooters simply because of their own ignorance of the law, and some vague notion that anyone taking a picture is somehow a security threat.
Further, police are inappropriately citing wiretapping laws, wrongly claiming that shooting pictures constitutes illegal electronic surveillance. NPPA's general counsel, photojournalist Mickey H. Osterreicher, wrote about this issue this week for the Media Law Resource Center: "Photography Restrictions Run Rampant."
Although the First Amendment has been under constant attack since its ratification, incidents occurring over the past few months might lead one to believe that the War on Terror is taking its toll on a mistaken enemy. In Houston, a homeowner filed a civil rights complaint because he was arrested for "illegal photography" after a taking pictures of a police sergeant who followed him into his own home. A student photographer at Ohio State University was handcuffed and charged with criminal trespass by university police after attempting to photograph two cows that were roaming the campus. School employees and police told him he was not allowed to take pictures of the incident, despite the fact that he was a student photojournalist working for the school paper and he was on public property.
In Miami two photojournalists were told by private security for the transit system and Miami-Dade police officers that they were not allowed to photograph in and around the metro stop. Police also barred the pair from entering the station although they had metro tickets and threatened them with arrest if they did not comply. Another similar incident occurred in Atlanta where a person was ordered off a train and off MARTA property by a transit employee for taking pictures. Almost as disturbing was a subsequent post by a MARTA customer service representative who justified the action as a result of “the 9/11 attack and the subway bombings in Spain and the UK.”
Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts are just three states where police are using obscure wiretap laws to prosecute people for recording the activities of police officers on public streets and roadways. In Boston one man was arrested for “illegal electronic surveillance” after he recorded audio of police officers making a drug arrest. In Baltimore, several people face felony charges for recording their own arrests. All of these incidents happened in public.
Osterreicher goes on to cite, in devastating detail, the numerous reports of government interference with press coverage of BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
While these incidents only create anecdotal evidence, they do seem to point to a shift in how free speech is viewed by both law enforcement and the public. In many cases police officers make up new laws. In other incidents the police and the public seem to truly believe that they are enforcing or articulating laws or unwritten policies that do not actually exist. Still other cases appear to be an abuse of discretion as authorities ignore well founded constitutional principles. It is therefore incumbent upon the legal community to directly address these cases as soon as possible.
Educating the public, and its sworn protectors, seems to be the most feasible solution, he argues.
While assaults on the First Amendment continue it also appears that a commonsense approach in individually redressing even the most egregious of these abridgements has yielded some positive results. Continuing vigilance against this uninformed attitude along with efforts to make the general public and law enforcement aware of the dangers that accompany such infringements will help protect these precious freedoms.
Meanwhile, ABC reports on the "Growing Number of Prosecutions for Videotaping the Police," offering as evidence this video that motorcyclist Anthony Graber shot with his helmet-cam -- of him being stopped for speeding by a plainclothes state trooper with a drawn pistol. He was arrested for posting the video on YouTube, an "offense" for which he faces 16 years in jail.
State police officers raided Graber's parents' home in Abingdon, Md. They confiscated his camera, computers and external hard drives. Graber was indicted for allegedly violating state wiretap laws by recording the trooper without his consent.
Arrests such as Graber's are becoming more common along with the proliferation of portable video cameras and cell-phone recorders. Videos of alleged police misconduct have become hot items on the Internet. YouTube still features Graber's encounter along with numerous other witness videos. "The message is clearly, 'Don't criticize the police,'" said David Rocah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is part of Graber's defense team. "With these charges, anyone who would even think to record the police is now justifiably in fear that they will also be criminally charged."
Carlos Miller, a Miami journalist who runs the blog "Photography Is Not a Crime," said he has documented about 10 arrests since he started keeping track in 2007. Miller himself has been arrested twice for photographing the police. He won one case on appeal, he said, while the other was thrown out after the officer twice failed to appear in court.
"They're just regular citizens with a cell-phone camera who happen to come upon a situation," Miller said. "If cops are doing their jobs, they shouldn't worry."
Again, the conclusion is that the friction between camera-wielders and cops is getting worse, mainly because of a widespread misunderstanding of the law.
Law enforcement officials have a hard time explaining the gap between policy and practice. The disconnect, legal experts say, may stem from a dearth of guidelines about how to balance security concerns with civil liberties.
"Security guards are often given few rules to follow, but they have clearly gotten the message that they need to be extra vigilant," said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. "In the end, it seems you never know how a particular security guard is going to react."
