Glass is the host of This American Life, now in its 15th year on public radio. The show is admittedly something of an acquired taste. But as American Journalism Review once said, the program airs “stories that are changing what we think stories are.” And Glass is not impressed by most of the stories he sees and hears on the news.

“Part of the job of journalism is not to describe what’s new, but to describe what is,” Glass recently told an audience in Seattle. “The world they describe is so much smaller than the real world.”

Glass says his goal is to add fun, joyfulness and surprise to stories, something he says never happens in broadcast journalism, which he called “a failure of craft.”

I’d say “never” is much too strong a word. Steve Hartman’s stories for CBS are built around surprises, like this piece:

But Glass is absolutely right that surprise is too often missing in broadcast news. The late journalist Alistair Cooke once said:  “To write a dull sentence, a sentence without suspense, a sentence that doesn’t make you want to know what is coming next—that is the only gross incompetence in broadcasting.”

Think about it. Does your intro or lead tell almost everything there is to know about your story? Imagine if Hartman’s story started this way: “In a surprising development at an animal sanctuary, an elephant and a dog have become best friends.” Why would anyone stay tuned for the rest?

Shapira is no rookie; he’s been at the Post for 10 years and was the lead reporter on the team that won a Pulitzer two years ago. But he’s brand new to audio and video, and he’s still discovering the different skills he needs to tell stories with these new tools. No, he’s not the first print reporter to go through this learning curve, but he may be the first to write candidly about it and share his student work on his own paper’s website.

On the Post’s StoryLab page, Shapira writes of his experience shooting a profile of a veteran DJ:

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.

The video Shapira produced isn’t brilliant but it does show he’s trying. He ’s also experimented with audio slideshows on his class blog, Curb Your Journalism. And he’s opened himself up to being critiqued in public; I hope he pays attention to the useful comments on his video.  But as he struggles to learn a new medium, Shapira wonders if it’s worth the trouble:

Does it even make sense for writers like me 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?

You can probably guess where I come down. Yes, it makes sense for journalists to be more versatile.  And as Shapira’s learning, getting there is not a snap. How would you advise him?

Having the jitters about an assignment increases the odds that it won’t go well. So if you’re concerned about sitting on the set, a little preparation will improve your chances of success.

One obvious step is to take a test run in the studio before you do it for real. Get comfortable with the teleprompter, especially if you have to run it yourself. Have someone talk to you on the IFB while you’re reading. If you don’t have your own earpiece, make sure there’s one available that fits you well so it won’t pop out on the air.

Randy Tatano has some additional, excellent advice on his blog at TV News Grapevine, including this tip:

Make sure you have plenty of breaks in the first newscast. Packages and vo/sots give you a chance to regroup. Nothing is worse for a rookie anchor than to have two straight minutes of copy at the top of the newscast, because if you stumble out of the gate you’ll be a snowball going downhill.

Tatano also suggests meeting with the director before the newscast to make sure you’re both on the same page. And one last useful bit of advice: Have water on the set. “Cotton mouth is a really common problem among rookies,” he says.

If you’ve found other useful ways of preparing to anchor for the first time, please chime in with a comment.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

The standard excuse is that everyone is just too busy to make that happen. A news director can’t possibly spare the time to help every reporter through every story every day. A chief photographer who also shoots can’t possibly help other photojournalists do better work on a daily basis. Fair enough. But managers aren’t the only people who can offer assistance. The truth is that anyone can do it, by becoming a coach in the newsroom.

Coaching basics

Coaching means sharing responsibility for what goes on the air. Photographers help reporters write. Reporters and photographers offer newscast producers material for teases and tags. Assignment editors ask questions instead of just giving orders. And it doesn’t have to take much time to help a colleague produce better journalism.

The key to a coaching culture is simple yet profound: journalists have to learn to listen to each other.

Coaching often begins in the morning editorial meeting. Instead of running through a list of “must do” stories for the day and assigning them at the start, coaching newsrooms solicit story ideas and encourage everyone present to weigh in with suggestions on how to approach those stories. At some stations, staffers share responsibility for running the meeting, rotating the assignment week-to-week. The only rule is that managers are never allowed to be in charge. “Giving people a little bit more power and control,” says photojournalist Mike Plews of WOWT in Omaha, “they really get excited about bringing stuff in.”

