Tangled up in multimedia blues

I used to have to have only a notebook and pen.

Now, I need a video camera, an audio recorder, Blackberry, and various headphones and battery chargers. My desk is a mess, and I sometimes find myself tripping over wires and tangled up amid the mess that is my desk.

Shuffling papers is one thing. Untangling wires consumes my time.

Anyone have ideas for controlling my tangled life?

Taking a chance: recording audio and video separately

For the past year, I've been trying to find the best way to get decent audio from the courtroom for my video blog.

I thought I'd get a free lesson earlier this year, when the murder trial of a local abortion doctor drew national attention. I asked the audio experts on the production crew for CNN/Court TV their secret. The answer: they wire the courtroom with a dozen microphones. So much for that.

Even local broadcasters complain about the bad acoustics in our courtrooms, so I had been experimenting with various microphones. If you go back and listen to the episodes, you'll hear differences.

Finally, I decided to try a variation on what the real pros do -- recording audio and video separately, then synch them up later.

I'd been thinking about this for a while, but I'd been afraid the work flow would chew up all my time.

Turns out, it's easier than I thought. All you need is a sound, or a cue, to capture both on the camera's mic and the audio recorder. Then you have a mark to synch. That's where the clapboard comes in that we've seen in movies. It's to synch the audio and video.

You can use your hands to clap. But that doesn't work in the courtroom (although I know some judges who might like people to applaud when they enter). Too bad they don't use those gavels anymore.

The first time I tried it, the judge walked in, sat down, grabbed some files and then stapled them together. That was the sound I needed. I put the audio in Audacity, the video in Final Cut Express and started each clip with the click of the stapler.

I put them both in Final Cut as one clip, then export as a Quick Time Movie. That gives me a large file I can then bring back into Final Cut.  I edit the final clip from that file.

I've used doors snapping shut and people popping their "p's" as cues, setting the scrubber to the exact moment.

For video, I'm now using my Kodak Zi8, and Edirol R09 for sound. The stereo microphone on the Edirol is so clear, it picks up everything in the courtroom without the need for an external mic. I can pretty much set it anywhere in the room and let it go.

Another advantage is I can massage the sound separately, using various filters to blend out hums and the annoying sounds of the heating and air that fill courtrooms. It's not perfect by any means, but it's better.

And both the Zi8 and Edirol fit in my pockets. If I wanted, all I'd have to carry would be the tripod.

I don't always need to always sync the sound, either. The Kodak has an external mic jack on it, if I want to use it, but the built-in mic works surprisingly well, as I found when I did clips of a recent political debate.

Don't be afraid that something may be too difficult or complicated. Often, it's easier than you realize.

The technology of storytelling

I’m really not one to talk about staying with the basics. As this blog shows, I love new tools. I love the gadgets available to us as journalists.

But one piece of this I haven’t lost is the love of reporting and telling a good story. That transcends technology, whether scrawling pictures on a cave wall or putting together a multimedia package.

Marc Cooper makes the point again that, as this business changes at a whirlwind pace, we need to stop and reflect on how to use all the tools at our disposal to tell the best story.

“New multimedia tools, now reproducing themselves exponentially, provide reporters and editors with sometimes awe-inspiring ways to tell our stories. Learning to master these tools and when to choose them, however, can be as important as which tool a surgeon requests for a certain procedure in the compressed atmosphere of an OR.”

We have a tendency to want to stick with our old comfortable forms. As an old newspaper guy, I still like to craft a good narrative text. I know broadcasters who are more comfortable in front of a camera than behind a keyboard.

But as Cooper points out, some stories are better in some formats than in others. We need to ask ourselves: is this piece better in video? Audio? Do we need to let people see and hear the experience themselves? Or is a descriptive story better?

We also need to be prepared to do it all. That’s why I try to record everything. Get the phone interview on mp3. Carry the video camera with me, and use it.

Then at the end of the process, I can choose which are the best pieces to use and how to use them.

That happened recently with a story about sex crimes against children.

A key element was getting a spreadsheet of addresses to show on a map how these crimes span neighborhoods in our community. But the map by itself had little context.

I used my social networks to help find the girl and her mother quoted in the story. I recorded audio, and even shot video on an interview with the prosecutor. I was prepared.

In the end, a text story and the map seemed to be the best way to go.

Still, none of it matters if we haven’t done solid reporting along the way.

Rolling out the investigative blog

After using twitter to cover live events, such as trials, I’d been thinking about what it would be like to have an investigative report unfold online as it happened.

Those kinds of reports take time, however, and you can go weeks and months with nothing happening. Sometimes, it takes months of pre-reporting in your spare time to find out if a story is even worth pursuing. Banging it out 140 characters at a time wouldn’t necessarily be effective, especially when mixed in with the regular routine of my courthouse beat.

