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I like telling stories. What sort of stories do I like to tell? Stories about days at school, life in the ANZ Bank, stories my father told me, historic sagas and the like.

I like telling stories. What sort of stories do I like to tell? Stories about days at school, life in the ANZ Bank, stories my father told me, historic sagas and the like.

Cheat sheet for multimedia story decisions As newsrooms everywhere struggle to adapt to the digital information environment, everybody in the newsroom needs to gain some multimedia literacy. At the basic level, that means you understand what the media are suited for. Even if you do not know how to make an audio slideshow, you must understand what kinds of stories work well in the audio slideshow format - and which stories are poorly suited for it. If you don't understand that, you're in a weak position for telling stories in the 21st century.

Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking what a multimedia story is not. After all, go to any news website and you are certain to see stories being told using a combination of media. But just because an online story has multimedia elements does not mean that it is a multimedia story.

Digital Storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between two and ten minutes. And the topics that are used in Digital Storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between. A great way to begin learning about Digital Storytelling is by watching the following video introduction to Digital Storytelling.

Getting A Story Made at National Geographic After talking with several National Geographic photographers about shooting for the magazine I became intrigued with the process of getting a story made. The collaboration between the photo editors and photographers and then the photographers involvement in all the steps along the way is unique and important to how they make stories. More magazines should spend this kind of time with their contributors. The few times I've had photographer come into the office and present their images to us have been incredibly rewarding and certainly I think made the story that much better.

Introduction to Digital Storytelling by Daniel Meadows Digital Stories are short, personal, multimedia scraps of TV that people can make for themselves. They're 'mini-movies'. Desktop computers enabled with video editing software are used to synchronise recorded spoken narratives with scans of personal photographs. This project requires commitment for, as well as all the technical stuff that must be learnt, script writing, picture editing and performance skills are also needed and these have to be worked on, which is why most Digital Stories are made by people attending workshops where participants can benefit from the help and advice of facilitators. People of all ages and abilities make Digital Stories and many have testified how rewarding the experience is for, when their story is shared with friends and family or posted on the web, they find they have discovered a new voice. There's a strictness to the construction of a Digital Story: 250 words, a dozen or so pictures, and two minutes is the right length. As with poetry these constraints define the form (e.g. a haiku is a poem written using 17 syllables, and the 14 lines of a sonnet are written in iambic pentameter) and it's the observation of that form which gives the thing its elegance.

Declaration of Principles Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone is news reporting for the new millennium - a nexus of backpack journalism, narrative story-telling techniques, and the Internet, designed to reach a global audience hungry for information. Our Mission and Goals To cover every armed conflict* in the world within one year, and in doing so to provide a clear idea of the combatants, victims, causes, and costs of each of these struggles - and their global impact. With honest, thoughtful reporting we'll strive to establish Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone as a forum for information and involvement. Users will not only learn about the scope of world conflict, but will find ways to be part of the solutions- through dialogue, debate, and avenues for action. How We'll Do It We will be aggressive in pursuing the stories that are not getting mainstream coverage and we will put a human face on them. We will not chase headlines nor adhere to pack journalism but vigorously pursue the stories in front of and behind the conflict, the small stories that when strung together illustrate a more complete picture. Veteran war correspondent Kevin Sites will travel solo to these conflict zones, aided by a U.S.-based "mission control" team: Producer Robert Padavick (NBC News, CNN) and Researcher Lisa Liu (Radio Free Asia, International Medical Corps). Using the latest technology, including high-definition digital cameras and satellite modems, Kevin will deliver stories via a five-fingered multimedia platform of text, photography, video, audio, and interactive chat - all available on one website (http://hotzone.yahoo.com).

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

The Ethics of Mixing Music and Videojournalism Regina McCombs, a Poynter Institute visual journalism instructor, has created a powerful illustration of how soundtracks can affect a video story -- illuminating the debate as to whether they have a proper place in videojournalism. In her article, "See How Music Changes a Story," she shows three versions of the same video story, "Mom Goes to War" (featuring a pilot preparing for her second Iraq deployment and her young son). The first is with natural sound. The second adds a slow, somber keyboard track. The third features an upbeat guitar/percussion track. (Both scores are GarageBand loops -- demonstrating how easy and accessible it is for even someone with a tin ear to provide professional sounding music background.) McCombs poses the all-important question: how do the alternate versions change the way you react to, and feel about, the story?

""Should we present this story as an interactive? Before undertaking any large story project be sure to ask: * Who is the target audience for this story? * What do we hope to accomplish in telling this story to them? Then use this decision-tool to see which approach to storytelling is best supported by the research in these studies:"

"Increasingly music is finding its way into online multimedia journalism, and with good reason. A well chosen soundtrack can pull your viewers deep into your story, keep them hooked and make an emotional point. Music is, and let's be honest about this, a way of manipulating how your audience feel. There are those purists who are against that, who argue the story should be strong enough not to need to tell your viewer how to feel. Whichever camp you lie in, one thing is for sure: if you use music in any piece of online video journalism or digital story it must be legal. There is no excuse for getting your client or your newsroom shouldered with an expensive bill just because that bit of Arcade Fire fitted perfectly with the film. The good news is there are plenty of resources out there for free, or cheap, music. Most, but not all, operate under the Creative Commons Licence, which lets you use music on certain conditions."

