Visual Journalism

California is the land of sun, stars and cars – and it’s also becoming a cutting edge mobile journalism area. Damon Kiesow has a story up on the Poynter Institute site about Ray Meese’s work at the Ventura County Star where he’s doing the full mobile journalist deal with an iPhone and a few accessories.

(Thanks to Tammi Marcoullier for the link.)

Registration is now open for the National Press Photographers Association’s Multimedia Immersion workshop, May 18-22 at my old school, Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

(And stayed tuned to this space for more interesting, entertaining and/or frightening NPPA news in the next few days.)

I didn’t coin the phrase (and not sure I’d admit to it if I did), but it’s being bantered about in a couple of places. Columbia University Prof. Sree Sreenivasan uses it in a post about a New York City gathering to talk about “The Future Journalist” – and there are some good tips in there.

Particularly, I like this list of what a future journalist will need to be:

a multimedia storyteller: using the right digital skills and tools for the right story at the right time.

a community builder: facilitating conversation among various audiences, being a community manager.

a trusted pointer: finding and sharing great content, within a beat(s) or topic area(s); being trusted by others to filter out the noise.

a blogger and curator: has a personal voice, is curator of quality web content and participant in the link economy.

able to work collaboratively: knowing how to harness the work of a range of people around him/her — colleagues in the newsroom; experts in the field; trusted citizen journalists; segments of the audience, and more.

Go spend some time on the post, think about it and let me know what you can use from it – or what’s missing.

It’s a little odd that Flash Goddess Mindy McAdams tweeted a link to this story about the rise and fall of the Las Vegas Sun while I’m in, of all places, Las Vegas. Worth a read.

My initial reaction is similar to what I thought of Curley’s work in Florida and Washington – one model won’t work everywhere. What was very successful in Kansas and Florida because of the community ties wasn’t going to work in suburban Washington or Las Vegas. The sense of community in each of those places is very different and a site has to be able to comprehend and react to those differences.

But I think what they tried was brilliant – we have to accept that some great ideas will fail as we rework journalism.

I spent the last few days at the University of Tennessee participating in the Intercollegiate Online News Network’s second conference. ICONN looks to bring journalism educators and students together to work out what’s next in journalism. (Everyone kept saying “online journalism,” but I think our problems run deeper than that.)

There are a lot of ideas still rumbling around in my head, but I’ve gotten a few requests for the presentations I did. Now I know it’s a traditional thing to ask for a printout of presentations, usually because they’re text heavy and everyone’s afraid they’ve missed point nine on slide 17 … but I’m not sure my slides will make any sense unless you happened to be there. To be honest, my slides are more of a GIANT CUE CARD for me than they are for the folks suffering through one of my talks.

Regardless, I’ve been asked, so here they are …

• FailFaster – Thursday’s kick off talk
• Multimedia on the Cheap

And I guess I should mention that … well … both talks were live-streamed and available … there’s a problem with the Fail Faster talk – it’s now Playing Faster, honestly I don’t talk that fast. And the Multimedia piece starts a little late but it’s there.

There have been few multimedia sessions I’ve attended at conferences that affected me as much as seeing Richard Koci Hernandez at the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar a few years ago. None. So when he wrote a book, I bought it. And when he tells me there are rules and lessons for learning multimedia, even though I’ve heard them all before, I read them again. And I practice them.

As our spring photojournalism workshop drew to a close, we put some of our editors around the table and asked them the questions every student wanted asked – what’s next? What do I need to know to get a job? Where are those jobs? What do I do to survive?

Walt Stricklin, Director of Photography at the Birmingham News, Minla Shields, the former Senior Editor for Planning at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Mike Haskey, Chief Photographer at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, tackle those questions.

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(40:54)

Up next in our series of podcasts is a talk about the role of video online and how traditional print publications are, can and should move towards it. Guests include Walt Stricklin, Director of Photography at the Birmingham News, Dave Labelle, author and former photojournalism professor, Minla Shields, the former Senior Editor for Planning at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mike Haskey, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, John Curry, Visuals Director at the Augusta Chronicle and Jon Samuels, staff photojournlaist at WXIA in Atlanta.

One of the most interesting aspects of this conversation was the student input in the second half, particularly when asked about their online news video consumption habits.

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(59:22)

Continuing with the conversations we had during our March photojournalism workshop, this one on “backpack journalism,” also known as “mojos” for mobile journalists. Most refer to it as “one man bands.” We hear from Walt Stricklin, Director of Photography at the Birmingham News, Jon Samuels, staff photojournlaist at WXIA in Atlanta, John Curry, Visuals Director at the Augusta Chronicle, Minla Shields, the former Senior Editor for Planning at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and joining in later, Dave Labelle, author and former photojournalism professor.

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(37:29)