My Five Easy Multimedia Tips

29 Jun

I attended the June 13-18 Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at the Knight Digital Media Center at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. It was a phenomenal experience. I met 19 fabulous journalism professionals and a great group of knowledgeable and skilled trainers; I learned new photo, video, audio, and web skills; I listened to stories of multimedia successes in the newsroom; and I ate one tasty meal after another, gaining three pounds during the workshop.

Oh, and a 10-year-old gymnast accidentally jumped on my head while I was under a trampoline, setting up a video camera. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

Our class of workshop fellows. An amazing group!

Most of the things I learned at the workshop were fairly technical – how to shoot a variety of pictures for an effective slideshow, how to set the white balance on a video camera, how to create a Flash interactive graphic. I loved all these skills and am already working hard to apply them on my own this summer so I can teach them to my colleagues and in my courses this fall.

However, instead of writing about all those things that others have already discussed in great detail elsewhere, I’m going to tell you the five quick, easy things I learned that can be implemented in a mere moment and that are already helping me produce more interesting, better quality photos, audio, and video. These are probably going to be obvious to some people, but they weren’t to me, since my focus has always been writing.

Soaking it all up.

1. Audio: it’s all about the audio. Despite a lifetime of NPR listenership, I truly never realized how critical it is to ensure that your audio is high-quality and aurally intriguing, whether it’s standing alone or part of a video, and how hard it is to make it work. I learned at the workshop to organize the video I edited (see my team’s project; I edited the video about Cairo, the superstar gymnast) around the various topics interviewees discussed and the ambient sounds we’d recorded. I also learned to not just have constant loud noise in the video, but instead to include “breathing room” so the viewer could relax into the setting and have a deeper experience. I know this video, while it still has room for improvement, is far better than anything of its type that I’d created before.

Not so thrilled about being on camera.

2. Being onscreen: limit the gestures. When I teach in a classroom of 120 or more students, I need to be physically expressive. However, one of our sessions at the workshop was about doing standups on camera. I was terrified of this, but apparently did not completely embarrass myself. One reason? With a mental effort, I kept my flappy hands under control. The coach for this session, Marilyn Pittman, instructed us to make a gesture to accentuate each of the main points of the copy we were reading, then release our hands and relax them by our sides until the next gesture. In other words, no constant gesturing, and no frozen hands and arms in front of your torso. After returning from the workshop, while doing a video Skype interview, I applied this strategy by consciously reminding myself to gesture only rarely and then to relax my hands in my lap (I was seated at my desk). Those lecture-hall-sized gestures would have been horribly distracting in a tiny onscreen video.

3. Video: for the love of all things multimedia, use a tripod. USE A TRIPOD. Or something, anything, to stabilize the camera. Richard Koci Hernandez, who lectured on video storytelling at our workshop, strongly emphasized the importance of not letting shaky hands diminish the quality of your video. I’ve broken out my little Gorillapod tripod that had been gathering dust, even though for now I’m only using it with the video setting on my still camera because I don’t have a better option at home. The image quality may not be HD, but because it’s much more stable, the video that results is far more watchable than what I’ve made without a tripod in the past.

The iTalk app. Yes, I have a clip about goats.

4. Tools: my iPhone has its limits, but if I know them, I can still do some cool stuff with it. And this is my lowly 3GS, not the new iPhone 4, which is even cooler [fangirl alert]. I recently attended a fiber festival in Oakland to indulge in my love of all things yarn-related, and decided on the spot to attempt to produce an audio slideshow of my time there. I walked around and interviewed people using the iTalk app on my phone and just the built-in microphone. I figured if the sound didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. The sound quality turned out to be remarkably good, and I hope to finish the slideshow and post it when I get back from traveling next week. I did pretty much put the phone right up in my interviewees’ faces, but they got used to it. Hernandez has a new post on his blog detailing other great ways to use your iPhone for multimedia production.

Contact with my head in 3...2...1...