Last year, New York City police sought to clarify the rules on photography with a directive to all officers. It said that photography is "rarely unlawful" and that officers have no right to demand to see photos or to delete them. Like Washington, New York is a potential terrorist target but also a major tourist destination, and as a result, the directive said, "practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct."
Police officials say officers who seek to stop photography are driven by safety concerns and the fact that the presence of a camera can spike emotions.
Now photographers are fighting back en masse.
Photographers are challenging unwarranted restrictions by collecting hundreds of photos that prompted police questioning, detention or arrest; the pictures are posted on online photo sharing sites such as Flickr.
Local photographers are also testing trouble spots, especially outside federal buildings, many of which are guarded by the Federal Protective Service, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security that has 1,225 officers and 15,000 contract guards to secure more than 9,000 buildings nationwide.
Photographers say police need to be told explicitly not to prohibit photography, because officers often don't respond well to impromptu citizen lectures on constitutional law.
The Washington Post details 10 local incidents where photographers were erroneously asked to stop taking pictures, including this one:
A Union Station security guard interrupts the taping of a TV news segment with an Amtrak official. The official was trying to explain that photography is allowed at Union Station. The incident illustrates the problems photographers encounter at the station, which is controlled by multiple entities. Amtrak controls only the ticketing area and waiting area. A parking management firm has jurisdiction over the parking garage. The guard who interrupted the interview worked for a real estate firm that oversees the retail and dining areas. (Photographs inside a store or restaurant require permission from its proprietor.) All three entities say they allow photography in public areas, but photographers are often told inconsistent information.
The Online News Association today announced NPR's Vivian Schiller and AOL's Tim Armstrong will headline a “keynote conversation” moderated by WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher at its annual conference in Washington, D.C. in October.
Jump-starting the discussion on reinventing media companies will be Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR as President and CEO in 2009, coming from The New York Times Company where she served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of NYTimes.com....
Joining Schiller in conversation will be Tim Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of AOL, LLC. Armstrong is responsible for setting strategy and overseeing the businesses and day-to-day operations of the company. He joined AOL in March 2009 from Google, where he served as the President of The Americas Operations...
Moderating the pair will be Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. A former reporter for the Washington Post, Swisher the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web” and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”...
You can get more info on the 2010 ONA Conference and Online Journalism Awards Banquet, and register, here.
Photo District News reports that Getty Images dropped a freelance photographer for digitally altering a golf photo, even though the transgressing photo was apparently transmitted by mistake.
Dallas Morning News photo editor Guy Reynolds originally alerted Getty to the fact that he had received two near-identical images of golfer Matt Bettencourt, both by photographer Marc Feldman. One showed his caddy over his shoulder (above), but in the other the caddy is replaced by trees (below).
Getty immediately issued a "kill" command to subscribers, and in adherance to a zero-tolerance policy on photo manipulation, terminated its relationship with Feldman.
He said he was in the press tent processing the images when Bettencourt and his caddie stopped by to see some of the pictures. Feldman said the caddie, looking at the image in question, said it would be better if he wasn't in it. "So I showed them how easy I could do that. I thought I just saved it to the desktop, not to the send folder," he said. "I certainly did not mean to send both of them to Getty."
"There was absolutely no intent to pass this off as a real image. Only a moron would have sent both," he said. "And I would've done it a lot better, too."
The fact that he sent both the original and the retouched photo is pretty solid evidence that he wasn't trying to pull a fast one. ...
Feldman, 61, certainly isn't the only photographer to make a gaffe and pay the price for it.
"I understand Getty has a reputation to uphold. I certainly don't blame them for letting me go," he said. "I know the ethical standards for editorial clients. I just wish my long relationship with them didn't have to end like this....I've been doing this for 26 years," he said. "Sometimes you make a mistake and it's fatal. I made a fatal mistake."
*****
Another digitally doctored photo is causing a stir, but because it wasn't committed by a journalism institution, the ethical breach isn't as cut-and-dried. However, because it was committed by BP, it has cast a shadow over the beleaguered oil company's claims of communications "transparency."
The offending photo, of employees gathered in BP's Houston crisis room, is prominently displayed on the company's Website. Essentially, someone did a really lousy job of copying/pasting three underwater images onto a wall display. The blogger took BP to task for the sloppiness of its subterfuge as much as it did for the deceit itself.