Photojournalism and ethics - How far would you go for a photo? Duckrabbit takes Pulitzer Center to task over ethics Posted on April 21, 2010 by mirandagavin| 4 Comments Benjamin Chesterton from duckrabbit alerted me to the following story. He has just published his views on A Developing Story with quotes from his letter to the Pulitzer Centre. Briefly, and according to Chesterton: "The Center has recently funded the photographer Macro Venaschi to do a story on child sacrifice in Uganda. His highly stylized black and white photographs are deeply disturbing on a number of levels. One of the pictures shows an abused boy with a catheter protruding from where his penis has been cut off. I believe that if published in the UK, this picture would be illegal on the basis of indecency. Beyond that, there is an account on the Pulitzer website of how Vernashi persuaded grieving parents to have their murdered child's body exhumed so that he could take photographs of the body. A payment was then made to those present.

"On digging up the truth, and Marco Vernaschi April 21, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments These are the facts: the Italian photographer Marco Vernaschi, working on a story dealing with child sacrifices and mutilations in Uganda, a story supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, persuaded a family to exhume the recently buried body of their murdered daughter (photo here), so that he could photograph it. It is also a fact that he gave them money-about $70. Vernaschi and the Pulitzer Center are now getting plenty of criticism for this, and also for publishing (as part of the same story) a full frontal photograph of a naked child whose penis had been cut off."

The Beauty of the Slideshow - Now Available to Everyone By Stanley LearystanleylearycloseAuthor: Stanley Leary See Author's Posts (38) Recent Posts * Still Images Plus Audio Can Be More Effective Than Online Video * Teaching Is a Great Way to Learn * Telling Stories with a Telephoto Lens * If Your Pictures Aren't Good Enough, You're Not Close Enough * What Kind of Photographer Are You? Stanley Leary is a Black Star photographer who has been telling stories for more than 20 years as a photojournalist. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Business Week, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Chicago Tribune, NY Times, World Book Encyclopedia, Information Week, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and many other publications. in Video and Multimedia on January 20th, 2008 Even before the Internet, I appreciated the slideshow. I created presentations with multiple projectors and audio, and I was always impressed with what the combined media could communicate. Even compared to video - where you move right through a moment so quickly you can miss the subtlety of it - the slideshow has its unique charms. The problem, in the old days, was that you had to have the audience present to deliver the program; it was a lot of work for a small number of people. The printed page reached a much larger audience. Today, with the Web becoming the leader in delivering the news, we are no longer limited to printed words and still images on the page. Rather than publishing a quote, we can deliver audio of the interviews and the experience, giving a story authenticity in a way that we couldn't achieve before. We can create slideshows for everyone - to watch whenever they choose.

Multimedia Picker: Choose the right medium for your message Thursday, April 02, 2009 With all the different ways to present a news story online, many often ask how they should select the multimedia tool that is best for a particular story. There is never any concrete answer, but with the multimedia picker embedded below, you can at least have an idea of which technology will work best to showcase a story or idea.

MediaStorm: Visionary Journalism Weaving Stories Producers start by cutting audio, creating a "radio edit" of the story. Then they work with the journalist to craft a working narrative. A cohesive story emerges, and then it's time to pair the images with the audio. For that, they use Final Cut Studio. "Final Cut is our workhorse," says Storm. "Our producers live inside Final Cut all day long. It's a simple and powerful tool. It does everything you need it to do, yet I can teach a new producer how to create our type of project in a day." Images are exported out of Aperture at twice 1080p resolution, giving producers the flexibility they need to experiment with shots. "We pull everything into bins in Final Cut, and we use a lot of labeling to organize it," says Storm. "It's very simple: We use green for a picture that's in, red for one that's out, blue for a maybe. We have a very visual environment inside Final Cut to get things done quickly."

What is Your Story? by BBC Your Story

"Corentin Wauters: Gamma is one of the most famous photojournalism agencies. Some even call it legendary. How important has it been for photojournalism? Michiel Munneke: I think Gamma - but also others like Magnum, for instance - played an extremely important role from early years on, especially in documenting crucial news events around the world. It's important to realise that in those days you had magazines like Life and the Picture Post who very generously allocated tens of pages to events like the war in Vietnam, for example. Those publications and photographs made a huge impact on their readerships. I think it's fair to say that the founders of Gamma, like Raymond Depardon - although he moved to Magnum at the end of the '70s - and Gilles Corron, who died in 1970 in Cambodia, can be classified as legendary. They played a very important role in news documenting in those years. Raymond Depardon said that in 1966 you only had to travel far away and take three shots to get published in magazines Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur. How has the profession of photojournalism changed since Gamma was founded? If Depardon was saying that competition for space in publications like Paris Match or Le Nouvel Observateur is stronger, then he's absolutely right. Competition is far more severe. Circulations are going down, advertising revenues are shrinking, and consequently budgets for journalism and for photography are being cut. image Nowadays its very rare that publications send photographers for assignments overseas. Take a renowned magazine like Time. They still have photographers on staff but they very rarely get assignments to go overseas. It's a sign of the times. Gamma, but also other big photojournalism agencies like Sipa, were founded in Paris. The city had a big name as a centre for photojournalism. To what extent is that true today? I think for those years it was really true. But now, in the era of globalisation and digitisation, it doesnâ

Here are three slightly different versions of the same story, "Mom Goes to War," which I photographed last summer with reporter Mark Brunswick while working at The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. In the story, Maj. Patricia Baker, a helicopter pilot in the Minnesota National Guard, prepares to go to Iraq for her second deployment, and her son Zach talks about his mother leaving. The first version uses only natural sound, while the other two use loops from GarageBand. I did a limited amount of music editing to fit it to the video.