Coaching one-on-one

Coaching also happens outside the newsroom, often in the car on the way to an assignment. Reporters and photographers who coach each other apply what former NBC correspondent John Larson calls the rule of thirds. They can complain about the boss or the assignment or the weather, but only for a third of the time they spend driving to a story. The rest of the time they have to discuss and plan what they’ll do that day.

Teams that coach don’t practice “standing around journalism,” to borrow a phrase from Lane Michaelsen, news director at WTVJ in Miami, Florida, and a former news photographer. The reporter doesn’t wait in the car while the photographer shoots the b-roll, and the photographer doesn’t go for coffee while the reporter does pre-interviews. Instead, Michaelsen says, they stay together and talk frequently so they both know what they’re getting and what they still need to tell the story.

Reporter Kim Riemland and photographer Bill Strothman coached each other regularly when both worked at KOMO-TV in Seattle, Washington. Kim says Bill wrote the best line in one of her daily news stories about the protests against the World Trade Organization–”In downtown Seattle today, the First Amendment ended at Fourth and Spring.” Bill says Kim suggested the perfect audio transition, from the sound of a machine gun to a sewing machine, for one of his favorite long-form pieces on a woman who makes quilts for war refugees. But they weren’t just a two-person team. Each of them involved others throughout the reporting and editing process, asking for ideas and feedback from producers and editors, and sharing the compliments after a story aired.

The coaching culture

In a coaching newsroom, no one is shy about seeking the help they need and they often turn to peers to get it. When Bob Gould was chief photographer at WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he would invite other photographers into his edit bay to screen stories that he was working on as a kind of reality check, “to see if an edit works, if sound is understandable.”

Coaching newsrooms build on the positive. They may begin each morning meeting with a “daily win,” reviewing what went well the night before.  Scott Libin, news director at WCCO in Minneapolis likes to show tape from the previous day’s newscasts to celebrate successes.

Changing the culture may be more difficult in a television newsroom than at a newspaper, because the staff turnover tends to be higher. But even if only a few people are committed to the practice, coaching can take hold in what Riemland calls a “conspiracy of excellence”–a bottom-up effort that improves the product and makes the newsroom a better place to work. “When you get a few dedicated people who are committed to excellence to be supportive of each other, not only will your work be better, but others will notice,” Riemland says. “It can be contagious, and pretty soon that small core group has coached the management by example.”

The Tribune station in Houston is planning a total overhaul of its newscasts changes this fall with a new format it calls NewsFix. “The core concept is to focus more on storytelling by allowing those in the story to tell the story and to place video and audio at the center of all that we do,” KIAH general manager Roger Bare told the Houston Chronicle. Translation?

Say goodbye to traditional anchors and on-camera reporters. Most stories apparently will be fast-paced, told with lots of nat sound from the perspective of those involved. As a station employee who didn’t want to be identified told the newspaper:

“It’s not going to be as much of a newscast as a collection of stories that will roll into each other,” the employee said. “There will be natural sound, and you won’t see the reporters. It will be news for people who don’t watch news, which sounds a lot like opening a bar for people who don’t drink.”

KIAH is now advertising a job opening for an “executive producer and imaginator” to oversee the newscast and it’s an eye-opener.  They’re looking for someone “with a fiery passion to help re-invent the 80’s rooted, focus grouped, yuppie anchors and a news desk, super doppler ultra weather style.”

Experience in running a TV Newsroom is not necessary and might actually be detrimental, as this position requires someone with no traditional TV News baggage, because there’s little tradition involved in this idea.

KIAH probably isn’t risking much by trying something totally new. Its two daily newscasts get the lowest ratings in town, drawing less than a .5 rating. But other Tribune stations could be in line for a similar “fix.” The company plans to roll out the NewsFix at some of its other 23 stations “that don’t have a strong legacy news product or where the local news tradition may not be as strong as it is in other markets,” says Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman.

This is hardly the first time a news organization has talked about getting rid of anchors. I seem to remember discussions along those lines at CBS News back in the 1980s. As I recall, some experimental newscasts were even produced, with each reporter tossing to the next reporter in line. The idea never took hold.

One reason may be that many viewers decide what newscast to watch based on who the anchor is. What television news has that print doesn’t is personality. Stations have tried to capitalize on the personal connection viewers feel to TV journalists by making sure they’re not just heard but also seen. Reporters who resist doing stand-ups are inevitably told that they must appear on camera regularly because viewers want to see the person who’s telling the story. Was that just a myth? I doubt it. But if the Tribune experiment succeeds, a lot of TV managers will be proved wrong.

