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BERKELEY, CALIF. — After our long storyboarding sessions, it’s now time to move into more hands-on training and seminars on doing video shooting, audio recording, digital photography and using Macintosh computers.

So far, there’s been a good mix of lectures, discussions and collaborative work on storyboards for our projects. The group is very inquisitive, and the instructors have done a great job of imparting their knowledge but also including the group as much as possible. (I am banned from using the term “unconference” by Paul Grabowicz; it’s a term he is very tired of hearing.)

First up is a Videocamera Instruction led by Ellen Seidler, photojournalism lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each group gets a high end Sony DV camera and tripod to try out.

Ellen Seidler: We used to have analog video, and now it’s digital video. The difference is that with analog, it’s a continuous signal, and with digital, it’s a series of 1s and 0s. You can copy it and copy it and copy it, and you don’t lose any quality. When we copied analog, each copy degraded it more and more with each copy. With digital, once you have that video, you’ll have that quality in every transfer and copy.

We’re in the digital age, and it’s opened up a lot of amazing opportunities. Equipment that cost thousands of dollars a few years ago now is completely affordable. This tutorial is available online on the Knight website as well.

Organizing equipment and doing a checklist before you leave is an important thing. We’re using cameras here that are rather nice. They are about $3,000, and are DV cams. (They are Sony DSR-PD170 cameras.) When you look for cameras, go to B&H Photos and look at consumer cameras, with the median price point at $1,000.

The things that differentiate each camera’s price are:

> Chips: The charge couple device (CCD). With a three chip camera, there’s one chip for each main color — RGB (red, green and blue). A single chip camera has sections for each color. For web work, it’s primarily irrelevant. But if you’re working with content that might go on broadcast, then you will need to get a three-chip camera.

> Auto-functions: You have point-and-shoot cameras for people to shoot baby’s first steps and they’re not for journalism. I don’t recommend getting a camera with auto-everything. You may need to override it at some point.

> HD video: We’ll be talking about HD video a bit later.

The first thing you need for each camera is something to power it. We call these batteries “the brick.” You want to make sure your battery is fully charged and that you have a backup. The camera bag also includes an AC adapter to plug it in. With these cameras, you have to use Sony mini-DV tapes. The Sony camera is the best way to go. If you use an off-brand tape and record with it, it can clog the record heads. We always insist you use Sony tapes.

What about cameras without tape? They record onto small hard drives, or mini-discs. They could be the wave of the future, but for now, I would stay away from them. They add more steps to the process, and you can’t archive it as easily. If you have to archive on your computer, it becomes a nightmare, and with tapes you can just put them on your shelf.

Check out the video tapes themselves. The first thing you need to do is write the story slug (description in a word or two) and the number 1, then number 2, etc. We’ve had people lose tapes because they never labeled them and they got mixed with other tapes. Make sure to label your tape clearly.

(She now goes through the basic parts of the camera: the lens, viewfinder, power button, LCD pop-out screen, manual focus, etc.)

Auto-exposure can be a problem when there’s someone in front of a window and there’s light behind them. To override the auto-exposure, turn off the “auto-lock” button, and then use the manual iris, so you can regulate the amount of light. The F-stops refer to the amount the iris is opening in the lens. The lower the number, the larger the iris is, and the more light is let in. If you leave it on auto-exposure, the camera will keep hunting for different exposures and the iris will change a lot — so I don’t use auto-exposure.

Audio is an integral part of video. It’s flat and dead without it. From the get-go, learn to acquire good audio with the video. In these cameras, there’s a built-in microphone, a “shotgun” microphone. They vary on their “pickup pattern” — the line of how they pick up audio, whether it’s straight or more broad. The closer you are to the subject, the less outside noise you’ll capture.

It’s better to use external microsophones, than built-in microphones. Hand mikes are workhorses in TV news. It doesn’t require an extra battery, and you should use a wind filter. They run about $140, they’re not that expensive. I like the RE-50. For the lavalier microphone, it attaches to a lapel, and requires a AA battery. It attaches with an XLR cable.

Learning to do video right is like learning to write sentences and do grammar. When I look at videos on the New York Times site, I am amazed that they allow people to shoot videos like that. They would never allow that quality of writing into the paper, so why allow it online? They have got a bit better, but I never watch videos at any of the newspaper websites.

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I had to leave the day’s sessions early today, so luckily Jessica Goldwin, a fellow in the boot camp who works as a journalism program associate at the Knight Foundation, agreed to take notes for MediaShift. The following is taken from her “minutes” of the “Video Shooting Techniquest talk by Ellen Seidler.

