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!

“If you don’t really love doing it, you’re not going to do well,” she said in an NPPA interview. “It’s such a monster that you battle every day. You have to be so many things in a day.”

Here’s one of Michael’s prize-winning stories, a story that she says changed her life because “it showed me a lot about what people are willing to give up and do for other people.” It’s also an example of the value of listening. Michael says she met the man in the story when he demanded to see her ID as she entered a government building. She had to put down all her gear to find it. She wasn’t all that happy to see him again on her way out, but when he asked if she wanted to hear his story, she stopped long enough to hear what he had to say.

Michael does plenty of stories like that without a stand-up, but when she does decide to include one she spends a great deal of time setting up and shooting it. The result is often a multi-part stand-up, like the one in this story.

Did you count the number of shots in that stand-up? How long do you think it took Michael to get that done, working alone? Here’s the answer, in a behind-the-scenes look at how she produced that stand-up:

Thanks, Michelle Michael, for sharing your work and showing what it takes to do it well.

“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

Last year’s national winner in the small market TV category was Jason Lamb of KTUU in Anchorage, AK. In this post, Lamb shares how he crafts his award-winning stories by spending more time than most with his video.

“It’s important to remember that the goal of any memorable story should be to get information across in a way that makes it easy for people to relate and connect to,” says Lamb. “Logging your tapes (or your cards or your disks) well is a crucial step in that process.”

For Lamb, “logging” is much more than registering the clip number or time code.

He has three key components to his approach:

1. Log as much of the video as time allows
Many less experienced reporters say they’re just too time-crunched to spend time logging, but even a few minutes can improve a story. “There is so much more of the raw footage to log than just the framed up ‘interview shots.’ I log as much as I can: interesting shots that I might want to write to, spontaneous moments with the person I’m interviewing, etc.,” Lamb says.

2. Log “the moments”
According to Lamb, a “moment” is something captured on camera that helps make people forget they are watching a “news report” and makes them feel closer to the story. “They help people relate to what your story is about. It could be the moment that a stem-cell recipient meets his donor for the first time, or a spontaneous reaction to a section of land being eaten away by a raging river. Moments help drive your story,” says Lamb.

3. Log “the layers”
Lamb says good stories have multiple levels or layers to them that keep the audience engaged throughout. “A different layer could be an interesting detail or added ‘twist’ you can introduce in your story at just the right moment to keep people interested,” Lamb says.

Check out one of Lamb’s stories below and check back later for Lamb’s tips on putting words and pictures together in the most compelling way.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Used well, a graphic makes data more visually appealing and easier to understand.  Newspapers often do this well in print but when they post those static graphics online they fall short by failing to take advantage of the medium. What online gives you is the ability to make graphics interactive, letting users explore data not just look at it. You can use more information in an interactive graphic than you ever could in print or on the air, letting users dig deeper. And there’s one more bonus: users exploring interactive data will stay on your site longer.

The trouble, of course, is that many newsrooms don’t have enough staff to do all that needs to be done on the Web side on a daily basis, much less create interactive graphics to go with any given story. But guess what? They don’t have to. You can do it yourself, for free.

We’ve already shared tips on creating a simple interactive Google Map. Now, check out how to use the online tool Many Eyes to build additional types of interactive graphics:

The Internet is a treasure trove of multimedia but it’s important to make sure that what you find is really OK to use for free. Copyright laws do apply to online material, and saying you found it online won’t get you off the hook if someone decides to take legal action.  It doesn’t matter if you’re not making money from the content. As Mark Luckie warns, “If you copy and use something created by another person you may be violating their rights to their work.”

So what can you do? Look for material that’s in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Serena Carpenter at Arizona State University has compiled an excellent list of sites to search for images.  Among them:

• Creative Commons search, a one-stop site for scanning Flickr, Google, Blip.tv and Jamendo (for music).
• EveryStockPhoto, which claims to have 7 million free photos in its database.
• Wylio, which calls itself “the fastest image-finder for bloggers.”
• Wikipedia public domain resources, a meta-list of searchable sites.

Once you’ve found what you need, be sure to double check the license. It’s always a good idea to say where you got it and link to the original source, if possible.

Do you have other favorite sites for finding material that’s free to use online? Share the wealth!

What’s different this time around? The new edition includes substantial revisions but retains the essentials: how to report, write and produce for multiple platforms. We have chapters on delivery, ethics and job seeking as well. There’s a ton of real-world examples and advice from professional journalists. New screen shots, images and examples are included throughout.

There’s also a new focus on the use of social media and mobile devices in gathering and disseminating news. Difficult to believe, but Twitter didn’t exist when we wrote the first edition. My how times have changed:

A majority of journalists today use social media to do their jobs—mainly to find stories, sources and information quickly and to monitor trends. Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, once used primarily in breaking news situations, have become a central part of the daily newsgathering process. TV anchor Amy Wood says she gets “lots of tips on breaking news” via her social media sites. One of her Twitter followers told her a hostage crisis at a local bank had been resolved before the police announced it.

We’re hard at work on a new companion website that will be available for use with the book this fall. You’ll be able to buy access to the entire site or to individual modules. Each online module–linked to a chapter in the text–includes interactive exercises, tutorials, resources and examples of multimedia storytelling. The “Ongoing Story” module allows users to report a story from beginning to end, and write a TV package as well as a Web version.

No matter what edition of the text you have, updated chapter-by-chapter content will continue to be available on the Advancing the Story blog.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

There’s no single “holy grail,” of course, but two key words are search and social, according to participants in an online video journalism summit hosted by the Washington Post this week. Their advice: make sure your video is tagged so people can find it and get it on every social platform you possibly can.

