Sadly, timelines on news sites are too often nothing more than text, like the one the Sporting News posted chronicling the Penn State sex abuse scandal. It has all the dates and facts but it’s not in the least bit engaging. Why not take advantage of the medium and add images and links that users can navigate for themselves? That’s what the Seattle Times did in the run-up to an exhibit about the iconic grunge band, Nirvana.

That timeline was created with Dipity, a free online tool anyone can use. You don’t have to be a graphic designer or know anything about code to produce a sharp looking timeline that can be embedded on any site. Trust me. Here’s how:

Another free online tool that can be used to create timelines and more is Vuvox. The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, used it to create a minute-by-minute account of the race to save a stroke patient. Projects created with Vuvox look and function a lot like a slideshow and there are lots of options for customizing the content. But a simple timeline or “collage” is easy to produce. Trust me (again). Here’s how:

Remember, the basic editions of both Dipity and Vuvox are free. So there’s really no excuse for posting dull, text-only timelines, is there? Let us know if you try either of these free tools, or if you’ve tried others we should investigate. And have fun!

Let’s begin with the Internet-connected TV sets that were all the rage at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. True, there were several competing systems on display, but that doesn’t mean broadcasters should dismiss them, says Arthur Greenwald at TVNewscheck, because those systems could soon converge.

If so, they’ll arrive in one massive wave that could completely disrupt the way people watch TV — and threaten the way broadcasters do business…Today’s smart TVs are precocious toddlers, little more than key word matches within a single program guide. But they’ll soon skip a grade and display much more sophisticated selections.

When a broadcast channel is just one of dozens of icons on the screen, how hard will it be to find? And when promos don’t reach viewers, how hard will it be to sustain expensive programming?

Now, consider the aggressive push by YouTube to launch 100 channels of original, specialty programs available only online. Those channels won’t just be watched on computer screens and tablets. Thanks to connected TVs at set-top boxes, they’ll be watched on big screens, too. So broadcast execs should worry, says consultant Will Richmond.

YouTube – and the many others who are pursuing original online programming – are still in their early days. But when combined with changes in viewer behavior, the proliferation of connected and mobile viewing devices and the firming up of online video monetization models, I’m betting that these efforts, particularly those led by YouTube, are going to be a highly disruptive force to the traditional TV ecosystem.

Broadcasters have been counting on mobile digital TV to change the game in their favor. When users can get high-quality streaming video for free on multiple devices, the thinking goes, they’ll be less interested in paying for “over the top” services that require an Internet connection. But mobile TV has been at the starting gate for a couple of years, while connected TVs and set-top boxes are selling now.

[Update: Just hours after this post was published, The Huffington Post announced plans to launch a live streaming video network this summer, described as “never-ending talk show.”]

What are broadcast executives doing to prepare for this disruptive future?

The assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they’ll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

The free service launched for iPhone last November; an Android app is in the works. Rawporter allows publishers from news organizations to bloggers to solicit either video or stills via geolocation push notices and to pay users for their work. In an interview with the citizen journalism blog NewsMeBack, co-founder Kevin Davis said the tool aims to make it easier for “everyday people to cash in on being in the right place at the right time.”

Rawporter wants to help media outlets crowdsource cost-efficient news content that they would normally not have access to. At the same time, it’s important to us that our contributors’ rights are protected, and that they get the recognition they deserve. That’s why, if something sells, contributors get paid. If something is used, they get the on-screen or online credit.

The new reality of local TV newsrooms, which produce more hours of news than ever before, makes these kinds of tools appealing to managers and anathema to professional photojournalists. We’ve written about this new world in which everyone is a news photographer before. YouTube claims that many news organizations are using its Direct platform to collect citizen reporting about news events, among them ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, WHDH-TV in Boston, Tribune Company, Gannett, Al Jazeera, and ITN News. Rawporter is so new, it’s hard to tell if it’s being used at all. The question, once again, is whether these tools are a serious threat to the profession.

My own sense is that newsrooms won’t use these services instead of staff photojournalists, but they may turn to them when news breaks where they can’t go, or when they can’t get somewhere fast enough. But freelancers could face a real pinch if stations find they can reliably and quickly get cheap video of breaking news from a bystander with a smartphone. Beyond that, asking non-journalists to get video in what could be dangerous situations raises all kinds of ethical red flags.

What’s your view?

Note taking for me has always been defined by deadline — the tighter it is, the more my notes tend to reflect immediate needs: the in/out cues of the best potential quotes, the most important facts/statistics that I’ll need RIGHT NOW.  I needed to make sure I’d have the quotes I’d need without even looking at the media.  (I used to sync the camera with my watch during extremely tight deadline press conference, so time code would be time of day. There are now software packages that will do the same thing.)