Ellen Seidler: Before you go out and shoot, you want to plan your shoot. What visual elements will help you tell your story? Have a conversation with the reporter on the way to the story, “What kind of pictures, in an ideal world, do we want?” You will probably have to adjust when you get to the location, but it is nice to have a shot list in your brain.

Also, when you stick a new tape in your camera, let 30 seconds roll by. Check your audio and wear headphones throughout the shoot. It is also not a bad idea to have a little checklist when you are starting out. This will eventually become second nature, even though it is overwhelming at first. Become one with the camera.

Next thing that’s important: shoot selectively. One main reason being that it will take you that much longer to get to the good stuff, so don’t commit to taping anything you don’t want seeing the light of day! Stop the camera to get the good shots. Start the editing process before you even shoot. Don’t shoot garbage…develop good habits.

Second thing is to “shut up when you shoot!” If you are rolling tape, don’t talk. The sound of cars going by or wind will be poisoned by Joe asking what you want for lunch. You can’t separate the bad from the good when it comes to audio editing.

Paul Grabowicz: Also, don’t “uh-huh” in response to interview answers because you will have a whole roll of that.

Seidler: People have this notion that taking video is like taking slow shots. No. Think of Thanksgiving Dinner when you take photos all down the line at the table. You can’t do that with video! Hold your shots instead, for 10 to 15 seconds.

It is easier to take a 10 second shot and cut it down to three seconds. Not so easy for the reverse. When you are shooting action, anticipate ahead. Have a few seconds buffer before and after. Holding shots gives you options in the editing room.

The next thing is to not zoom or pan. Why? Well, imagine if you wrote a story and everything ended in an exclamation mark. It would drive you crazy. Use zoom or pan for emphasis. Get your camera and frame it on something. Don’t feel like you have to follow the action. Let things happen within your frame. Once it happens, stop, follow the action, reframe and shoot again. There can be times when it is helpful, but don’t overuse it.

If you are going to zoom or pan, then use it with the “holding your shots” rule in mind. For example, you want to do a story about a beautiful park, so you start with a wide shot. Hold for 10-15 seconds. Zoom in to ducks on lake and hold for 10-15 seconds. Then, when you get into the edit room, you have tons of options for nice static shoots.

Movement on the web sometimes doesn’t work so well. Movement requires more compression. Sometimes it doesn’t translate very well.

One of the hardest things to learn is shooting in sequences, which is like “Hollywood moviemaking on the fly.” Gas prices, for example: story about gas over $4. Go to a gas station and you have a 20 second spot to fill. You could stand outside and get a 20 second shot of the station, but that is pretty boring. Instead, think of the parts. Start with a nice wide shot to establish place. Then, focus on the parts. Maybe there is a guy pulling in? Get a shot of his feet stepping out, or maybe a close up of his hand pulling the nozzle out or unscrewing the gas cap. You could get an extreme close up of his eyes, and then close up on the numbers going by. Then an over the shoulder shot…get lots of angles to get different components that will build the whole visually. But don’t let the camera roll continuously. Turn it on and off. Only shoot when you are ready to get something you potentially want down on tape. The other thing to think about is to not shoot everything from the eye-level perspective. In this case, you can take video to more interesting places but leading their eyes to different angles. Shots ¼ wide to establish, ¼ medium normal, ½ close ups. Remember, this is for the web! The stuff that is really going to resonate are the close ups. The wide stuff is going to get lost. [shows videography sample, “Day at the Races.”]

You need to think two steps ahead to get the shots that, when put together, will tell a story. You have to think about what is happening and where it is going to go. Get the footage that can be pieced together in a sequence. “Storyboard in your head.” Most newsrooms now only give you limited time, so this is a good strategy in order to capture the general experience. In journalism though, you have to be mindful of manipulation. You don’t want to give the sense of something that isn’t…especially if you are splicing together and editing shots.

If you want to be a photo-journalist, you want to be up in the action. You can’t shy away.

Take advantage of foreground and background to get a sense of depth.

It is also interesting to layer different audio experiences to create more richness. Variety in perspectives, angles and details has the same effect regarding the richness of a piece.

Today, quality has diminished, but YouTube has kind of made that acceptable. It is difficult since instead of a two-man team, one person does everything.

Capture diagonals also adds to a sense of movement.

When framing people, get head shoulders. You want the eyes to be on that “top third” line. It is a compositional thing and serves very well to define a shot.

“Match edit” is seamless integration of two shots; maybe a close up cut together with a wide shot of the same action that appears continuous.

Also be careful with using music, since copyright issues are huge. “Be mindful.”