Jeff Whatcott of Brightcove said that for SEO purposes, every page that video is embedded in needs to be rich in metadata about the content so searchers can find it. But while search is still the primary way users find videos, Whatcott said, social sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook is “growing significantly and faster than search.”

The Associated Press YouTube channel has over 650 million views to date but almost half of those viewers never went to YouTube, according to Kevin Roach, director of US broadcast news for the AP. “Forty percent of our streams from YouTube come from embedded streams” in social media networks, he said. It may seem obvious, but it’s critically important to make it easy for users to embed or “click to share” your videos, said Anna Robertson of Yahoo! Video.

Video content & length

What about content? It depends on who you ask. Roach is a believer in the power of raw video to attract younger viewers, in part because it’s nothing like the TV news their parents watched. But Stokes Young of MSNBC.com said that in his experience more explanatory, scripted videos get more views.

The Miami Herald has increased video views by 25 percent in the past year, making it the second most important driver of traffic to the site behind articles.  Managing editor Rick Hirsch told Poynter Online that breaking news and sports videos are most popular, in large part because that’s what the site is known for. “This isn’t rocket science, but do video on the things that people come to your site for,” he said.

Long videos, in general, don’t drive much traffic. As Hirsch told Poynter:

One thing we’ve learned is there’s a reason that television does two-minute stories. Unless something is super compelling, people’s attention span is relatively short, and it’s even shorter on a small screen.

As for live streaming video, it’s no longer the flavor of the month. Mike Toppo of CNN.com said he doesn’t consider live video “a game changer” online unless it’s of something unexpected and unquestionably newsworthy, like what’s been happening in Egypt. Anna Robertson of Yahoo! agreed. In her view, shorter clips typically work better online than live streams.

Video location

Whatever the content, don’t slap video online without providing context. MSNBC’s Young and Ann Derry of the New York Times told the summit that integrating video into online articles is critically important to increase the number of views. “People definitely watch a lot of video at the page level,” Derry said. “People don’t want to go to the ‘gallery’ or the ‘library’ to watch video. They want to watch it integrated into the site.”

If you’re featuring video on your news site, what’s worked best for you? What’s been a waste of time and effort? Share your ideas and links to video in the comments. Thanks!

Post updated 3/2/11 to include second Hirsch quote.

• The key data of the day – broken down for you
• Our pick of the data blogosphere – which sites have the key posts?
• Search the world’s government data – and global development data
• What have you done with our data? Featured apps

And there’s more. For journalists, the site is a treasure trove of browsable and downloadable datasets from all over the world, including the United States. You can search by country or by topic area, from agriculture to transportation.  There’s also an exhaustive list of specific subjects they have data about, from AIDS to youth justice.

Beyond its utility as a resource, the site’s also worth visiting for ideas on how to visualize data. The Guardian took the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks and plotted them on a bubble chart-map mash-up (above) so you can see where the most traffic was coming from. A simple bar graph made it easy to compare energy consumption in the United States and China on a per capita basis over the past twenty years.

“It’s our job to make the key data accessible and easy to understand,” says Simon Rogers, the Guardian’s news editor. Lucky for us, the paper believes in doing that not just for its own readers but for anyone, including other journalists. Thanks, guys.

Hinkle says he had to re-learn a lot of technical skills when he took the job in Austin last year but he’s now shooting and editing his own stories daily. “I am expected to turn a package for the 5 p.m., file VO/SOTS for the 6 and 10 p.m. news, do a Web report first thing and update it throughout the day,” he says. “I do the same thing  a reporter and photographer together would do.”

That includes demonstrative, multi-part stand-ups, which Hinkle produces on a regular basis. He decides what he wants to say and show in a stand-up and plans it out, selecting different shots or locations for each segment of the track.

“Sometimes, especially if it’s a multi-part stand-up with more than three parts, I draw out a very quick, rough storyboard on paper, so I remember exactly what each shot is,” Hinkle says. “The storyboard might sound ridiculous, but thinking about the stand-up as a movie instead of just a portion of the story has really helped me.”

Then he records the entire stand-up in every location, so he can use a single take if he doesn’t have time to edit.

Hinkle typically shoots with a 25 lb. XDCam and heavy-duty tripod. But on a couple of occasions, he’s shot entire stories with a Flip cam. On his blog, Living Off the Air, Hinkle describes covering a firefighters’ training exercise in a network of caverns. Photographers from other local stations couldn’t fit through the small opening, but Hinkle grabbed two Flip cams out of his pack and crawled in. Good thing he had two. The first one died.

Taking the camera apart, I noticed moisture was collecting inside around the lens cover. I hadn’t dropped the camera, but I figured the air was saturated enough that far down to cause something like this to happen. I wiped a film of cave condensation from my face and had an idea, as I replaced the out-of-service camera with the one from my pocket.

As we continued on our course, I would stop recording every two or three minutes. Next, I pressed my lips up to the camera lens and breathed in hard. Weird? Sick? Okay, whatever. It worked. I was able to suck away any moisture from inside to keep the camera running the rest of the trip.

A Flip cam also saved the day when Hinkle was overcome by pain that turned out to be kidney stones while on assignment. He couldn’t lift the big camera but managed to shoot this story with his Flip:

Hinkle says he’s often asked how he manages to do it all as a solo journalist. “Car time is phone time,” he says. While driving, he sets up interviews and looks for places to shoot.  Like most solo journalists, he uses a light stand to help him frame and set the focus for his stand-ups.

What else? You’ll find the answers in this light-hearted video Hinkle showed at a recent journalism workshop:

Right. Don’t forget to have fun!