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Long-Form Multimedia Journalism: Quality Is the Key Ingredient As a producer of social documentary projects-viewed on digital platforms-Brian Storm talks about the excitement of doing journalism in this way, at this time. A conversation with Brian Storm MediaStorm describes its mission as ushering in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media. Brian Storm is the president of MediaStorm, a production studio located in Brooklyn, New York, which publishes multimedia social documentary projects at www.mediastorm.org and produces them for other news organizations. In an interview I did with Brian on December 30, 2008, he spoke about how he envisions the future of long-form, multimedia journalism from the perspective of its creation, distribution and economic viability. An edited version of our conversation follows.

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."

on Brian Storm

In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.

"Is photojournalism dead? The debate has been raging for decades, and, ever since former Magnum Photos director Neil Burgess called time of death, it has taken the web by storm. But do young and emerging photographers really care? "

The ethical and real hazards of citizen journalism People powered People powered Who is responsible for the risks taken by citizen journalists who become 'accidental' reporters in dangerous situations? This was the excellent question asked by Slawek Kozdras, a Polish student, who was in the audience when I gave a talk at Cumberland Lodge to LSE Government scholars. I was doing my usual schtick about how networked journalism could alter the terms of the political communications trade. I put up slides about activists in Burma, G20 protestors and other people using new media technologies to report where professional journalists can't go. Slawek made a good point drawn from a fellow eastern European's work: "I remember a story told in Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. After the Soviet army stormed into Prague in 1968 the brave Czech people (as opposed to cowardly Czech politicians) were mocking the army, women were teasing with Russian soldiers, laughing at them, taking pictures with them knowing the Russians can't react. The paradox is that later on these pictures with people mocking Russians turned against the Czechs and served as evidence in trials."