When you are doing an interview, remember to have the camera at eye-level. “Good framing is very important.” Don’t want too much empty, useless space. Remember the “rule of thirds,” want the eyes on the top third line. A normal interview is usually a head and shoulders kind of thing. This gives enough room and balance (and make sure everything is in focus). Generally, you do “talking head” interviews a lot in news. Have interviewee and reporter face-to-face and the camera is to the side. If someone starts looking at the camera, tell them not to since it is distracting. “Nose room” is when you pan over slightly, keep face centered and give extra room to the direction the interviewee is looking. This also eliminates dead space. The camera person should be mindful not to make eye contact at the interviewee. If you are shooting by yourself, without a reporter, you should sit across from the interviewee and maintain the eye contact. Keep audio in one ear though. This is tricky since you have to be responsible from everything, so develop a routine.

Be consistent with angles, eye direction, etc. Keep it tidy.

Mics in interviews: You want the lapel mic to be as unobtrusive as possible and clipped facing the same direction as the person is speaking. If you are using a hand mic, frame it outside of the shot. “I know this is obvious, but remember to point the mic at the source of the audio.”

Set up shots are important. Shoot 15-20 seconds from over the reporter’s shoulder. Then get the same shot from the other side (reverse shot of the reporter). Also get a cut away shot of the reporter listening. This gives you shots to cut with in the editing room. You might not need to use this, but it is always good to have. You also need to keep the camera on the same side, the “180 degree rule” to keep consistency within the segment.

If you have to edit your own stuff, you get a lot better a lot faster. You learn quickly what you are lacking and what kind of shots you need to effectively tell the story.

It is also important to have the video and the script complimenting each other, not repeating each other.

When shooting hand held, the shot will be shaky unless you are right up close with a wide focal length. It is better to just use the tripod, but just in case…

Also, think about three point lighting: key light; fill light; back light. Key light is the dominate source of light. Fill light is the half light that fills in shadows. You can be creative. Often in news, you can’t have time to set up this traditional lighting set up.

Think of Picasso. He learned classical figure drawing first, then experimented. Take that lesson with you into camera work. Get a strong foundation and then branch out.

“Your editors will push for you to do video, but push back for having it as good as it can be. Video for the web is part of a larger piece, not as a stand alone…it needs to fit into the overarching story telling, but quality is still important…this is evolving everyday. I see stuff online just so they can say they have video, but to me, it doesn’t add anything to my knowledge…video content should provide information that is compelling and gives a perspective that print can’t.”

BERKELEY, CALIF. — It’s Day 2 at the Knight Digital Media Center’s week-long boot camp for journalists learning to do multimedia reports. On the agenda for the day is learning about doing “storyboarding,” or laying out how a multimedia report will work. And there will also be some basic tutorials on using videocameras and techniques in video shooting. (Some sessions will be webcast live and archived online here so you can follow along at home or work.)

UC Berkeley journalism school new media director Paul Grabowicz is now talking about the basics of storyboarding, along with UC Berkeley instructor Jane Stevens.

For what kinds of stories would you shoot video?

Stevens starts a running list of possible video topics, as suggested by fellows in the audience:

> Action sports
> Takes you to a place
> Character — person
> Breaking news: taking you there
> Showing a process or how-to video
> Show a large perspective of crowd at live event
> Humor
> Animals or pets
> Kids, especially if they are talking to the camera
> Drama
> Celebrities

What are events not worth videotaping? Politics, especially if it’s just a politician speaking in a rote setting.

When would you use photos? Steven starts a new list of good times to use photos:

> Show emotion instead of drama, show that moment
> Give perspective or angle on something
> Stay in one moment instead of video
> When Olympics runner cross finish line (vs. video for whole race)
> Faces or portraits
> Show changes over time
> Show details
> Portray a concept

What’s audio good for capturing?

> Hear the character of someone
> Catch the ambience of situation
> Intimacy of conversation
> Emotion of situation
> Reflection (if someone’s talking, you can reflect on what they’re saying better)
> Create a mood
> Musicality: musical interludes in stories, pacing

Stevens: The relationship between audio and photos is very interesting. There’s a lot of interplay between these.

Grabowicz: If there’s one thing you’ll learn in this training, it’s the primacy of audio. You’ll always be checking the audio, whether you’re capturing video or audio. A common sound will often take you someplace, like the tone when you enter a corner store. When I hear that sound, it really makes me feel like I’m there.

Q: What’s the ethical problem if you use a sound effect that didn’t come from that place?

Grabowicz: If it’s a generic sound, and you’re not implying that it happened then, I think it’s OK. But if it’s a story about school bus accidents, and you put in a generic screeching sound, then no. But if you’re just using school bus sounds as background, that might be OK. It depends on the news organization, but you don’t want to create a mis-impression, making people believe you are somewhere and you’re not.