What I didn’t know until now is that Twain was also an expert on being interviewed and he didn’t much like it.

In an unpublished, unfinished essay, Concerning the Interview, now available online for the first time, Twain compares the attitude of interviewers to that of a cyclone “which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.”

Twain complains that interviewers can’t tell the difference between a good quote and worthless drivel:

He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

And that’s not all. Twain says interviewers never stick to any one subject long enough to learn much of interest. “Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you; you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your position.” The interview, says Twain, is not a happy invention. In his view, “It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man.”

Sounds like Mark Twain was never interviewed by a journalist who was any good at it.  A gifted interviewer can learn all sorts of things the subject may not even have wanted to divulge. And it’s worth remembering that Twain’s essay was written around 1890, when yellow journalism was on the rise. Still, it’s a treat–and a little humbling–to read this American icon’s take on one of the central tasks of our craft.

Want to hear more about Twain’s essay? Here’s NPR’s Scott Simon, discussing the art and aggravation of the interview with the writer Calvin Trillin, another humorist from Missouri. Enjoy!

CBS Mobile's report was wrong; Spain beat the Netherlands, 1-0.

How many news sites make it easy for readers to report errors? Very few, according to MediaBugs, a pilot project in the San Francisco area that’s trying to hold the news media accountable and get them to fix “correctable mistakes.” The group reports that three-quarters of news sites it examined offer no links to report corrections.

Many bury information about how to report errors behind confusing trails of links. Some provide multiple, poorly labeled avenues for feedback without telling readers which ones to use for error reports. Others provide no access to recently corrected articles beyond a search on “corrections,” which often turns up multiple stories about prisons.

More than half of the 28 sites–newspapers, TV stations and others in the San Francisco area– “have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.” That’s worse than what a national NewsLab survey found almost 10 years ago, when just a quarter of the TV journalists we surveyed said they worked in newsrooms with no clear-cut corrections policy. You’d think it would be easier to correct errors online but apparently it’s not being done.

MediaBugs is pushing to change that. The nonprofit, funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, thinks every site should have a “report an error” link displayed as prominently as the ubiquitous “share” and “email” links on every page. They’ve even developed a widget for Bay Area news organizations to let readers easily report problems through MediaBugs; so far, only Spot.Us is using it.

More transparency

In the meantime, readers and staffers are reporting errors through the MediaBugs site and having some success in getting them corrected, although it can take a while. In the process, readers can learn more about how mistakes happen, as when KCBS radio news director Ed Cavagnaro explained why two people who were quoted online weren’t named.

“Yes, the people interviewed should have been identified in the website version of the story, as they were in the on-air report,” Cavagnaro wrote. “In fairness to the webwriter, he didn’t have the spelling of the names. We still have to remind our broadcast reporters that we need the spelling of the names of interview subjects for the text versions of the story.”  Now that’s transparency.

The MediaBugs project seems like a useful experiment but in my view it would be ever so much better if individual newsrooms just made it easy for readers to report errors on individual stories. USA Today is one of the few sites I’ve seen that already does this consistently, with a note and an email link at the bottom of every story: “To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones.”

To their credit, the folks at MediaBugs say that approach would be fine with them, too. So who else is actually doing it? And if not, why not?

Plan ahead and multi-task

Because a solo journalist is responsible for everything from transportation to transmission, another time saver is to map the route to each location before leaving to avoid backtracking and other delays.  Navigation systems like Garmin or Nuvi are must-haves for many VJs.

Multi-tasking behind the wheel is part of almost every VJ’s day. “While on the road, I make phone calls to interview subjects,” says Torres. “It’s still legal to talk on the phone while driving in Colorado.” He also works in close collaboration with KUSA’s assignment desk editors, who will make calls for him while he’s shooting.

Find fast, free WiFi

Torres says it’s a good idea to search the Web in advance for locations with strong WiFi signals to save time feeding in the story.  ”The reason I file by WiFi is because the transfer rate is usually faster,” says Torres. “My favorite place to transfer from is a hotel. I’ll usually set up in a lobby and log in to their WiFi for free.” With a phone company air card, Torres says it usually takes about 40 minutes to send a 1:40 package. Using a WiFi connection and the free FTP program FileZilla it typically takes about half as long. On a really fast connection, Torres says, he’s fed packages in as little as 3 minutes.

Torres often works the late shift and it’s part of his job to cut a separate V/O-SOT on his story for the morning news. Instead of feeding that piece in from the field, he’ll save time by putting it on a USB thumb drive and taking it back to the station.