BP blamed the photographer, though it's unclear whether the photographer was working at the company's behest, as is usually the case with corporate images. You can follow the brouhaha, in infinite detail, here.
As the Washington Post concluded: "Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks."
What is perhaps most startling about both the golf and BP incidents is that the online commenters are split over whether doctoring photos this way is acceptable practice -- even in journalism. Some cite the "slippery slope" warning, other vehemently claim it's no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Given the technological capabilities of programs like Photoshop, many people apparently presume photos are somehow tidied up before publication anyway. Hardcore ethicists (and professional news guidelines), however, argue that a lie is a lie, and altering reality destroys credibility.
A blook is a collaborative system to fill the gap between a blog and a book. It fuses opinions from us and you to create a polished and comprehensive set of topic discussions.
Well, it's an onscreen flipbook collection of essays by academics and professionals who talk about the pros and cons of government bailouts of newspapers and citizen journalism and ... well, go look for yourself.
On the OurBlook website, you can find blooks on all sorts of topics, and read and watch video of the interviews with their contributors. Here are some that pertain to journalism:
Advice for newspapers that want to live to see the future? Nothing especially original, but here it is, in a nutshell:
Step 1. Abandon print (unless you're USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or Washington Post). It's obsolete.
Step 2. "Carve out a niche that makes the paper's web site dominant, irreplaceable and one of a kind." Translation: local news. (We would add: Dynamic multimedia and videojournalism.)
Step 3. Start charging (via subscriptions or micropayments).
And, as you can judge from the book's cover (pictured) -- if you click to enlarge it, and read the fine print -- one thing we'll definitely still need in the future is editors.
Hurry! The first round of YouTube's Project: Report contest ends tomorrow (Sunday). Upload your three-minute video (about a day in the life of someone who's making a positive impact on their community), and you could win a $10,000 grant to pursue videojournalism internationally.
We've previously shared YouTube's video tips for producing your video, here and here.
Now we've got another half dozen doses of advice about media management, story building, editing techniques, compression, audience building, promoting your video, and incorporating print journalism techniques into your video reporting.
Each short video features an accomplished professional videojournalist. So whether or not you choose to enter the contest, you're bound to glean some useful instruction here:
Project Report Production Tip #9:Media Management
(Whitney Shefte, Washington Post videojournalist)
***
Project Report Production Tip #10:Story Building
(Pierre Kattar, former Washington Post videojournalist)
***
Project Report Production Tip #11:Editing Techniques
(Robin Bell, Bell Visuals production company)
***
Project Report Production Tip #12: Compression
(Michael Rickley, Azimuth Media video producer)
***
Project Report Production Tip #13:Increasing Your Audience
(Mark Stanley, New Media Strategist, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting)
***
Project Report Production Tip #14:Print to Video Journalism
(Jason Motlagh, Pulitzer Center international multimedia journalist)
***
CRITERIA: What makes a great videojournalism story?
If you decide to enter, be sure to read the rules. And even videojournalists who don't enter would do well to heed the judging criteria below (which, not coincidentally, is remarkably similar to the checklist we use to select video stories to showcase on KobreGuide to the Web's Best Videojournalism).
# Is the story topic interesting and compelling?
# Was the story reported from an original and unique perspective?
# How thorough was the reporting?
# Did the Entrant have an engaging storytelling style?
# How well did the Entrant technically execute the video? (i.e. the use of camera, sound, lighting, and editing)
# What was the overall impression?
Tom Kennedy consults on, speaks about, and trains others in visual journalism. He was managing editor for multimedia at The Washington Post and, before that, director of photography for National Geographic magazine. He has created, directed, and edited visual journalism projects that have earned Pulitzer Prizes, EMMY, Peabody, and Edward R. Murrow awards.
This semester, Kennedy is "working with visual journalism graduate students to create an innovative website that will evaluate the State of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals in seven Asian and African cities... His project will become part of the Center’s current anchor project: Our City. As a component of the project, graduate students from the visual journalism program at the University of Miami will work with faculty and students at journalism institutions in Africa and Asia creating local stories about global issues like poverty, environmental sustainability, HIV AIDS, maternal health and primary education."
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.
Every photography and journalism trade publication wails, "How can this be happening?" and "What can we do to stop the bloodbath?" Sure, we know all the economic reasons, but it's so... unfair! To rob these superstars of their forum, and deprive audiences of their work is so... wrong!