What are graphics good for?

> Explain how things work
> Show statistics, numbers
> Locational, maps
> Simplifying data, processes
> Timelines
> Provide context
> Take people where humans can’t go: space, bacteria

What is text good for?

> Snide answer: whatever is left
> Breaking news; blog it first, get it out fast, urgent info
> Ability to translate words
> Highlighting things
> Linking out, getting more information
> Scan-ability, browse-ability, especially vs. video or audio
> Backgrounders and history
> Explaining things
> Thumbnails, essential info on profiles

Stevens: There was a project called The Fair, where an audio report was fabulous and it went along with video. The writing was amazing, even though it was audio.

Grabowicz: Print might be going away but not text.

Sample Storyboarding

Grabowicz: What’s a breaking news or disaster story that might be happening in your community. What are the parts of a disaster story you have to cover? Let’s say it’s wildfire. Fire is everywhere. What are the components?

Parts of the Story — Matched to Medium to Tell It

> Evacuation — map, video, text
> Where is the fire? How is it moving? — text message to cell phone (Twitter), graphics
> How big? —- map, photos, user-generated photos
> Deaths, injuries, victims — photos with audio, data
> How did it start? — photos, text, map, graphic
> Authorities — text, photo, audio, video
> Prevention — animation, games, text, graphic
> Hospitals and evacuees — audio, photos (might not let you take them), video
> Personal stories (firefighters, homeless, etc.) — audio, user-gen content,
> History — text, timeline, photos
> Future — text, graphics, timeline
> Rescue — video

Stevens: Text lives in two ways that doesn’t work in print as well. Sometimes you just need bullet points of text next to a graphic or photo. We’re always forcing the same festival story every year. Well, don’t do it. Just put up photos with bullet points and allow the audience to tell their stories.

Projects Fellows Will Be Doing

Jeremy Rue of UC Berkeley is laying out the projects that groups of trainees will be taking on this week.

Tele-immersion: Look at lab at UC Berkeley doing tele-immersion. It’s a process for using video shot from all sides to recreate a user, an event, or object, so they can be experienced, and users can collaborate in real time. Researchers think it will help revolutionize the way physicians, artists and educators interact with their colleagues and audience.

Learning from Nature (Gecko Project): There have been new discoveries about the way geckos use their tail to twist their bodies around and even fly. There’s a scientist studying it using robotics, and his lab is creepy. He has a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation and it’s fascinating. You will be there for four hours with him. His office has tons of toys, dragons and beetles. It’s a great story. They’re adapting the finding about geckos to improve robotics. DARPA is funding this project, so they’re getting government money.

Eco-House: A super-efficient house is in Berkeley, a house of the future with maximum efficiency. It uses gray water to recycle plumbing, with that water going out to the gardens. We’re on the cusp of a huge water shortage here and there’s been an emphasis on conserving water. But it’s difficult to do this kind of gray water recycling and plumbing and getting permission to do it.

Bay Area Outreach and Recreational Program for Disabled Cyclists: Helps people with disabilities to bike and get around. BORP provides training, hosts games and advocates for the disabled community.

Teams are being split up by specialties, so each group has people with varying abilities in different mediums. I’m on Team Gecko.

Team Gecko Storyboarding Process

My breakout group includes Karl Mondon from Contra Costa Times; Martha Irvine at Associated Press; Laura McClure from Mother Jones, MIguel Castro from Open Society Institute and Penelope Carrington from the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Here are the elements for our story:

> Background on gecko finding
> Why do the research
> How did researcher get into this?
> Background on researcher, Dr. Robert Full, life sciences pofessor at UC Berkeley
> Him or his work
> Cast of his robots, examples of his work
> Other famous geckos
> Creepy factor
> Bloopers/mistakes
> Dehumanization, sociological aspect
> Ethics of using science for military
> DARPA funding, explainer
> Who owns project?

How do we storyboard this on the web?

Home page could contain these main chunks: The researcher (Full); his robotic creatures; ethics around project; why do the project or uses for technology. Include brief explanation on home page about why people should care. Background image: Could be evolution of robots, showing them getting better over time.

Should we create a game? Yes, it would be excellent to have a game where you choose animals or robots and see who would win a race or battle. “Animal Wars”?

For ethics page, what medium do we use? Text story could be good. Maybe get people in the community to answer questions about what they thought about robots relacing soldiers in the military. We’ll fold this page into “Uses” page.

For page about Professor Full, what medium do we use? Video, photos, audio, kid photos, timeline.

For page on his things and robots, what medium do we use? Video, photos, audio, slide show or Flash. Compare robots vs. real animals with text “fun facts.” Might be a good place for blooper videos, later uploaded to YouTube. Put game here.

