Creating video out of little more than audio

Over at my work blog, I've been working on this investigative report of a 30-year-old murder that has sent a man to prison for a crime he claims he didn't commit.

In the course of those posts, I've been using multimedia to tell the story, but it's produced its own particular challenges. There aren't a lot of visuals left from a crime that happened in 1981. But I did land a phone interview from prison with Ronnie Rhodes, whose case we've been looking into with students from a Kansas law school.

I wanted to produce an audio story to let people hear Rhodes speak.

Katie, our online content developer, shook her head, "no."

At least I just got the shake of the head. The online team says you're really in trouble when Katie gives you a shake of the head and roll of the eyes. The eyes didn't roll this time.

"No one listens to audio on our site," she said. I had to come up with something visual -- anything but a blank screen.

Not having much video or visuals, we decided to create a timeline of what Rhodes said happened the night of the crime. We ended up with this video.

I created the timeline using PowerPoint. I saved the slides as .jpgs, then imported them into Final Cut Express. You work with what you've got, after all.

The "video" was really the audio story I'd wanted to create with something for people to watch while they listened to it. It worked. It continued to get a number of views for weeks after I originally posted it, and the three-part series, ranked among our most-watched videos that first week. I'm still getting views on them months later.

So what do you think? Do people listen to straight audio stories on your site? What can you do to help create video with a lack of visuals?

Hot links: the journalism sessions I couldn't attend in Vegas

NO PLACE LIKE HOME, KS -- The SPJ Convention has been over for days but people are still talking and blogging about what they learned. And we can catch up on the sessions we missed.

Among them:

• Deb Wenger reports on a talk by CNN International's Etan Horowitz: Used to be, broadcasters tried to put TV on the web. Now they put social media on the air.
• Wenger also adds info on Victor Hernandez’s sessions on all-platform journalists, with a list for gearheads like me.
• Libbi Gordon of the University of Missouri sums up her analysis of the convention: "To the youth and young adult market, using the Internet and social media is second nature. YAYAs will thrive in the online journalism."
• No journalism convention would be complete without talk of layoffs of downsizing, and Tim Eigo, editor of Arizona Attorney magazine, reports on a conspicuously empty Gannett booth at the trade show: "Is that angst in your pocket, or are you just sorry to see me?"
• Marnie Kunz writes: "Matt Villano offered helpful advice on diversifying for freelancers and not keeping your eggs in one basket ... . And it soothed my frazzled soul."
• Amanda Maurer reviews Google 101 for Journalists: the session everyone who missed it wished they'd attended.
• And Vince Duffy of Michigan NPR and the most dapper man in radio, blogs highlights of the convention for the RTNDA, which will team with SPJ for next year's convention in New Orleans.

Did you attend a session or blog about the convention?  Leave details or a link to your post in the comments.

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.

Textual healing: The Roeder trial ends with a shot for out web site

Covering a murder trial can be as invigorating as it is grueling. The pressure increases when that trial becomes a national story, as it did with Scott Roeder, convicted of murdering Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.

As I said last week, I was assigned to report for web only. Another reporter took care of the print story. I did what I had been doing for the past two years of court reporting, using Twitter for my dispatches.

I’ve received attention for tweeting trials before. But this time, more people than ever were watching my twitter feeds. And we learned even more how valuable it was to driving traffic to our web sites.

Web producer Eba Hamid said early in the trial that every time I tweeted a link to a courtroom video, it got double the page views.

At the end of every trial, I routinely ask people for feedback, and I got 11 pages of responses.

Among them:

• @lummox_ict: @rsylvester Thanks for the tweets! Could you do the same thing for Avatar.
• @JenWPortraits: Thanks again to @rsylvester for lowering employee productivity all over Wichita this week. Great job!
• And @ryansholin (who introduced me to Twitter): @rsylvester’s tweets from the Roeder Trial kept me engaged with a story I’d usually only read as a headline from a national news org.

Back in the newsroom, Eba and content editor Lori O’Toole Buselt took my tweets and crafted them into text blocks for the daily trial updates. I would tweet links to those throughout the day, so people could catch up without having the read thought a bunch of tweets, scattered in the timelines with the rest of their Twitter friends.

Without rewriting the day’s events for print, however, I found myself missing one important element of what I do: writing and storytelling.

Sure, I always say Twitter helps you right tight. With a 140-character limit, there’s no room for wasted words. And people like you to filter their information. We are journalists, after all, and that’s what we do. But it’s just not the same as crafting a good story.

I got to do that at the end of the trial. My tradeoff for doing web only was I agreed to work on a narrative that was supposed to run in Sunday’s newspaper. It was a magazine-length article, taken from the week’s testimony. But when the obits ran two long in Sunday’s paper, it was sent to the web site only.

I'd been totally shut out of print for this trial.

Did it matter? Well, it was the No. 1 read story today on Kansas.com. It drew more readers, comments and reactions than the weekend’s basketball game between the University of Kansas and Kansas State, the local Wichita State basketball team, and an online database of traffic tickets that had dominated the top spot with readers for weeks.

It also shows people will read a story, no matter where it's told.