If I have a little room to breathe, my notes reflect how I think the story might best be told: you’ll see rough outlines suggesting the beginning, middle and end of the story, and the best, rough sentences that occur to me during the gathering process. And ideas for a standup bridge – if necessary.

I often organize my story by using a list of boxes, representing the best video moments/settings/bites — matched with whatever information I may want to share within each “box.”  For example, a story about airport landing fees/taxes might have a box for an amazing shot of 747 landing over our heads, coupled with a statistic: 32 foreign flights land in American airports every second of every working day.  Then there will be another box representing a interview with a Federal Tax Policy Specialist, etc.  I started organizing stories this way from the very beginning, and I realize now it reflected my interest in writing from and for whatever video I had, instead of the other way around.

As a television journalist I often have a video backup of many interviews, so that relieves the pressure of note taking if my deadline is not tight.  In local news, I always had a tape recorder that I would use for every interview.  As a national magazine correspondent, I almost never needed a tape recorder — the deadlines were far enough away that we would have complete written transcripts in our hands before I began viewing raw tape or writing.

Here are two shots of my notebooks from recent stories.  On the right you’ll notice all I’m really writing down are proper spellings, ages and specific numbers about the number of hours the people work at their jobs:  ”16 – 23″, how premature their baby was: “18 months” and how much in debt they are in medical bills: ”30K”  On the left you’ll see how sparse my notes can be, I only wrote down a favorite quote that I knew was off camera that I didn’t want to forget.  (The director of a Wild Mustang Rescue operation said, “I have the best job in the worst location in America.”  Beneath that, all I am writing down are specific events that I want to research or look up later: in Ohio, Pomona, CA, and northern Nevada.

Lastly, I try not to bury myself in my notebook when listening to people. I think it much more important to connect with them.  I’ll often rewrite or organize my notes immediately after and interview, or at lunch, or at night in the hotel room.  Unless it is numbers, titles, spellings that I might forget.  Also, sometimes my scribbles are so random, they’ll make sense to me for about a week — but will be incomprehensible if I look at them a year later. Not good, but they seem to get the job done.

Anyone watching television news these days could be forgiven for thinking they’ve accidentally tuned into a strange new game show called “Hide the Verb.” No matter how hard you try, it seems, you just can’t find one.

Remember verbs? They’re the action words that come between subjects and objects, telling what happened and when. Try locating one in this NBC Nightly News script: “Less resilient, local business. Dwight’s concession stand, in the family three generations. Sales this summer off 75 percent.” Not a verb in sight.

What is going on in TV newsrooms? It seems unlikely we’re victims of some vast anti-verb conspiracy that has recruited news writers from coast to coast. Instead, this new news-speak could actually be the result of a misguided attempt to improve broadcast writing by making it more active and immediate. The goal is laudable. The results are laughable.

Problem number one: Some writers appear to believe that by eliminating all forms of the verb “to be,” they can avoid the passive voice. Wrong. The best way to spot a passive is to look for the subject of the sentence. If it comes after the verb, or if it’s missing altogether, you’ve used a passive. “The body was found at noon” is passive because we don’t know who found it. Taking out “was” solves nothing at all. Former TV news reporter Ike Pigott has his own tongue-in-cheek explanation for why writers might be killing off auxiliary verbs like “is” or “was.” “Maybe they feel more room for important facts when small words removed.”

Problem number two: When verbs do turn up in copy they’re often disguised as gerunds or participles, trailing an “-ing” behind them. On Fox News, for instance, Shepard Smith’s scripts are notorious for overdoing that “-ing” thing. “Cops and demonstrators clashing openly in the streets of the nation’s capital, pepper spray, smoke bombs, night sticks, beating back the crowds.” That’s not active copy. It’s a run-on sentence fragment. And it violates a central principle of good writing. As George Orwell put it, good prose is like a windowpane. It does not draw attention to itself.

Problem number three: Some scripts have verbs, all right, but the verbs don’t get along. “Golfers getting quite a surprise on the green when a single-engine plane makes an emergency landing. It happened at the Hillcrest Country Club in Hollywood. A plane which was towing a banner experiencing problems and forced to land. The pilot putting it down safely near the 11th hole.” Could the writers at Miami’s WSVN-TV have been engaged in a contest that day to see who could cram the most verb tenses into one paragraph?