For page on “why” or “how come?” what medium would we use? FAQ, examples slideshow with audio.

We’re going to rename the “why” page as “Beyond the Lab,” and cover ethical issues, military usage, other uses outside of his lab.

Now we’re laying out the web pages for our project.

Home page: Still photograph of him (linking to page about him); photo of robots (linking to page about his robots); photo of military robot (linking to “Beyond the Lab” page on uses for his science). Quick explanation about the story.

Page about Full: Photo of him; timeline explaining his bio; video overview of him; his famous presentation (if he lets us use it).

Page about his robots: Group photo of his robots, where you could roll over and get info on each robot. Audio slide show for each one or video — but try to keep it consistent. Also, include the game on this page.

Beyond the Lab page: Show the evolution of Big Dog, a robot based on a dog. FAQ on this page. Timeline might include past, present and future.

We then tried to figure out how to fill in the “Beyond the Lab” page, thinking about doing a chart that would include various uses for the technology, along with things that have been successful, some that have flamed out, and others that were controversial.

How to Get Your Dream Job

Now we take a break from the hands-on work on storyboarding to hear from a speaker. Laylan Connelly is a reporter for the Orange County Register, who started as an intern and moved up to doing a blog and covering the beaches. She was a fellow at the Knight digital training previously, and is going to talk about how she used those multimedia skills back at her newsroom.

Laylan Connelly: I actually did a business plan based on what I learned at the seminar. It is real important for me to tell the people in my company what other publications are doing. I took quotes from Rob Curley.

So how do you change the culture of the newsroom? Editors have to care about it and not just give lip service. It’s important to change the culture when moving from a print-centric publication to a web publication. But you don’t have to be at the top of an organization to change it in today’s climate.

You can’t just send everyone out to shoot with videocameras without any training. You need to start doing informal training sessions, and I volunteered to run those at the Register.

My new job title is: reporter, columnist, blogger, photographer, videographer, website manager, broadcast journalist. I’m better at some than others.

(She shows her new OC Beaches website.)

Q: How do you carry your gear with you?

Connelly: Let me show you. (She stands up with notebook in hand, and one point-and-shoot digital still camera wrapped around one arm, and a Flip videocamera wrapped on her other.) I do my interviews on my notebook because I never trust that I won’t lose a video recording or audio. If I like a quote, I’ll ask if I can videotape it. I use Microsoft MovieMaker because it’s the easiest one to use. What I’m doing is pretty basic, quick and easy.

Blogs are great for people with short attention spans. They also help create two-way dialogue, and I’ve added other bloggers as well from the community, adding different voices.

Being a blogger does not negate that I’m a reporter. I still do front page articles, but the blog and web offers me different ways to tell stories. When there was a shark attack, it was 8 a.m., and the only information was in the San Diego newspaper and I linked it on my blog. We need to join the conversation that the rest of the world is having. And we can do our own unique reporting, and add in AP reporting as well. We had a videographer get local reaction, I called local lifeguards, and we added a map showing where the attack was. They eventually took what I had done on the blog and put it in the paper, and it was an A1 story.

Q: Would you link to newspaper sites that compete in your market?

Connelly: Yes, if they are the only one who has a story, then I would link to it.

Q: Did you check with your editor before putting those links in?

Connelly: I don’t like checking with editors. [audience laughs]

Q: Do you have an editor look at your blog posts before they go up on the site?

Connelly: I just post things on the web without an editor. Sorry, editors. Readers do a good job telling me if there’s a typo and I just fix it. If it’s something big that will be featured on the home page, then I do get an editor to look at it first.

Q: Are you the only reporter in America that can wear a swimsuit to work?

Connelly: Yes! Sometimes I feel guilty going out and getting sources while I’m out surfing, but that’s what I do.

There should be discussions in the newsroom about these things. We need to engage our managers about what’s possible. You guys are in a unique position to go back and help move journalism forward and make a difference.

Read More about the Knight Digital Training:

> Live-Blogging the Multimedia Boot Camp for Newspaper Journalists

BERKELEY, CALIF. — With MediaShift, I’ve always had a plan to add video and audio along with all the text reports I do here. As I want to “walk my talk” about media outlets using multimedia, I felt it made sense to do them myself. This week, I’ll be auditing a week-long boot camp in multimedia training at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. It’s a training run by the Knight Digital Media Center.

Not only will I be doing the training, but I’ll also have the chance to live-blog the sessions and share them with my readers here. I won’t be covering the entire week, but will try to write about topics that will resonate with the MediaShift audience. (You can also see live webcasts here.)

