JMC 352

I’m taking the two most recent blog posts from two of my favorite journalism writers and putting them together to see what happens. These are the direct quotes, mixed between one another only to paint an instructive picture. Original posts: Mindy McAdams and Jeff Jarvis. First, McAdams:

(L)et’s consider the story. Do you in fact have a story? It seems to me that a lot of journalism students (and even a surprising number of working journalists) wouldn’t know an interesting story if it fell on their head.

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So make yourself remember what a story really is: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Aladdin and his lamp, the tortoise and the hare, the Iliad and the Odyssey. A story is not a relaying of facts — that’s a report, not a story.

What I learned from Ken Speake, who worked in TV news for almost 40 years, was that a reporter who follows his curiosity can find interesting stories everywhere. Ken has a way of seeing the world almost like a child — you know how little kids are always asking “Why?” They can drive you crazy — they ask about the most mundane things. How does it work? Why does it look like that? What does it do? Why is that man on a ladder? How did it get here? Where did it come from?

These questions can lead us into back alleys and backrooms, behind the scenes, into people’s hearts and into the hidden places in their souls. I would suggest that those places are where stories live, and you have to go there to find them.

To go there, you have to be curious — and you have to care. No one ever opens up the door to his inner sanctum if you’re sticking a camera in his face and pummeling him with questions.

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(I)f you don’t approach the scene and the people there with genuine curiosity, and a willingness to discover something unexpected, you will fail to see the story that’s right in front of you.

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Walk around and look, with just your eyes. Talk to people. Ask questions. Don’t record anything, don’t stick a microphone in anyone’s face. You might take some handwritten notes about what you see or what you learn, but that’s all. What you’re looking for is the action and activity that will make interesting video images. Remember, this is not breaking news — this is a story. People will be doing these things later; it’s not a one-time action that you are going to miss without your camera.

Talk to people as much as possible, and ask a lot of “Why?” and “How?” questions. This is not the interview for tape. This is your legwork. This is the foundation of your story.

And now Jarvis:

Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?

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How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have - on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines - goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

Look at a service such as PaidContent. They have a small (though growing) staff and they choose carefully what they do, whether it’s worth it to send someone to a conference, whether they can add reporting to a story that’s already known, how they can curate links to the best of coverage that already exists. They fire their bullets carefully, economically, to contribute maximum unique value. PaidContent doesn’t - and can’t afford to - record stand-ups or rewrite others’ reporting for the sake of rewriting it or waste money on production and design niceties.

That’s the way that journalism will have to be executed in the future: efficiently.

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Once journalism becomes efficient, I think it can do much better than maintain what we have now. When we cut out all the incredible waste - those standups and rewrites and frills and blather - and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting.

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Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.

In the link economy, the value given to original reporting will rise. The ability to waste money on old practices of egotistical journalism will plummet. And what is left standing, I think, is more efficient and valuable reporting.

What do you get when you put these two ideas together? Does it fit the reporting that you do? Are you working towards becoming a better storyteller? More efficient? Where can you improve towards these goals?

Some newspapers inflate their circulation numbers based on the idea that you’re going to read your copy and hand it on to another reader. Conversely there’s a downplaying of statistics for online news sites. Amy Gahran picks up where Dan Thornton starts and runs with it:

Thornton suggests that if your newspaper factors shared readership into your print circulation, then to be fair you should also try to estimate how many people encounter your online news without ever logging into your site as a visitor. This includes people who:

• Block cookies
• Use a feed reader or personal home page (like MyYahoo)
• Get news or headlines via social media or news aggregators
• Access mobile or cached versions of your news (which often aren’t estimated adequately)
• Read reposts of news stories elsewhere online

According to Thornton, “There’s a big elephant in the news room. Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?”

Therefore: If you think your online readership (as estimated by direct Web site traffic) only represents only a small percentage of your estimated print circulation — think again. When considering the future of your business, how many people visit your site ultimately may be less relevant than how many people connect with your news content and brand via any online or mobile channel.

There’s a great distributed network of people out there just beyond the individuals reading your stuff. How might they pass it along? Who might you be influencing because of it? From the business perspective the key, as Gahran says, is in recognizing the opportunities in a broader view, and communicating that value effectively to advertisers and other potential partners.