Size doesn't matter: Why metrics are no longer important to my beat blog

John Ensslin and I were talking over lunch at the National Journalism Conference last month in Indianapolis, pondering why the numbers on our news blogs weren't soaring as they did on the daily stories we posted off the crime beat.

We're both courthouse reporters. John produces " for the Colorado Springs Gazette. I do "What the Judge Ate for Breakfast for the Wichita Eagle. Like most news sites, we get metrics reports each day -- the kind that can drive old newspaper reporters nuts.

"Most of my stories are usually in the top three each day, but my blog isn't getting that kind of traffic," John said.

Neither was mine.

We discussed ways we might drive more traffic to our blogs.  Then when I returned to the home newsroom, I asked web guru Katie for advice.

"Stop looking at the numbers," she said.

Katie does know best.

Used to be, back when we banged on typewriters, circulation was the only number that counted. We just figured people were reading, because we were providing important information. Now that we know who is clicking on each story, and how long they're staying, we've become disciples of pageviews. We've also learned that the weird or salacious stories get the numbers -- not always our best work.

John and I both had revelatory experiences since our visit in Indy

A courthouse source called me with a story tip. This is someone I like and value, who had never called me with a story tip in my 10 years on the beat.

"I love your videos," the caller said, talking about the 2-minute documentaries from the courthouse I produce several times a week.

I received an email from an acquaintance from the Criminal Justice Department at Wichita State University saying a professor there was using those same videos in class.

I'd call that useful content.

John had a similar story, when we reconnected via email:

I was watching a verdict in a drug trial. It wasn't a big enough case to make the print paper, so I went ahead and posted it on my blog within a minute of the verdict.

Within one minute of posting, the judge in the case stepped out of his chambers and says "I see you've posted the verdict on your blog."

That made me realize that, in a very immediate way, the blog is my connection to the court house beat. Sure, it has all the candlepower of a kitchen nightlight (to borrow a line from David Carr) but it's also my way to own this beat online.

Not that we've given up on numbers: I'm confident that the people who read daily stories off the news pages will eventually find the little extras we do. Lori O'Toole Buselt, our web content editor at the Eagle, began linking to my blog from my daily stories and printing refers to the blog in the print edition. I'm also working to add some of the best practices I've read on BeatBlogging.org

But I'm also reminded what a good friend of mine, Michael "Supe" Granda told me years ago about his life as songwriter in Nashville. In any given club, on any stage, Mike said you'll see singers and bands playing their souls out, even if there's only a handful of people in the audience.
"Because in Nashville, you never know who's out there," he said. That small audience might include the music reviewer for the Tennessean or the executive with a major-label recording contract.

Sometimes it's who's paying attention, not how many.

And now I return to where I started as a multimedia reporter

I come back to this blog, and really I realize I never should have left. This is where I started my journey into a new era of journalism that many my age found frightening.

I feel like I've come a long way in the past two years. I made many new friends.  I discovered Twitter, which brought me to a new level of reporting and may have saved my career.

I've talked to journalists around the country about how I use multimedia and social media to do my job.  I've sought out others and tried to learn from the best.

My experiment with SPJ that moved me to leave this space was so successful the organization made that blog their own for a new committee on digital news that I was proud to help initiate. It's great when something that started to just chronicle my learning has such value for others. It was sad to leave that blog, but that didn't mean leaving blogging.

So I return here, where I started.

May others find this and jump in, because one part of this new era of journalism I've really learned to enjoy is not writing for an audience, but having a conversation with friends.

It must be good if someone is trying to stop it

We’re barely into this new world of live reporting, via the Internet, and already the some anti-constitution authorities are trying to stop us.

I’m not talking about federal prosecutors in California – I’m talking about sports brass.

One of the most hit-on news briefs at Kansas.com this past Sunday and Monday was the item where the Eagle explained that fans couldn’t follow the usual live game blog of the Wichita State Shockers in the NCAA super regional baseball games.

Seems the NCAA had outlawed “live representation of the game.” They didn’t want some newspaper blog interfering with people watching the game on television. The NCAA doesn’t seem to realize that fans of the Shockers, and most teams, will watch the game on portable televisions while sitting in the stands and reading the blog on their smart phones. Fan is, after all, a short for fanatic.

Not everyone agreed with the NCAA

Brian Bennett of the Louisville Courier Journal blogged anyway during the Cardinals’ game against Oklahoma State, and was tossed out of the press box.

As our columnist, Bob Lutz pointed out:

“It's nonsense to ban blogs, especially since someone watching on television could produce a blog and the NCAA would not have any recourse.”

There was all sorts of talk a few months back on the Yahoo! Newspaper Video Group about how the Major League Baseball trying to ban newspaper video shooters from spring training.

I can, sort of, understand franchises and leagues can put a tight reign on video, just like they limit television rights.

But blogs? C’mon.

With so many people trying to stop us, we must be doing something right.

The Courier-Journal may take legal action, and I hope it does. I hope more papers out there will challenge this, and other kinds of new age censorship, the way they would open records and meetings. I would hope more reporters would take a stand and risk being tossed out of the press box.

As I write this, by the way, the San Antonio Spurs and Cleveland Cavaliers are tied in the third quarter.

I know that, because I’m watching the game on TV, and I’m looking at the San Antonio Express-News (home of our friend Angela Grant) which has a live game blog going.