Today, Sunday, started at 2 pm with a reception at the J-school’s library. The other trainees all work at small, medium and large newspapers around the country, with a few coming from magazines and broadcasters. The idea is for everyone to learn more about doing interactive projects, shooting video, editing audio and video, while also hearing from expert speakers.

Cit-J, Community, Mashups and Mobile

The first panel is called, “Cit-J, Community, Mashups and Mobile: How a Newspaper Company Becomes a New Media Company.” The focus is on the Bakersfield Californian newspaper site, which has had success doing citizen journalism with the Northwest Voice and other neighborhood print publications culled from citizen contributions online.

Jennifer Baldwin is “contributions editor” of the paper, and is in charge of working with community members and getting them active in contributing text, photos and video to the site. (I’ve added bold emphasis below when paraphrasing the speakers.)

Baldwin: How do you get buy-in from your staff when it looks like you’re trying to replace them? I talked to reporters and editors and explained what I was trying to do. They realized that it helps empower the audience. User-generated content isn’t going to replace them; it just augments their reporting. I go to all the budget meetings and look for opportunities. The key is to have someone champion your project in the newsroom, someone like me in charge of citizen journalism or user-generated content.

Get out in the community and meet people and encourage them to submit stories and news releases and photos from their events. Some communities don’t have access to technology — older people, poorer people — so help facilitate for them. I’ll post things if they can’t do it.

A big part of what I do is check stories submitted by the public, verifying identities, etc. There’s also bad poetry you have to go through. You can’t run everything in print that people submit. People don’t want to have their stuff just online; they want to be in the paper. I sometimes have to convince them that we have a lot of traffic on our site.

I want to encourage people to send in more breaking news to us. We get a lot of features but not as much breaking stories. If you see a car accident, take a photo and send it along to us. The TV stations have been doing this and we need to compete with that.

Just last February, we reorganized our newsroom into an informational hub. We used to have reporters and editors working in their own world deciding what got in the paper and there was no cohesive discussion on how it would look online. So we’ve created a hub system with all our front end information creation people broken into teams. So they are reporting for the web as if it was a wire service. In our morning meeting, we talk about how we’re going to do reports for the web.

And then the editors are grabbing the content and putting it on the web. The amount of work being done on the front end is really shocking. People are really apprehensive about it, but now they are reporting the heck out of everything, posting things on the blogs, doing audio and video and it’s been a real transformation in our newsroom.

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Jason Sperber is community content coordinator at the Bakersfield Californian.

Sperber: You get more page views from doing community projects. It’s no longer the norm that we’re giving information and people are getting it. People now expect not only to talk back at a website but talk first. With user-generated content, you can get sources and feedback from the community that you wouldn’t have got previously. Now, you become the host for that dialogue and discussion.

We now have the “Bakatopia” brand, created as a hedge against Craigslist. But what caught fire wasn’t the free classifieds, but the early adopters who liked music and more edgy content. Communities will happen anyway online. If you don’t do it, someone else will get those voices or page views or loyalty.

The biggest thing is that interactivity = people. Some folks think it’s about technology or hiring someone to filter comments. Some people think you need to moderate every comment and you get a huge queue of comments for a couple days. The Bakersfield Californian took a big step by creating my job to have a full-time person working on this.

Use automated filters, and also use the human touch. Don’t rely on the automated filters, you also need to get in touch with people, and have people help flag comments. If you can get them to buy into the idea that this is their community, then they need to do something about it. It’s very powerful to see people step up and police their own community.

(Talks about rules for commenting, and I notice that the Californian’s rules are almost exactly the same as the ones on MediaShift. Sperber then admits that he stole them from me, and says, ‘It’s good to steal from the best.’ Nice one.)

We’ve also created niche social networking sites, broken down by neighborhood, subculture, ethnicity, and even targeted marketing. They can share information and even meet in real life. With targeted marketing, we’ve learned that we need to find new ways of finding small businesses, and find ways for them to reach niche people in our community. So we’re trying to combine print and web advertising to reach local parents. I highly recommend the book, “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky.

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Matylda Czarnecka, specialty product manager, Bakersfield Californian.

Czarnecka: I’m a geek so I get excited about this kind of stuff. I’m going to talk about mashups using maps. You can tell a story with a map and it becomes more illustrative than a story alone, or words alone, it’s an exciting way to show things to people. It’s also a different way of navigating sites.

We found out that all the Christmas tree sellers were clustered around freeways. Tools we use regularly include ZeeMaps, QuikMaps and Google’s MyMaps. We have a QuirksMap where people can put in their own quirky landmarks, with contributions from readers. We encourage people to communicate their concerns in a new format.