5. Storytelling: it’s worth getting slightly injured to get an element of the story that grabs the audience and makes them persist through the rest of the story. My teammate Fenella Saunders and I clambered down into a dusty pit under a trampoline at the nonprofit gymnastics school our team profiled for our project. There among the lost socks and spiderwebs, we shot video of our star gymnast bouncing on the trampoline – from below and off to the side. It made for a great shot, but on a whim, I said, “Let’s put it right under her!” I lowered the tripod and camera, then ventured out to the center of the pit – only to have the gymnast bounce right on top of my head a moment later. The minor neck pain I felt for the rest of the day was made completely worthwhile by the awesome video we got. Everyone who’s watched the video has commented on that shot.

What are your quick and easy solutions to make better multimedia? Share your tips here so I can pass them along to my students and colleagues!

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“The Branded Professor”

22 Jun

Photo by c__ on Flickr.

I recently had the opportunity to provide a guest blog post for the University of Venus, a blog focused on the concerns of Generation X women in higher education. I addressed an issue I’ve written about briefly here before: the increasing use of branding terminology both in the classroom and for academics themselves. I’m crossposting here and hope to see more discussion of these issues. Let me know what you think in the comments!

As a relatively new tenure-track professor in journalism and media, I teach students skills and critical thinking for a profession that is in a state of redefinition. One of the ways journalism educators are trying to increase their students’ job opportunities is by encouraging them to develop a “personal brand,” through which they establish themselves as a rising professional with a unique voice and style. They then publicize that personal brand through multimedia blogging and social media, in hopes of impressing prospective employers with their initiative and distinctive qualities.

I do think that this is an important strategy for my students, and I feel I’d do them a disservice not to discuss it with them and help them to establish themselves professionally online. This semester, I required students in my introductory media writing class to get involved with Twitter and also to set up individual blogs. I hope that those who excel in their online work will have opportunities to find jobs in their desired profession, and will be better situated to compete with students from larger, better-known programs. It seems unfair to not help them position themselves for their futures in this way.

I have struggled a bit with the implications of this approach, however. What does it mean to encourage my students to think of themselves as brands? I emphasized to them in class that they must be authentic and honest in their online writing and self-presentation, and that they had to prioritize their sense of personal integrity and ethics above all else. They could not be someone online who they weren’t in the real world. But still, the frighteningly corporate language of branding permeated the discussion.

As a faculty member in this field, I have also felt a need to “brand myself,” especially in these turbulent budgetary times. Not only do I want to shape a coherent public and scholarly identity, but I want to remain current with the changing norms of media and journalism practice, and so I practice what I preach to my students. I also have a blog and a Twitter account, and I focus these on professionally relevant topics – usually on changes in the magazine industry and the role of journalism in communities, which are also two of my research interests. However, these topics are not always organically arising creations of my soul, if you will. As an undergraduate English major and a lapsed poet, I am torn between desires to produce work that is professionally oriented and to create work that is more expressive of my experiences and emotions.

As a result of these conflicts, I identified with Mary Churchill’s recent UVenus post asking whether we as faculty are “merely playing the game[,] or have we become the game?” I am tentatively feeling my way through the challenges of equipping my students for a world where some degree of “playing the game” seems necessary, even for the chance to enter into such a potentially game-disrupting occupation as journalism. I also want to continue to use the online world to build my own public communication skills and engage in discussions of my field of study and my profession.

I think that this kind of engagement, through social media and other communication opportunities, is critical for someone who wants not only to teach about important societal issues in the classroom, but also to contribute to change on a larger scale. Attempting to establish myself online as someone with a voice and some expertise in my field gives me a bigger platform from which to speak.

Unlike my students, though, I have no one to remind me to remain true to myself and to monitor the integrity of what I do and say. That responsibility falls to me alone.

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Do Social Media Users Link to Magazines?

31 May

But do they link to magazines' web sites? Photo by Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a summary of its recent study “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press.”

The study compares the variety of topics included in news-related blog posts and tweets with the range included in mainstream media coverage, and found that:

Social media and the mainstream press clearly embrace different agendas. Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda – the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied.

I don’t find these results particularly surprising, but – as a magazine person – I wanted to know how often social media users linked to magazine stories online. I checked out the tables summarizing the PEJ data [PDF] and found that they had added newspapers and magazines together in their breakdown of the sources of links provided by bloggers and Twitter users. Unfortunately, this means that the study – unless the raw data can be broken apart once they’re made available – doesn’t tell us much about whether social media users are linking to magazines’ sites in their conversations about news.