Solo journalists also learn to save time by asking for help when they need it. Some VJs have been known to enlist a bystander to find people to interview so they can keep shooting b-roll.

Torres has been a backpack journalist since 2004 and he’s worked hard to become a better photographer. You can see the result of his effort in this story, which just won an honorable mention in the NPPA regional competition for best solo video (in depth).

Maybe. Including “vox pops” or person-on-the-street sound bites or quotes won’t automatically make a story stronger. Often, they’re just window dressing. I can’t count the number of times I was sent out to get citizens’ reactions to some development or other and most of the people I talked to had no idea what I was asking about.

Does that mean the public is stupid or woefully uninformed? Not necessarily. At least half the problem with this kind of reporting is that we ask the wrong people the wrong questions.

Choose the right place

Where do you go to find people for reaction stories? A public place near the office with lots of people, right? It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that few shoppers or commuters have informed  opinions about every issue you could possibly bring up.

When you’re working on a reaction story, you’ll have better luck getting usable sound or quotes if you find people who actually care about the topic. That means you have to go to a place where they’re likely to gather. Need parents for an education story? Try a school parking lot or a soccer field. A health study? Ask people going and coming from a free clinic instead of a supermarket. It takes more effort, obviously, but the payoff is usually worth it.

Ask the right questions

Finding the right people is only half the solution, though. You need to ask questions differently than you would when talking to officials or other people who are accustomed to being interviewed. Don’t start with an agenda and ask them to fill in the blanks. It’s almost never productive to ask what people think of a pending proposal to…whatever.

Ask open-ended questions about the topic in general to learn what people are really concerned about and what they think should be done. If they don’t tell you what you expect to hear, maybe that’s your story.

Stories, not anecdotes

“Real people” often show up at the top of stories and never appear again. You know the drill: “Joe Smith has been looking for work for seven months, since he was laid off from his job at the manufacturing plant. He’s not alone….”

Anecdotal leads turn people into props or window dressing. If you really want to tell a character-driven story, the story has to be in large part about the character. And that doesn’t just mean bringing him or her back at the end. You know that drill too: “For Joe Smith, the bad news on unemployment means he’ll have to keep looking.”

Stories are stronger when characters get more than a hello and goodbye. An anecdote may be a good way to hook the audience but central characters will keep them reading or watching all the way to the end.

Try these suggestions for finding a focus for your stories as you’re reporting, and before you start to write. If they help, please let us know.

Think First
Finding a focus means thinking about the story before you start reporting. Instead of rushing to snag the usual suspects, ask a few questions early on to help you figure out the best way to approach today’s assignment. Who has the basic facts about this story and do we need them on camera? Who has personal experience with this and who can put the facts in perspective? Where is the central place of this story and is that where we’re going?

When you get to a location, take just a few minutes to look around. Do a complete 360-degree turn: the real story may be behind you. Don’t be so locked in on what the story is “supposed” to be about that you miss what’s really going on.

If you’re struggling with a broad topic, looking for a story within the story can provide a tighter focus to illustrate the bigger picture. If you have a small story that seems unimportant, finding a story behind the story can reflect a larger trend or theme.

Eliminate
Take time to decide what the story is really about before beginning to write. That sounds obvious, but it’s a step many reporters skip, especially on deadline. Try to sum up your story in just a few words–three can be enough. Put the three words on a sticky note and keep it in sight while you write.

Use your focus statement to help you decide what to leave out of your story. Who and what will not be covered in this story and do you have a good reason for that?

Consider what you want the audience to take away from your story. Will viewers or readers know something after seeing this story that they didn’t know before it aired? If viewers can put this new knowledge to use, have you told them how?

Information that doesn’t fit your focus may be useful for a lead-in or tag, or an info-box. It may suggest another angle on the story for another day.

Choose a Format
Only when you know what you really need to say should you decide how to say it. Too many story ideas are pre-formatted before they’re even reported. On television, a court hearing is always a V/O; a weather story is a live shot. In print, a local event is always a brief.

Consider what approach works best for the story you want to tell. Maybe that brief is a photo essay. Maybe that TV story should be something other than a package: Anchor copy, graphic, V/O, natural sound, live or some combination. Deciding how to tell a story before you even know what it’s about is a disservice to the people you cover and the audience. Finding a focus will help you tell better, stronger stories in any medium. That’s a promise.