Tips on doing maps:

> Start small with locator maps (showing where certain news hotspots or businesses are).
> Look for opportunities in daily stories.
> Collaborative maps are easy to start: pre-populate them and watch them grow.
> Experiment with topics, embedded multimedia.

The goal with maps is to help people see what’s happening around town in real time. And by tagging content, you can improve search, and automate inclusion on maps and in RSS feeds. If you can geocode stories with addresses, it will put things on maps automatically.

(Now she turns to talking about mobile.)

Mobile is an opportunity to reach new audiences, especially people who use cell phones and aren’t reading the paper. People have their cell phones with them at all times, so reaching them on that device is powerful.

(Listing of all the SMS alerts the newspaper is sending out: breaking news; events and entertainment; classifieds; freebies and offers; sports scores; job fair reminders.)

We’ve done interactive campaigns with mobile. During a hockey game, people could text in the players they think were best of the game. It had less participation than we thought, but it was an experiment. Sometimes things work well and sometimes they don’t.

The Elton John scavenger hunt exceeded our expectations. People had to go to three different parts of the site and find key words, and we had quite a few people entering that to win tickets to the show. But we also gave away tickets to a basketball game and only one person entered. That person was excited but we wanted more people than that to participate.

We’re also doing “MoPhos” or mobile photos. We started out by asking them for photos from St. Patrick’s Day, and we got a photo of a guy who died his beard and hair green. We sometimes do photos around themes or get random photos of sunsets or pets. It’s another way to get people to interact with us.

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We’re now at a dinner and all the “fellows” are introducing themselves and also socializing, chatting about why we’re all here and what we want to get out of this training. I’m noticing that many folks are already doing video and audio work for their sites, while others are complete novices. There’s also varying degrees of fear around technology, with some people being very excited about being the new tech guru at their media outlet and others being less enthralled with it.

(I’ve agreed not to quote the fellows directly here on the blog without getting their permission first, so that they can speak openly about their work situations.)

Web-centric Journalism

The final session for today is called “Web-centric Journalism, Shells and Storyboards,” the first real training session with UC Berkeley lecturer Jane Stevens and UC Berkeley new media director Paul Grabowicz (who’s also a blogger on MediaShift Idea Lab).

Jane Stevens: We are in the early years of webcentric journalism. The shift started happening around 2002. A few years before that, news organizations thought that their websites would be totally separate from print. Some of them still have their web staffs separate from print.

You need to think about being web-first and web-centric. Even though the print product is the cash cow, and still will be, people say the tipping point for the web will be in 2012 to 2015, and that’s not that far away. At that point there will be more advertising going to web that print.

Part of what we do here is training and part of it is getting you to think about how your organization will make the transition. Bad news: 2,400 newsroom jobs were lost in 2007. Every couple weeks you hear about layoffs and buyouts. (A bell tolls in the background, leading people to start laughing.) Good news: Transition to online journalism continues, including Grist, Marketwatch, Slate, ProPublica, St. Louis Beacon, Stateline.org, MinnPost, Salon, Chi-Town Daily News.

The key to success is understanding the medium. We’ve been grappling with the nature of the web because we’re so tied to what we’re used to in legacy media. What we know so far is that the web is: contextual or immersive, reflecting our lives in no way any other medium has done before; immediate and continuous; solution-oriented; participatory; webcentric storytelling.

It’s not an audience anymore, it’s a community. We really need to think about serving the community in ways we’ve never done before. Webcentric storytelling is some combination of video and audio and still photos and text in an interactive environment in which each of these media is complementary and not redundant. We chose feature stories that you (the fellows) will tell so you can decide on the complexity and the medium.

People in news organizations get stuck on having a multimedia section, when it’s really just a story. Yes, there’s a place for YouTube and all the video on your site but that’s a browsing function. A lot of news organizations, if they do have a blog, they have the reporters do the blog and they also do stories outside the blog. Why aren’t those stories on the blog? To have a separate story that’s just text doesn’t make sense in this arena.

(Shows LA Times Homicide Report blog.)

This was a very difficult undertaking for the Times to cover every single homicide in the area. It’s one of the most popular blogs on the LATimes.com site. It’s not just the shootings, but occasionally there are follow-up stories, like when they showed the consequences to a shooting, a mother’s reaction to her son’s being shot. This woman was a basket case for months and couldn’t work.

I think they should just run this blog in a strip in the print paper. But they haven’t done it yet. There’s just no interest. (Fellows in the audience can’t figure out why they wouldn’t do that if it’s so popular.)

(Shows SeattlePI.com traffic page.)

