Capturing Exuberance

While the grand opening of a new Apple store is always a curiously exuberant event, with hundreds of MacFans camping out overnight to be among the first through the doors, it's not typically worthy of newspaper coverage. At least that was the thinking at the Spokane's Spokesman Review. But that didn't stop multimedia producer Colin Mulvany from realizing that there would undoubtedly be some fun footage to play with, so he shot it on his day off.

"Because of that, I gave myself a little more latitude to get more creative with my storytelling," he writes on his new Snaps and Frames blog, which is usually devoted to one supersized original still image per entry.

I used my new Nikon D3s to shoot sequences of images, which I used as mini time-lapse segments. I kept the interview narrative tight, instead just letting the natural sound and visuals tell the story. The music could be considered over-done, but I like the mood it creates. It is a wacky edit that take me into uncharted storytelling territory.

P.S. On his blog, Colin gives his new Nikon D3 a big thumbs up. Read his review here.

Looking Back with Archival Images

USA Today invested time and resources into assembling a noteworthy multimedia package, showcased on KobreGuide this week, that looks at the rebuilding of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina five years ago.

Anniversaries of major events and catastrophes offer news organizations an opportunity to both look backward, and to examine present-day circumstances. The juxtapositions and lessons can be illuminating. Audiences love historical reviews, especially when accompanied by visual artifacts. For video purposes, it's obviously impossible to travel back in time to shoot footage, so that's when photographic archives prove especially valuable.

Here's how two other newspapers, with fewer staff and resources at their disposal, cleverly incorporated video in recent anniversary-themed stories.

To travel back 15 years, Tulsa World staffers offered their own on-camera perspectives, accompanied by archival images, and TV newscasts, of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building where 168 people were killed.



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Spokane's Spokesman-Review reached back a full century to revisit the Big Burn of 1910, which obliterated entire towns: "Three million acres burned. At least 85 people killed." In a narrated voiceover, incorporating archival images, a staffer "looks back at the forest fires of 1910 in Idaho and Montana, the largest in U.S. history."



News organizations should think about how they can create compelling video stories of major historic events by using invaluable photojournalism images from yesteryear.

What Is Your Newsroom's Video Vision?

As an advisor to Bill Gentile's Backpack Journalism Project (pictured) at American University's School of Communication, multimedia producer Colin Mulvany recently shared his perspective of the rise and fall and eventual resurrection of newspaper videojournalism -- how we got here, and where we're going.

In his expansive essay Video Journalism at Newspapers, Mulvany concludes:

For the last several years, newspaper video journalists have collectively held their breath. Mass layoffs, newsroom reorganizations and non-paid furloughs have left journalists still employed at newspapers on-edge. The good news is the worst may be over.

Mulvany has been in the vanguard of shepherding still photogs into the video fold. He's generously dedicated his time and energies to educating a generation of videojournalists, and has even co-created a community Website, FindingTheFrame.com, to help novitiates learn from their more seasoned confreres.

Having built a seminal multimedia department for the Spokane's Spokesman-Review, Mulvany's advisory capacity extends beyond tutoring in-the-field practitioners and to counseling editorial management.

"I occasionally get calls from video producers or editors struggling with how to successfully integrate video into their newsrooms," he reveals.

These are the blueprint questions I would ask anyone on a similar quest:

* Do you have an overall vision for video in your newsroom?

* Why are you doing video in the first place?

* Is quality video valuable to your viewers?

* Has video gained traction on your website over time? If not, figure out why.

* Has your paper invested in training that empowers your video producers to be able to tell and edit a story effectively?

* Do you have (need) a web-savvy management structure in place to filter out bad video ideas and is an advocate for video based storytelling?

* If you are producing lots of video, do you have a website that showcases this valued web-only content?

* Can viewers find your videos quickly if they land on a story page and not on the home page?

* Can lower levels of video quality be acceptable if they meet a high news value bar?

* Do your videos load fast, have good, clean compression, and have full screen ability?

* Are you using social media to promote your video content?

* If you’re a small paper with dwindling resources, should you really be adding poorly produced video to your already bleak shovelware website?

For all the bleak economic realities he's encountered -- including layoffs and reductions of the troops he's personally trained -- Mulvany remains hopeful.

I still believe video journalism can generate revenue opportunities for newspapers, especially as the economy rebounds. The Internet is growing increasingly visual. Video, in many ways, is becoming the language of the Internet. Online viewers have steadily embraced video, so it’s imperative for newspapers to be there with compelling, well-edited video content for them to consume. But if video journalism, or backpack journalism, is to grow and succeed at newspapers, it will need a lot more nurturing and support from newsroom management than it is getting now.

Amen to that.

LINKS:

Backpack Journalism Project

Colin Mulvany's Mastering Multimedia blog

Finding the Frame Website

First Prize for Excellent Advice

Videojournalist Colin Mulvany was elated to find that he won an "honorable mention" for one of his Spokesman-Review video stories (pictured) in this year's NPPA Best of Photojournalism contest in the multimedia category.

Until he realized that his was the only award in that category. There was no first, second or third prize. As he blogged:

What gives? This is the second year in a row I’ve placed in this News Video category. Last year I received a 2nd place, but no third was given. This troubles me. Not because I didn’t place higher, but because the judges didn’t see a video that reached a high enough level of excellence to place.