Then we read this recent blog post by marketing superguru Seth Godin. Though he was addressing mass marketers, his wisdom applies to visual journalists as well: "Just because you're good at something doesn't mean the market cares any longer."
He imparts cold truths by reminding us of the career of comic genius Groucho Marx.
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.
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.
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?
What's your plan?
Are there avenues still open for you to explore? Probably not. Those days are gone, kaput -- get used to it, live with it, deal with it. Can you forge new avenues, create new paths, blaze new trails? Pioneer and conquer new territory, like Groucho did? You bet your life.
The Concentra Award 2010, for global excellence in videojournalism, is now open for entries. The $10,000 prize is awarded annually "to a journalist who, in terms of both substance and production, produced an interesting news item which was broadcast or published on a news website."
"By awarding this prize, 'Concentra Media' aims to promote healthy competition between the various makers of television news items. Concentra also wishes to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves."
Last year's winner was Alexandra Garcia from the Washington Post for her story “The Healing Fields,” which is showcased on KobreGuide.com .
Deadline for Concentra entries is January 22, 2010. The award ceremony will take place on March 30, 2010 in Antwerp, Belgium.
Those Google geniuses are at it again. Take a look at Living Stories, "a new, experimental way to consume news, developed by a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. You can read the same reporting and analysis that you expect from the Times and the Post, delivered on a highly interactive platform."
One video is worth 10,000 words:
Happily, these Living Stories include visual elements, including slideshows and video.
Read the behind-the-scenes story on the creation of Living Stories, and let us know what you think. Once it's fleshed out to incorporate more topics, is this something you plan to use? Why or why not?
I conceived of KobreGuide to the Web's Best Videojournalism when I could not easily locate quality multimedia and video online. I knew it was out there because I had looked hard to find it. Today, with the KobreGuide assembling all the best multimedia and videojournalism stories in one place, I have for the past year been wowed by the range and quality of the material being produced around the world using this story-telling format.
Since the KobreGuide launched last year, I also have witnessed a vast improvement in the overall quality of multimedia/videojournalism, often produced by former newspaper and magazine still photojournalists. Many of these talented shooters working for local papers or national magazines were handed an audio recorder and/or video camera and told to start making multimedia stories -- while, of course, they were still shooting their daily print assignments.
The first attempts of these newbie multimedia makers were not always polished. Photographers had to learn the skills of interviewing, voiceover, and collecting natural sound. Even their shooting approach had to change. No longer was it enough to watch and wait for the one telling shot that would make the front page or magazine cover, or win a Pulitzer. No longer did the photographer need only seven dynamite pictures for a picture page. The multimedia photojournalist had to bring back 40 good shots -- enough images to cover a 3- to 5- minute multimedia piece. The multimedia photojournalist had to capture images that would serve as transitions, images that would carry a story line, images that would reveal the past or anticipate the future.
Still photographers, who were at home with their Nikons or Canons, were handed a Sony or Panasonic video camera and expected to quickly master this new hardware, which featured strange buttons, XLR plugs and shotgun mics. Not only does a videocamera take pictures at 29 frames per second, it also simultaneously records sound. Photojournalists were expected to interview subjects and gather far more information than traditionally necessary for photo captions.
Still photographers, whose former sole job was to capture meaningful still images to accompany a writer’s story, were now expected to become the writer, the producer and the editor of their story in the new online world. They were tossed into the role of soloist in a one-man-band, with an unfamiliar instrument.
While some photographers balked at the assignment, others leapt into the fray. They had, in fact, chosen photojournalism in order to tell stories with pictures. Now they had their chance. No longer stymied by a lack of space to run photos in the newspaper or magazine, no longer second fiddle to reporters, the new multimedia/videojournalists could find, report, shoot, interview and produce a complete, comprehensive, original package without depending on anyone else.
Today, former newspaper and magazine photojournalists have morphed into complete visual storytellers. Newspapers from the St. Petersburg Times to the Spokane Spokesman-Review are producing memorable multimedia stories. The Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times showcase strong short documentaries daily. For many photojournalists, online multimedia and videojournalism have inaugurated a new “Golden Age” of compelling visual journalism.
Gorgeous. Crazy good. Stunning. User experience is unlike anything we've seen. They threw in, in an organized way, the kitchen sink on this project and succeeded in presenting an innovative and informative look at the issue of water. There is multi-dimensional, multiple media story-telling going on here. Heads and tails above the rest.
There's an awesome coordination between map points, graphics and video. That's innovation. They built a heat map of residential water use that's remarkable. Las Vegas put it all together.