It has live webcams, a list of accidents, links to government sites. There’s a commute calculator, that’s almost a game, but it’s useful because it helps you decide which is cheaper — driving to work or taking public transport. This is what I call a web shell. It’s like an oyster shell. It has to have a way to link out to the rest of the world. A shell does all that for a particular topic.

I’ll show you a good shell at the BBC for special reports. This came about because the for-profit companies said the BBC is public so their site should link to us. The BBC lost that fight and said they would link to everybody and would make a place on the site that focuses on one issue or beat and put everything there. It will have links, photos from people, backgrounders, timelines. Sure enough, it worked and their traffic went up.

The new journalist has to be smarter, actually three people: a reporter, database programmer and infographics expert. You can use Swivel to create your own graphics and embed them onto your site. You can build graphics and share them. Google Maps Mania is a terrific site to get ideas. For example, AirFox Live is a helicopter with TV crew so you can watch their video and track them on a map at the same time.

Newser has a nice way of presenting stories and has a “hot threads” function so that anyone in the Newser community can build their own shell. It enables your community to build sub-shells.

Games are also important for webcentric storytelling. Here’s a game I did about leatherback turtles. We had more than 3 million page views and it went viral in the blogosphere. We tracked the migration of all these sea turtles to find out which one would make it to the destination first. Plus it was mentioned on “The Colbert Report” because one turtle was named “Stephanie Colburtle.” We did the traditional web storytelling with a leatherback virtual world where you could learn more. It actually became a popular bet on a sports betting site too.

(She does a run down of all the sites CBSSports.com has grabbed such as MaxPreps and CSTV and how they have captured a lot of sports sites and social networks that newspapers missed out on.)

Tributes.com site just launched two weeks ago. They are saying that obituaries are the last classified to move online. It’s an amazing site. They have recent famous people who have died, and a page on the recent China earthquake. Plus there are people who died a long time ago. It’s totally user-generated. It’s free for families and supported by funeral homes. (Q: Do they have a death pool? [laughter])

There are national tributes for famous people. There’s funeral planning so you can start planning your funeral now. There’s also a longevity calculator so you can start changing your bad habits. It actually gives you good information, and takes you to Eons, a social network for 50-year-olds and older.

It’s important to start thinking about the advertising part of it. When newspapers went corporate, they focused on larger advertisers like Macy’s and forgot the small businesses. And now we want them, and it’s not enough to just say “advertise with us.” Journalists started newspapers and it wasn’t just the news they were concerned about, but they realized this was a place where everyone in the community could put something in it — whether it’s births, weddings, business announcements. What we forgot was that some of the community out there cared more about the ad than the news stories.

The idea is that your community is your advertiser as well. Tributes.com has done this by going vertical about anything related to death. Newspapers have to do this in a geographical way.

Paul Grabowicz: We don’t want to end on a sour note, but we want to say what we think web storytelling is not. Sometimes you’ll see a video next to a print story, where the video is just telling the same story as the text. (Shows SF Chronicle story that does this.) The video has the same quotes, the same background info, the story told in two different mediums.

How many of you are doing podcasts? Someone at our last session called podcasting “radio without listeners.” (Shows NPR site of podcasts.) We’re training all 400-odd of people in NPR in multimedia, so that they aren’t just shoveling things onto the web.

Jeremy Rue (UC Berkeley instructor): We told NPR people to fit storytelling methods they know so well to the medium. No one goes to the web to listen to 28 minutes of audio. They want to see things and click on things.

Grabowicz: The SF Chronicle used to have reporters just reading their stories in audio and putting it on the web. They’ve gotten better. How many of you have been using YouTube for your videos? (Shows TheBostonChannel.com and its YouTube video channel.) This just looks like the 6 pm TV news. They haven’t done anything to alter it for the web.

I think you should distribute video on YouTube but when you do video on the web it’s not the same as doing TV. (Shows Cape Cod Times video site and its CapeCast video show with lots of laffs.) What I love about it is that it’s not the 6 o’clock news. It’s more whacky and entertaining but it’s just television on the Internet.

Then there’s the Christmas tree approach. On a site on NYTimes.com they take a list of print stories, and then decorate it with multimedia, a video over here, some audio over there. The problem is that this approach hasn’t evolved very much. (Shows Philly.com Blackhawk Down special story.) All the stories are listed and the video is on the left in navigation. Why isn’t the video put into its own chapter of the story?

Even National Geographic does this, which is frightening. They have a section on photos, multimedia, each one broken out. How many of you have sections titled “multimedia”? (Many hands are raised.) It’s thinking of multimedia as something separate or as an add-on.

Read More about the Knight Digital Training:

> Storyboarding Basics and Finding Your Dream Job