Rather than stew, he sought to figure out what was missing. During an online chat with the contest judges afterwards, he asked forthrightly why they chose to withhold those awards. Their response, as we previously reported, was illuminating:

"This was a real struggle for us. Many were full of technical errors and ignored the basic principles of photojournalism. We saw lots of evidence of urgency, however we really couldn’t award anything that had technical or fundamental errors."

Then as fate would have it, Colin subsequently helped judge the NPPA’s Monthly Multimedia Contest ... and saw for himself what the other judges were seeing.

"Video at newspapers," he concluded, "needs to improve. Dramatically."

Here is the gist of his prescriptive advice, but we advise you to soak up the specifics. Based on what we see every day at KobreGuide, in our quest to discover excellent videojournalism, when it comes to what's missing in 99 percent of the videojournalism stories out there, Colin has really hit the nail on the head.

Among the recurring problems he finds:

* Storytelling (making the transition from still images to video sequences)

* Bland Videos (no surprising revelations or engaging hooks)

* Structure (lack of dramatic narrative)

* Technical flaws (jarringly distracting audio and/or video glitches)

* Editing (lack of pacing, transitions, sequencing, layering, orchestration, audio mixing)

* Journalism (lack of basic reporting principles, the most frequent offense being the absence of multiple sources)

Colin recommends that videojournalists not be shy about collaborating with whoever can strengthen the story -- a print reporter, a video editor, even a script writer and narrator. He concludes, as we have, that newspaper videojournalists shouldn't strive to emulate TV news crews, but at the same time need to acknowledge that we have much to learn from them. We should embrace opportunities to partner with them, and even immerse ourselves in video workshops so that we can get better acquainted with the basic fundamentals of producing solid video stories. (He recommends a few that are worthy of your attention.)

"Until you know what you are doing wrong," he writes, "you can’t improve your video storytelling."

Go follow Colin's prizeworthy advice, and before long you will be winning those awards!

Colin Mulvany's Useful Multimedia Tips

Just a heads up that Colin Mulvany, multimedia producer extraordinaire at Spokane's Spokesman-Review, has rounded up links to the "useful tips" he's published intermittently on his Mastering Multimedia blog.

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:

* How to make your audio slideshows better
* Great audio starts in the field
* How best to approach a video story
* Sequencing: The foundation of video storytelling
* How to make your video editing easier
* Get creative with your video camera
* Opening your video: How not to lose viewers
* Random Final Cut tip: Lower thirds titles
* What we can learn from TV new shooters

Go learn from the best!

Will the Touch Tablet Save Journalism?

Multimedia pioneer Colin Mulvany, of Spokane's Spokesman-Review, paints a rosy picture on his Mastering Multimedia blog of how professional journalism can be rescued by... the imminent arrival of the touch tablet.

His scenario may not be far-fetched, but first we have to share another funny scene he depicts that pretty much sums up today's precarious state of affairs, and the new demographically dictated digital divide in general. His former newspaper editor was the keynote speaker at one of those ubiquitous conferences dedicated to developing "real-world plans for new media organizations to fill the journalism gaps left by shrinking news staffs at legacy media organizations.”

As [he] was speaking about the need to save “professional” journalism, back in the corner of the room were a bunch of self-proclaimed snarky bloggers and citizen journalists who took offense to the notion professional journalism should be saved. Of course they twittered their opinions in real time.

Now on to Colin's touch-tablet vision, which starts out like this:

A new breed of touch tablet readers hits the market in 2010-2011. Newspaper publishers at first shun the devices. Then one gutsy newspaper chain embraces them. They form a partnership with the tablet maker to subsidize the cost for the consumer. The more publications a consumer subscribes to, the less they have to pay for the reader. Others soon follow…

Go to Colin's blog to follow the next logical steps. He's a content-oriented guy, and never loses sight of what ultimately matters:

Our journalism is what’s most important and will no doubt have to be upgraded. Words and multimedia will need to work better together. The strength in the touch tablet is in its multimedia capabilities. Visuals like photo galleries, graphics, and hi-def video, will add value. Like your current Web site, the front page of the digital newspaper will change as stories are updated throughout the day. The page design will slowly change to integrate new content features.

Once this happens, the true digital media revolution will begin to take place.

Personally, we're enamoured of our iPhone apps that provide virtual newsstands for dozens of publications and broadcast organizations. News Feed, News Fuse, News Addict, News Junkie -- we've deposited our 99 cents and downloaded them all. It's arguable whether we feel more plugged in by scanning dozens of essentially headline services that more or less echo each other. While waiting for a friend to meet us at a restaurant, we're more likely to tune in to an NPR podcast than try to read a lengthy NY Times article on an eye-straining 2x3 screen.

Amazon's Kindle 2 and Barnes & Noble's new Nook e-book readers offer e-newspapers and e-magazines, but unfortunately as text only, not multimedia. However we can readily see how a similarly sized touch tablet with smart-phone features, and standardized and optimized video platforms, would enable and exponentially improve a full-fledged multimedia journalism experience. The portable touch screen is what would differentiate it as a tactile experience from viewing a similar point-and-click Website on your desktop.

Agree? Disagree? We welcome your thoughts.

And be sure to check out Colin Mulvany's stellar videojournalism on the Spokesman Review channel of KobreGuide.com .

A New Golden Age of Visual Journalism: KobreGuide's First Anniversary (Part 2)

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.