Be aware of how you frame your shots, particularly with interviews.

Avoid mergers, where it appears as if a person has a plant or pole growing from the back of their heads.

For interviews don’t be shy about rearranging furniture or people to properly frame the shot.

Leave noseroom and headroom in front of and above the person you’re shooting. There should be just a little room above a person’s head in a shot. Space below the face is better.

But don’t shoot so low that you crop the top of the person’s head.

Ask your subject to look at you, not directly into the camera.

Try shooting from a slight left or right angle.

Be mindful of squeaky furniture or nervous activity that will distract from the interview. Point it out to the person, ask them to stop fiddling with their keys and change and then start shooting again.

Don’t use the zoom, move closer if necessary.

You are determining what the viewer sees and how the story unfolds, so try shooting in segments for ease of editing.

Think of movie scenes. With each sequence you should follow the action, shoot wide, medium and close-up.

Want to capture a special event on campus? The setting up would be a sequence. There’s a shot of equipment being spread out, another of settings being built, another of literature being organized, another of the organizers talking to students and so on. This example is very general, but every detail is important. You can’t shoot enough details.

A good ratio to shoot for might be 50 percent closeups and extreme closeups, 25 percent medium shots, and 25 percent wide shots.

Start with a static, wide angle shot, and hold it for 15 seconds.

Don’t constantly pan from side to side or zoom in and out. Hold steady and look for the intense, exciting and dramatic moments of action.

After your move to zoom in or pan, hold the next static shot for an additional 15 seconds. Do this as a wide-angle, close up and your zoom, which will give you three useable shots to choose from while editing.

This is especially important for web site video. A lot of movement - panning and zooming, is disconcerting online. This is largely a compression issue. Pans and zooms can make the video appear choppy and slow.

Remember: hold your shots for at least 15 seconds, before taking another shot. It is easy to take a 15-second shot and make it 2-seconds in post production. It is impossible to turn a 2-second clip into a usable 15-second clip.

If we intended to discuss video all afternoon I’d invite Mindy McAdams and let her talk. As it is you can just read all this great stuff on story choice and shooting video. Definitely a must read.

Time to start talking about video. And in this moment that we’ve all been waiting for we’ll talk about the five shot rule. There’s a good example and narration of the five shot rule at the following link.

A warning before you click: This video is instructional, but it was shot at a tattoo and body piercing parlor. If you’re squeamish you might want to look away. But do listen to the narrator, it is useful information. And, if you watch it, you’ll never forget the five shot rule.

Here’s the tutorial.

You’ll find a COMM link and a TX link. Click the COMM link and then press play.

Here are some things to keep in mind. Avoiding these errors will sharpen your product. Mindy McAdams writes some of the things to consider. Don’t:

1. Begin with an ID ( “I’m Mary Jones, and I’m a finance major”); this is completely boring. It fails to spark any interest in your story.
2. Allow the background sound to drown out the interview.
3. Use natural sound out of context — for example, a car horn blowing when we see no cars and no street.
4. Show objects, walls, signs — unless there is a person (or a person’s hand, etc.) in the photo too.
5. Combine audio and photos in a way that misleads (for example, we hear one person singing while we see a photo of a different person singing).
6. Repeat the same lengthy information in multiple captions.

There were red faces at the BYU student paper’s newsroom. The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

“It was the worst possible mistake,” Evans recalled.

The error? A caption on a photo from this weekend’s LDS General Conference stated that “Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning. …”

The newspaper staff retrieved as many of the 18,500 copies of the paper as possible and reprinted them with the correction. And it issued an apology to the apostles. The staff also explained how it happened: an error in spell-checking.

In Mormonism, an Apostle is a “special witness of the name of Jesus Christ who is sent to teach the principles of salvation to others” according to a former member of that panel. An apostate is a deserter, a disloyal person who betrays or deserts a cause, religion, political party or friend.

Just because there’s no squiggly red line under it does not mean it is correct. We’re all guilty of this from time to time. Be careful!

The job is never done. Even while out of town I worked — hard, I tell ya — to put together a brief little multimedia package. This was done with my Cannon, footwork and that digital recorder we’ve been discussing. It’s a handy, lightweight and easy tool to master.

Simply pressing record, sitting it in a seat and just letting it run for an inning gave me some fairly decent sound too.