All this “ing-ing” and verb dropping and tense shifting in news writing is not accidental. It appears to be part and parcel of an ongoing effort to make news sound more current, more happening, more now. But the result is news that sounds more awkward, more phony, more odd. What could be stranger than the false present tense, a verb virus that seems to be spreading from newsroom to newsroom. “Payne Stewart dies in a plane crash,” we’re told, a full day after the accident, when the truth is that Payne Stewart died. Using the present tense in cases like this isn’t just bad grammar, it’s dishonest and misleading, and it ought to go.

Mark Wright (now a morning anchor at KING-TV in Seattle) suspects that what’s driving all this verb abuse is a desire for a “snappy, headliney” sound. But he says the cost of achieving that sound is too high: “The result is the viewer must really work to understand what the story is about.”

Writing that is hard to follow only serves to widen the existing gap between broadcast journalists and their viewers. It reinforces the public’s perception that people in newsrooms are distant and different from everyone else, since they certainly don’t talk like ordinary folks.

Former TV news director Scott Libin has a suggestion for breaking the verb-free habit: Try talking that way to somebody in person and see what kind of funny looks you get. “Come to think of it,” he says, “that’s probably the way a lot of people look at their televisions while the news is on.” Could that possibly explain why so many people aren’t even watching the news any more?

It used to be axiomatic that broadcast newswriting should be conversational. The verb-less verbiage that’s getting on the air these days is unnatural in the extreme. It often sounds more like news delivered by telegram. “Seven shot, one dead, stop. Police investigating, stop.” Stop, indeed. Please.

This article was originally published by RTNDA Communicator magazine, July 2000. 

“Leave the notebook at home.” That’s what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It’s a cool tool but it hasn’t replaced my reporter’s notebook and I don’t think it ever will.

A pad and pen are still the most convenient way I’ve found to take notes on assignment. They’re super portable, reliable in all kinds of conditions and never need recharging.

I’ve worked in broadcast news almost my entire career, so I’ve always recorded interviews for radio or television. But as photojournalist Rich Murphy says, “A camera is not a notebook” and shouldn’t be used like one. People who rely on digital recorders instead of taking notes have to go back and listen to everything again to find the sound bites or quotes they’ll use in a story. That’s a huge time suck, and in every newsroom I’ve worked in there’s simply no time to waste.

So how do you take good notes? Like most people, I learned to take notes in school but soon discovered that what worked for me in class didn’t fit my needs as a reporter. As a student, I wrote down pretty much everything the professor said and reviewed my notes later to figure out what was important. As a journalist, I learned to listen for what was most important in an interview and just write that part down. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I learned to distinguish what was NOT important and left that part out.

These notes are from an interview I did in 2009. Can I still read them? Absolutely. The part I’ve starred reads: ”What we found is people recuperate and keep going. When you’re doing something, making a difference, you don’t get burned out.”

I never learned shorthand but I developed my own abbreviations to save time, picking up ideas from colleagues along the way. I use a dash for “not” or a negative, for example, and an underline to signify “ing” at the end of a word. I leave out a lot of letters. Lower case “e” is “we” and “pl” is “people.” Many years before texting became a verb, I was using the same abbreviations in my notes that many people now use on their smartphones: “u” for “you” and “yr” for “your.” One other speed trick I learned from CBS’s Byron Pitts: I now put a rubber band around the cover and all the used pages so that when I can quickly open the notebook to a clean page. No more flipping!

My goal in taking notes for a today story is to produce something that is clear enough to read live on the air and concise enough to let me review the high points of a 20-minute interview in a minute or two. If I’m turning a story on a short deadline, I mark the time-code from the camera or recorder in my notebook as I’m writing things down, so I can find the exact bite I’m looking for quickly and transcribe it verbatim. A transcript is essential, and not just because it’s going to be posted online. It’s critically important to know precisely what someone said so you can write in and out of the bite.

Notebooks aren’t just for interviews, of course. I write down lots of stuff besides quotes: things said off camera or off the record (which I mark OTR); things I notice or lines I might use (which I put in brackets); questions or ideas to follow up on later (which get a ?).

That’s my system, such as it is. What’s yours?

One strategy when faced with a non-visual story or a story that would typically be told with predictable images is to think of an analogy that can bring the story to life. What does this situation or process remind you of? Ask your sources for ideas. Can you compare it to something that people are already familiar with?

One of my all-time favorite stories illustrated this way explained the physics behind a NASCAR crash. The driver survived because his car hit a wall with a glancing blow, not head-on. WGHP’s Bob Buckley showed what happens when a tomato hits a wall the same way–splat for a head-on collision, but only a split skin for a glancing blow. Trust me, it was both visual and memorable.

The same basic strategy–comparing something you can’t really see to something you can–helped NPR produce a memorable story when the earth’s population reached seven billion. Instead of relying on the usual images of babies and crowded streets, NPR found a great analogy and produced a video to illustrate it online.

