What do you get when you put two terrific storytellers in charge of a PR shoot? A great story, that’s what, and some useful lessons on how to capture stunning video with compact, light-weight equipment. “The Sewing Machine” is a video produced by former NBC reporter John Larson and one-time NPPA photojournalist of the year Lisa [...]
It’s the latest “must have” gadget for TV news, or so it appears from all the references I’ve heard lately to the GoPro camera. Small, rugged and light-weight, it shoots in HD and sports a wide-angle lens so it goes where other cameras can’t. It’s often used for “point of view” video, which is what it [...]
“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 [...]
Let’s say you’ve been a journalist for a while but you feel a bit out of the loop when it comes to using social media and multimedia. OK, not just out of the loop–totally overwhelmed. And you’re worried some kid just out of college is going to steal your job one day because they have [...]
We all know by now that social media are meant to be, well, social. It’s not enough to post links on Twitter and Facebook to something you’ve written and consider the job done. What you really want is for people to retweet, like and comment on your posts, to take advantage of the multiplier effect of social media. [...]
Facebook is giving me a headache but not for the reason you may think. Sure, it’s annoying when services you’ve grown accustomed to shake things up for no apparent reason (see the new Delicious, for example). But that’s their prerogative and we’d better get used to it. “Facebook will always be changing,” says Vadim Lavrusik [...]
Andy Carvin of NPR is a Twitter rock star. His social media reporting during the Arab Spring has made @acarvin a go-to source for information about uprisings from Tunisia to Yemen. He describes his role as that of a “Twitter anchor,” vetting sources, verifying information and passing it along to the public. Carvin’s 55,000 plus Twitter [...]
How’s this for a new way to train journalists? An Australian company is working on a new first-person video game that puts players in a war zone armed only with a camera. In Warco (short for “war correspondent”), players document a conflict that echoes recent events in the Middle East. Each scenario has different story [...]
You already know that prospective employers are looking for journalists with social media skills. The Statesman-Journal in Salem, Oregon, certainly is. Executive Editor Bill Church recently advertised an opening for a “talented reporter with high digital IQ.” If you’re talented, aggressive, responsible, innovative, socially adept, digitally awesome and perpetually energized, you’ll fit in just fine [...]
I often describe NewsLab as a resource for journalists. The tips, research and background on this site are free for anyone to use. I lead training programs for journalists for a reasonable fee, which goes toward keeping the site (and me) going. But another way of thinking about NewsLab is as a toolkit for journalists, [...]
Anyone with a smart phone knows that it’s difficult to read a standard website on the screen. Sure, you can zoom in, but then you have to scroll around to see the rest of the page. I’ve known for some time that we should offer a mobile version of the NewsLab site. But with no [...]
When NPR’s David Folkenflik called me for an interview last week, I wasn’t sure I could oblige. The usual routine involves my going to their DC studios for taping and my schedule that day just wouldn’t allow it. Turns out I didn’t need to, as long as I had an iPhone. NPR sent me a [...]
Twitter got a ton of free publicity this week by releasing #TfN, a newsroom guide for Twitter. “We want to make our tools easier to use so you can focus on your job,” the guide says, “finding sources, verifying facts, publishing stories, promoting your work and yourself—and doing all of it faster and faster all [...]
Information travels so fast these days that it’s hard to keep track of where it came from. Technology makes plagiarism and deception a snap. Online text can be copied and pasted in seconds, photos can be manipulated and no one may be the wiser. But thanks to technology, problems are also easier to detect. If [...]
Taking notes used to be a simple matter. You pulled out a pen and a pad of paper and you wrote things down. Over time, if you developed your own shorthand, you could take notes faster and more accurately. If you could read your own shorthand months later, you were a pro. Laptops changed the [...]
Many journalists already use their smartphones as news gathering and publishing tools, but Mark Briggs of KING5.com in Seattle and the blog Journalism 2.0 says mobile devices can do so much more. “Few reporters use smartphones as a research device,” Briggs says–a missed opportunity, in his opinion, because smartphones are “location aware.” As an example, [...]
Too many TV stories use graphics as filler, when there’s no obvious video available to cover a track. Full screens of text and numbers aren’t very attractive but they’re better than a black hole, right? If that’s how you’ve thought about graphics in the past, you need to think again, especially when it comes to [...]
Every time a new gadget comes on the market, someone tries to figure out if it’s as good as or better than what came before. There have been plenty of reviews of Apple’s latest tablet, comparing it to the previous iteration and to similar devices. But how does it compare when it comes to shooting [...]
More and more news organizations are creating interactive graphics that help users explore and understand their worlds. Some are pretty basic, others are more visually appealing, but all serve the same function of bringing data to life. On the hunt for some new examples, I searched a Twitter chat last week and found a boatload, [...]
You’ve written a story for the Web or a post for a blog and you need to add an image or a related video. If you didn’t take a photo or shoot footage yourself, what are your options? The Internet is a treasure trove of multimedia but it’s important to make sure that what you [...]