What’s the connection between photography and terrorism? Apparently, it depends on where you sit and when you ask the question. Just after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, investigators urged anyone who’d been near the finish line to share photos or video they’d taken around the time of the explosions. But the very same day, [...]
by Geoff Roth, executive producer, KRIV, Houston Last year our news director challenged everyone to come up with new ideas for our newscasts. One suggestion I made was to recruit bloggers from the Houston community to do pieces on restaurants, lifestyle, and the arts. His response” Great idea. Why don’t you go out and do [...]
Are some of the people you interview sounding a little rehearsed these days? More and more officials, professionals and business executives are being coached on how to deal with the media. And while that can be a good thing, it isn’t always. Many doctors and lawyers have been advised to avoid acronyms and technical language so [...]
Of course you have video on your website. Doesn’t everyone? But what is it, exactly? Putting TV clips on the Web is a no-brainer, says NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller, but it’s not a game changer. What is? No one really knows yet, but there’s lots of experimentation underway. Schiller told the Beet-TV [...]
Can you be a good TV photojournalist and a lousy storyteller? Absolutely. Fabulous images alone won’t tell a great story. Award-winning videographer Nathan Thompson thinks of each story as a puzzle with five main pieces. If any one of them is missing, he says, the story won’t hang together. Thompson shared his keys to efficient [...]
It’s a map. It’s a timeline. It’s photos and video and text and links. But that’s not all you get from the new online tool Meograph. You can also add a voice-over to tell a complete story, with the bells and whistles providing context–the fourth dimension, according to the founders. Other tools, like Vuvox, provide similar [...]
This isn’t a new idea, but it’s remarkably successful and so, worth revisiting. Local television stations that are smart about using #hashtags on Twitter can build their audience and amplify their coverage. That’s obvious when it comes to big events like Hurricane Sandy. By one count, there were 3.5 million tweets with the hashtag #sandy [...]
Organized chaos. That’s how Lee Zurik of WVUE in New Orleans describes his work days. And no wonder. He anchors two prime time newscasts every night and also serves as the station’s chief investigative reporter. How does he manage to keep producing award-winning work? We asked Zurik to share his strategies for finding and keeping [...]
Great photojournalists are sticklers about their gear. They check it thoroughly before and after every shoot. They supplement the standard-issue package with specialty items, from dimmers to clothespins to GoPros. They experiment and improvise, always on the hunt for new accessories that will save time or give them an edge on the competition. Jonathan Malat [...]
What does social media have to do with journalism? Everything, says Bea Chang, social media manager at KARE-TV in Minneapolis. Facebook is one of the best ways to expand the reach of your stories if you know how to use it. And Twitter has become the new scanner, says KARE news director Jane Helmke, with [...]
Video journalist Anne Herbst firmly believes in preparation. She does research on stories before leaving the newsroom. She shows up to assignments early so she can meet people and figure out in advance who might be a strong character. And she writes fast–an essential skill when you’re working by yourself and you have to do [...]
Darren Durlach left television almost two years ago to try something new. He’d won two consecutive NPPA TV Photographer of the Year awards and, unbeknownst to him, was on the verge of winning a third. He’s now senior multimedia producer at the Boston Globe, where he shoots and edits stories both alone and in collaboration [...]
How would you define a memorable TV news story? For reporter Boyd Huppert, it’s a story that connects with viewers, that goes beyond the facts to touch people in some way. To achieve that goal, Huppert looks for a character and a concept that will tie his story together. And when he writes the script, [...]
A front row seat to history. The privilege of sharing life’s most amazing moments. And the God-given right to eat behind the wheel. Nobody ever said working in TV news was all glamour, right? If you’ve ever been on a six-hour stake-out with no bathroom in sight, you’ve “enjoyed” one of the unique aspects of a TV [...]
From part-time, overnight camera operator in market 83 to best TV news photographer in the country in just six years: How did Nathan Thompson do it? Natural talent? Not at all, Thompson told NPPA’s News Photographer magazine. Instead, he credits hard work and a deliberate, methodical approach to learning on the job. When he started [...]
We all know the value of video in TV news, but great video alone isn’t enough. As a wise photojournalist once told me, “Sound is the other half of the picture.” I think of that adage often when I’m asked to critique stories in which sound is nothing more than narration and bites. Sound that [...]
Ask an entire generation of journalists what inspired them to go into or stay in the news business and the answer often comes down to one word: Watergate. Forty years ago this month, two young reporters at the Washington Post filed their first stories about what a White House spokesman described as ”a third rate burglary.” [...]
I know this is a touchy subject. Maybe I’d be smarter to leave it alone. But a piece in the new issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism and a recent exchange I had with a freelance photojournalist have me thinking again about this apparently age-old question: is staging ever acceptable in TV news? First, [...]
Police invariably keep journalists so far back from crime scenes that it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on with the naked eye. That’s the situation KTUU’s Jason Lamb faced earlier this month, as police prepared to search a frozen lake for the body of a missing woman. Photographer Mike Nederbrock had a decent shot [...]
He was a ground breaker who became a CBS News icon; a game show host and pitchman who became such a hard-nosed journalist that his name made up half of “the four most dreaded words in the English language: ‘Mike Wallace is here.’” His death at 93 after a long illness occasioned a flood of [...]