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.

“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?

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.

“The Sewing Machine” is a video produced by former NBC reporter John Larson and one-time NPPA photojournalist of the year Lisa Berglund. It’s a video with a clear purpose–to raise money for VisionFund, the microfinance arm of World Vision International. But it’s also a story that illustrates many fundamental principles of good storytelling.

First, a strong central character. As with many PR shoots, an advance team had done the legwork at a remote location in Rwanda. But Larson and Berglund, being newsies, didn’t think much of the original plan, as Larson explained in the Facebook Storytellers group:

We rejected story lines that had been set up for a month, and found the sewing machine woman because we were searching for a more photo-rich, metaphorical story line. We found and selected the stronger details and story lines within her story.

Second, the story has a clear beginning, middle and end. In this case, there’s a story within the story, which has its own beginning, middle and end. But the viewer never feels lost or confused. See what you think when you watch the video.

Because this wasn’t a news story, Berglund and Larson did a ton of set-up. To use a news term, they staged the shoot, moving locations to get a more photogenic background, deciding what people should wear, and matching shots they knew they would re-create when they got back to the United States.

And because this wasn’t a news story, Berglund had the courage to shoot it with a camera she had never used before–the Canon 5D–a digital SLR.  ”It is not good in reactive situations (like news),” Larson says. “The lenses are slow, bulky, time consuming… and gorgeous.” Virtually everything was shot with natural light.

Audio was a different matter, Berglund says.

Monitoring audio is one of the biggest challenges. Most of the audio was shot with my Sennheiser MKH-60, plugged into a Zoom H4N audio recorder. The interviews were shot with a Lectrosonic 400 series wireless, also plugged into the Zoom.

Because so much additional equipment was required, Berglund wound up recruiting an assistant on the spot who carried the recorder, wore headphones and got the mics in close.

Sound is my passion. It was really hard to give up complete control. But the risk was worth it in the end, and allowed me to concentrate on the visuals.

One of the most memorable moments in the video is the shot that reveals how the woman expanded her business. It’s a lock-down shot that was carefully planned, with each individual element shot separately and then combined in the edit room. “The trick is using the effect when the narrative is building, or adding, or growing,” says Larson. “Then the effect supports the story you’re trying to tell.” So it does.

It’s often used for “point of view” video, which is what it was designed for, after all. Two of the top-selling models are the Helmet and Motorsports versions, cameras the company bills as “wearable” and “mountable.”

WJZ reporter Mike Schuh is a recent GoPro adopter. He’d never used a GoPro until he was sent out on a story this fall about firefighter training that involved working in very tight spaces. Having seen what he was up against, Schuh ordered the camera on the spot and used it to get shots he never could have captured with a full-sized camera.

Photojournalist Brandon Whitworth of WKYT in Lexington, Ky., used a GoPro for the first time last week for a story about the hazards emergency responders face on the road:

How did he get all those angles? “I was shooting inside the cab, and I had one GoPro that I mounted on the various spots on the truck,” Whitworth said. “Every other time we stopped I changed its location.”

People who have used the GoPro say the key is to use the video shot with it sparingly. “Sometimes the angles are too different and call attention to themselves,” says KGO reporter Wayne Freedman.  But he also says the camera comes in handy at times. ”Due to the wide angle, it can capture some very unique, up close perspectives.”

Freedman used a GoPro to get the opening shots in this story:

Reporter Garvin Thomas, who works for KNTV in San Jose, used a GoPro in an underwater housing attached to a light stand to get some key shots for this story:

Photographer Dan Fox of Citizen Pictures, formerly with KCNC in Denver, notes that the wide angle of the lens depends on the HD mode, which is selectable on the latest model GoPro2. “In 1080 mode, the angle is not so extreme. In 720, it’s fisheye, so for mounting on bikes, cars, surfboards, etc, it’s useful, but in 1080, it’s a more normal looking image.”

Bottom line? “GoPro doesn’t make your story better,” says Detroit Free Press photojournalist Eric Seals in an article in the latest NPPA News Photographer magazine. “It adds a visual hook to your story.”

If you’re thinking about getting a GoPro, here are some additional tips from Seals and other photojournalists:

• Use top-of-the-line SD cards to ensure a good capture
• Shoot sparingly so the download doesn’t take forever
• To improve the audio, remove the camera’s plastic housing
• A monitor is essential if you want to see what you’re shooting
• Other accessories worth considering: a chest-mount harness and a rollbar mount

The GoPro isn’t the only small HD camera photojournalists are using in the field. Others include the Canon G12, the Sony Cybershot DSC-WX9, the Canon Elph 300hs, Contour and Iconix.

Are you using a small HD camera to shoot elements for TV news stories? Please share your experiences and tips!

“Everyone should have a smartphone in the future; it’s baseline gear,” says Damon Kiesow, senior product manager at Boston.com. Speaking at the Excellence in Journalism convention in New Orleans, Kiesow said newsrooms have to get more “intentional and strategic” when it comes to mobile.

“It doesn’t work to just go buy 20 iPhones and tell the reporters to figure it out,” says Kiesow. “You need to know what you want to accomplish and provide training.”

Kiesow also says that journalists’ smartphones should have these features:

• Both still & video cameras
• An active developer community that keeps coming up with new apps
• GPS capabilities
• Wifi (4G much faster and better for sending video/photo — though iPhone 5 probably won’t have it)

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

“Lord, no,” says Jen Lee Reeves of KOMU-TV, who’s on the faculty at the University of Missouri.  ”You can teach yourself anything. You just need a little quiet time.”

At this week’s Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans, Reeves shared a simple, three-point plan for getting up to speed: play, create and connect.

“Jump in and play with free stuff,” she advised. ”Share what you love.”

Start by setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, if you don’t already have them, and use the same picture and name everywhere. Make sure you create a profile with your work information on it. Consider claiming your name on about.me and point people to your content.The point is to establish yourself online.  ”If you call someone to interview them, they are totally going to stalk you,” Reeves said. “If you don’t have a presence online they’re going to be suspicious.”

Next, build a website or a blog and start writing about something you care about, whether it’s cooking or working out or something else. Reeves blogs about her daughter, who was born with one hand. What has she learned from that experience? “It made me better about doing journalism,” she said. “I learned how to build a community on the Web and Facebook and I’m now using those skills for the newsroom.”

If getting personal online feels uncomfortable, write about the experience of reporting a story and link to your own work.  ”I wouldn’t republish a story, but taking a screen shot is perfectly OK,” Reeves said. In addition to her blog, she also has her own “named” website, jenleereeves.com, where she writes about media.

Bottom line? “Our readers, consumers are everywhere and we need to reach out to them everywhere or we are going to miss a source,” Reeves said.  ”We know journalism. Let’s prove it, on all platforms.”