A blog, however, might be the right medium. Think of it as an investigative blog.

That’s what we began last week on “What the Judge Ate for Breakfast,” my courts blog at the Eagle.

The set-up piece describes how the idea came about – a project with some Kansas law students about the effectiveness of a 2001 law requiring DNA testing on old rape and murder cases. But it wasn’t until we started looking into a 29-year-old local murder case that a story began to take shape.

Usually, reporters dwell out of sight, revealing only the end result. Katie Lohrenz, my best collaborator and most supportive colleague, said this was an opportunity to let people really see the actual chase of the story.

There are risks involved, and we talked about them in the newsroom:

Couldn’t someone follow the blog, and then steal our story? Well, that would be kind of difficult, since the time stamp on the first blog post gave us ownership early. Someone else stepping in, without at least linking back, would be so obvious.

What if the story took a sudden turn, or didn’t pan out the way we thought it would? Investigative reporting is all about, well, investigation. So the readers would follow us through those turns.

Katie saw it this way: “There’s a reason Superman was a newspaper reporter. Because it’s a cool job, and people are interested, even if you’re not Superman.”

Definitely not Superman, here, I wanted to cheat. Get a few background posts in the can, and roll them out gradually. John Boogert, our deputy editor of interactive news, and Katie had a different idea. This is online news, they reminded me. No sense letting it get stale. I wrote sent the first one to our online team, expecting it to be published at some future date of their choosing. It published Friday, the same day.

In the meantime, I’m continuing doing other features of the blog, such as the “Common Law” courtroom video series.

“Presumed Guilty” won’t necessarily take over the blog. It will just be another feature, tied together with Word Press categories and tags.

Just as most investigative pieces don’t stop the daily routine of working the beat and producing stories. You do what you can, when you can.

The first post has already started a conversation. Maybe our readers will come up with ideas on how to proceed and it will become a crowd-sourced investigation.

They can watch us work through the mundane of searching through musty newspaper clips, public records, maybe even prison visits with an inmate who has argued his conviction for 30 years. They will see our successes and our failures.

At the end, we’ll have a story. As with all investigations, we don’t know what it will be yet. This much we know: it will tell us how our laws and justice system work for us, or even against us.

Investigative reporting can be kind of like a mystery. I’ve done it for years. But now, I get to write about it as I go.

However it turns out, it’ll be an exciting trip.

Quick lessons in newsroom geek speak

Ever see Twitter posting minutes after you’ve tweeted? May be something with the API. Hear folks talking about cloud computing and not sure what they mean? Create a Google Doc, and you’re doing it.

Wonder what the hell I’m talking about? Poynter has the answers with a “Digital Journalist Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know.”

It will help you understand what your web team. And it will help you understand your job. You need to know these terms as well as you do "ledes," "cutlines" or "b-roll."

Ways to use Tumblr for journalism

I signed up for Tumblr about the same time I signed up for Twitter three years ago. But basically I’ve just used the tumblelog for personal musings.

It’s another great platform for microblogging, including photos, videos and short text posts, and people can comment quickly, “liking” your post, as on Facebook, or “reblogging” it to others.

Now, Chris Cameron reports, larger news outlets are turning to Tumblr, too.

I like what the New Yorker is doing.

Life is posting what it does best, photographs, including updating the stories behind some of its classics. Elle is posting fashion shots off the runway and off the streets.

Others have created tumblelogs but don’t have any content. Can't wait to see what Rolling Stone does.

It’ll be interesting to follow these and see how Tumblr can fit into our personal role as reporters.

For more details and links, check out Business Insider’s report.

(Via Kevin O’Keefe on Twitter)

Of video blogging and emerging narratives

I participated community session on blogging with colleague Carrie Rengers and Bobby Rozzell. Bobby has a great project, where he's indexed our city's blogs. I've posted the slides from my slice of the presentation, with links and videos to the multimedia approach I used with the development "Common Law" video series of our court system. The slides include various links and examples used in the presentation (my digital handout, so to speak)



Now that I've been doing this for the past year, I'm seeing an interesting trend within the vlog. We're starting to follow some cases as they progress from preliminary hearings to trials. Some defendants in previous episodes are starting to make return appearances, as they continue break the law.

These are emerging narratives within the series, reminding me of a theme in a recent post by Andrea Pitzer on the Nieman Storyboard.
In discussing developing fluid forms of digital story-telling, Pitzer says:

"It’s an interesting concept for journalists, which some storytellers have begun working on -- a kind of episodic, open-ended narrative made of individual stories that tie back into the issue at hand while providing outlets for viewers to engage on their own terms."

It's what I feel like is starting to develop with the video series. But it's taken some time. While patience isn't something journalists are known for, it certainly paying off with this project.