Once you start exploring, it's a great piece. It has depth because it lets you explore not only the site, but how it was planned, how it was built via interviews with the architects and a 3D walkthrough. It works very well at different levels. Excellent use of the technologies and the tools.
This is a stark, black-and-white tale of an Iowa family of farmers. It feels extremely original, the camera work seems expert and the interviews will break your heart while never lingering on any one expression or sentiment. There's a richness, restraint and even a little dark humor here that was nowhere in any of the other videos.
Very funny expression of presidential campaign highlights, built entirely on selection of key moments in stills and video and then blending them in a frenetic editing style that works to create the "viral video" formula. It is an interesting commentary experiment offering the kind of analysis that cannot ordinarily be found in straight journalistic reporting by newspapers. (SEE BELOW!)
*****
Kudos to the Online Journalism Awards finalists, including:
And for those patient enough to scroll all the way through these, here is a sampler of Slate V's winning entry, The Power Recap (Online Video Journalism, Large Site). It's only one of a series of six remarkably funny and clever high-speed glimpses of last year's Presidential race, so be sure to check out the others -- along with all the OJA finalsts and winners.
Learn new video skills, improve your techniques and... join the winners of NPPA's Best of Photojournalism video contest in this innovative online workshop. You'll get detailed accounts on the creation of their videos. You'll learn their methods, listen to their insights, watch their work and ask them questions in this daylong online event.
Speakers will include:
* Darren Durlach, WBFF-TV in Baltimore, NPPA's 2009 Ernie Crisp Television News Photographer of the Year * Boyd Huppert, KARE in Minneapolis, a three-time winner of the NPPA Special Award for Reporting * Greg T. Johnson, WFAA-TV in Dallas, NPPA's 2009 Video Editor of the Year * Pierre Katta, WashingtonPost.com, Emmy Award-winning video producer
If you can't attend the live event, or can't commit to the entire day, we'll have an archived replay available soon after the live workshop. Your registration for the live event will also give you access to the replay plus our bonus resources.
MSNBC celebrates the tenth anniversary of its creation of an entire subgenre of photojournalism, the "Week in Pictures" online slideshow feature, with this behind-the-scenes video, below (6:23).
The concept was originated by former MSNBC multimedia director Brian Storm (now founding president of MediaStorm).
"It wasn't an effort to recap the news," he explains. "It wasn't the week in review. We were much more focused on showing people the diversity of the world we live in."
A decade ago, MSNBC editors picked through only a couple thousand images each week. Today they look at more than 65,000 weekly -- or 3 million per year.
Ten MSNBC editors select 150 finalists each week; then 3 editors (in case of ties) debate which are the best, finding the right balance between tragic and lighthearted.
When online readers were eventually allowed to start voting on their favorites, they consistently cast their ballots in favor of lighter fare. But Brian Storm says that those images only helped heighten the gravitas of the more newsworthy images. Also, the sunnier images hooked viewers, exposing them to darker issue-oriented images that they might not otherwise have searched for.
In this video, Tom Kennedy also weighs in with his experiences building the same feature as former director of multimedia at WashingtonPost.com . The concept is now a popular staple at online publications ranging from the Boston Globe to Time Magazine to Yahoo News.
Naturally, we at KobreGuide champion these pioneering endeavours, as we think of ourselves as their video counterpart -- sifting through large quantities of videojournalism stories from diverse sources each week, so that we can cull an array of the highest-quality gems for your viewing pleasure.
The New York Times multimedia staff that puts together its delicious 'One in 8 Million' weekly feature is now fielding viewers' questions.
'One in 8 Million' is an oral history project in which a different individual among New York City's 8 million residents is profiled each week of 2009. As Jodi Rudoren, deputy Metro editor, put it in a memo earlier this year: "The criteria for profile subjects are simple: Interesting person. Great talker. Never before mentioned in the NYT."
We get to know each person through their own images and accompanying audio, ranging from 'Michel Kramer-Metraux: Wedding Wardrober' to 'Mark Mocha: Ex Bank-Robber.'
Times staff members involved with producing 'One in 8 Million' are answering questions from readers Aug. 3-7, 2009, for its 'Talk to the Times' feature. Questions may be e-mailed to askthetimes@nytimes.com.
P.S. Compare the Times' approach to individual 'everyday people' multimedia portraits with the Washington Post's similar 'On Being' weekly series.
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