The reason this strategy works is that it employs what I like to call the velcro theory of news. News is just information unless it sticks to something you already have, at which point it becomes knowledge and understanding. Try using an analogy for a non-visual story, if you haven’t already. And please point us to more examples of stories that put this principle to work so we can share them.

Freelance writer J. Maureen Henderson lays out some of that strategic thinking in a post at Forbes, “On Becoming Barbara Walters.”

If done right, interviewing is actually a neat little game – you use all of your investigative and interpersonal talents (asking, listening, analyzing) to engage another person in conversation, mine that interaction for useful information and then use that information to create or augment a compelling story. You need to be perceptive, inquisitive, adaptable and more than a little bit crafty.

For Henderson, the first step is knowing the story you want to tell. Absolutely right. Like a good story, a good interview should have a focus. That doesn’t mean you’ve outlined your script in advance and you’re just looking for a sound bite to plug in. (I’ve seen reporters who worked that way, believe it or not, and while they never missed deadline their stories were always pedestrian at best.)

An interview is a conversation with a purpose and the reporter is (or should be) in the driver’s seat. You need to be open to unexpected detours, but you also need a road map to remember where you’re going. You should know what questions you plan to ask and why you’re asking them. What is the point of talking to this person, anyway? If you don’t know, you’re probably wasting their time and yours.

Henderson also advises interviewers to “leave yourself out of it.”

There’s a fine line between building a rapport and comfort level that gets you the juiciest candid quotes and being obsequious and fawning in your attempt to bond with your subject. Recognize the line and stay on the professional side of it.

I agree, up to a point. Not that I’m in favor of fawning or unprofessional conduct, of course. But you want to come off as a real person, not a robot, especially if you’re interviewing “ordinary” people who need to be put at ease. Under those circumstances, it’s OK to open up a bit to the person you’re interviewing, as long as you remember there’s only one star in an interview and it’s not you.

As I noted last August, the nightly summaries now give viewers a real choice. Just how different the network newscasts have become is apparent in Andrew Tyndall’s new 2011 Year in Review report.

International news dominated network television coverage with three of the top five stories of the year: political turmoil in Libya and Egypt, and the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. And the networks took noticeably different approaches, with NBC spending the most time on international news and ABC lagging in third place, despite the name of its broadcast–World News.

ABC also spent the least time on hard news and substantially more time than the other two on features and soft news. CBS spent the most time covering the economy while NBC led the group in weather coverage–perhaps not surprising given its corporate ties to the Weather Channel.

The list of correspondents who got the most air time is revealing in itself. ABC’s David Muir got the most exposure by far, 343 minutes covering domestic news. ABC’s White House correspondent Jake Tapper was in second place with 283 minutes. NBC’s Richard Engel reported on foreign news (246) and Chuck Todd from the White House (226). It’s usually a given that covering the White House is a ticket to lots of air time but that didn’t hold true for CBS. That network’s top reporter was Nancy Cordes (226), who covers Capitol Hill.

The other impression you get from the list of most-used correspondents is that ABC and NBC have an A-list, while CBS spreads the wealth. ABC and NBC each have five correspondents in the top 20; CBS has the remaining 10.

One last note: NBC’s Brian Williams has a much larger ”magic“ quotient –the term used at CBS back in the days of Walter Cronkite to describe the amount of time the anchor spent on camera during the broadcast. NBC Nightly News had more than 1,000 minutes’ worth of non-reporter stories, compared to about 850 on CBS and 600 on ABC.

Using Facebook for a TV investigation: Proof that social media are great reporting tools.

Digital note-taking tools: A review of free and low-cost software to help you keep track of information.

How to learn social media skills at mid-career: A three-point plan for getting up to speed on social media.

Is there any hope for quality in local TV news?: Review of a documentary that paints a gloomy picture.

Why journalists should learn to love data: Tips and tools for working with data that can lead you to great stories.

Do-it-yourself interactive graphics: How to use ManyEyes.

Recommended journalism textbooks: Originally posted in 2008, an updated list leading off with the second edition of Advancing the Story.

Secrets of the TV stations of the year: The shared newsroom culture and personal connections behind the three 2011 winners.

How to interview children: A tip sheet on how to talk to kids on camera.

Resolve to be a more enterprising reporter: What is takes to turn better stories (posted on New Year’s Eve 2010).

What did I learn by looking back at this list? It seems pretty obvious that tips and how-to posts are most popular with NewsLab regulars, so one of my goals for this year is to bring you more of what you’re looking for. If you have specific requests, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s to a terrific 2012.