The researchers note that:

In producing PEJ’s New Media Index, the basis for this study, there are some challenges posed by the breath [sic] of potential outlets. There are literally millions of blogs and tweets produced each day. To make that prospect manageable, the study observes the “news” interests of those people utilizing social media, as classified by the tracking websites. PEJ did not make a determination as to what constitutes a news story as opposed to some other topic, but generally, areas outside the traditional notion of news such as gardening, sports or other hobbies are not in the purview of content.

So though newsmagazines’ web sites might be included in the analysis, we probably won’t see many other magazines in the dataset. That’s an understandable limitation of the study, given its specific interest. Magazines are also likely to be less represented because they don’t usually relate to breaking news, as Twitter users would most often be interested in sharing. But if magazines aren’t offering even slower-paced bloggers something to write about, perhaps publishers should be concerned.

I would guess that magazines’ web sites are also rarely linked to by social media users due to their typically poor layout and usability. But I’d like to see some data on social media users’ links to magazines – and think it would be helpful to the magazine industry to see how far they’re being left behind as web users share information and favorite stories using social media. (Or not. But I’m pessimistic.)

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International Magazines on the iPad: Where, When, How Much?

14 May

Photo by Ethan Hein on Flickr.

My iPad should be here any day. I’m looking forward to testing out the magazine apps that have been released. Though I’ve been underwhelmed by demos I’ve seen so far, I think we also have to give the magazine publishers a little credit: after all, the iPad has been available for, oh, a month now? For an industry that’s rather set in its ways, the response of many major magazines within a few months to this new medium has been somewhat remarkable. They have a long way to go to truly innovate with the tablet format, but at least they’ve made a start.

One of the things I’m most interested in for magazines on the iPad is the possibility of greater access to international magazines. I recently wandered the magazine shelves at a bookstore and pondered the variety of English-language publications from abroad that I’d love to buy, but that cost $12-15 for the imported paper editions. It would be fabulous to be able to access many of these on an iPad or similar device for a lower cost than the print edition.

An example: I’m a knitter. I especially like the British knitting magazines for their sense of style. Not that I’m a fashionista, but some of the American knitting magazines seem to be tailored (no pun intended) for an older audience, whereas the British publications I’ve seen include patterns and ideas for younger knitters. One of my favorites – The Knitter – is available at a local big-box bookstore for about $13 per copy. A U.S. subscription would cost over $100/year, which would be save some on the bookstore cover price, but still too pricey for this knitter.

Screenshot of The Knitter magazine, as shown on Zinio's Web-based digital replica.

I investigated on the Web to see if I could get the magazine in an electronic edition for less money. It would seem that an electronic edition of a British magazine could cost me the same as an electronic copy of an American magazine. I found I could buy a digital replica-style subscription to The Knitter via Zinio – a company that assists publishers in creating digital editions – for the grand total of…wait for it…about $100/year.

This makes no sense. Why wouldn’t a publication take advantage of the low cost of digital distribution to build its readership overseas, as well as within its own country? Surely it would make no difference whether a digital-edition reader is in the U.K. or in the U.S. Perhaps there is an advertising angle or other concern that I’m not considering, in which case I hope someone will set me straight in the comments. I have ordered yarn from a British supplier (yes, I am a dedicated knitter!). It would seem advertisers, especially those with online stores, would be happy to reach an international readership.

I’m hoping that magazines around the world will rapidly innovate to create new multimedia products – beyond just digital replicas – and then will make them affordably accessible to global audiences. Not only would doing so make it possible for their magazines to be read more widely, but it would also increase the flow of information around the world, in multiple languages and with a variety of topics, and that’s always a good thing.

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Playing around…

8 May

I discovered Typekit and its WordPress integration. This is dangerous for someone like me who enjoys typography but has little design skill and no knowledge of CSS. Bear with me and rest assured, these are not my final font selections. Final design forthcoming!

Edited 5/13: OK, these might be my final font selections. Thoughts?

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