What to do when your boss hands you a flip cam

It’s going to happen eventually, if it hasn’t already. Newsrooms are going to start handing out flip cameras to reporters.

It doesn’t have to be an actual Flip cam. Hopefully, it will be a Kodak Zi8 or something else with an audio input, where you can connect a microphone and get decent sound.

There will be snickers from some in what was formerly known as the photo department. People will expect you to fail, because you’re a reporter.

Prepare to blow them away.

See, as reporters, we know how to interview people, get good quotes, take them and put them together in stories. For years, we used audio recorders. Now, we can use these small video recorders. The one thing you can do is killer interviews. That already puts you ahead.

We’ve been over the basics before, but brush up on them. It would help if you have a friend in the photo department. They’ve been through the painful transitions. They should empathize.

I have received encouragement, support and valuable advice from our photo/ video department – the people who really know what they’re doing. They like that I can do some of this on my own. It lessens their workload in a time of dwindling staffs.

Really, I bug the hell out of them for advice. They can attest just how much of a pain in the butt I am. But they also take the time to answer my lame questions, even when they’re crazy busy. I’ve even had a couple of photogs come to me and say, “show me how you did that.”

But in many newsrooms, I’m hearing of reporters getting handed these video cams, then being sent out with no training. Terrible.

Here are a few tips I’ve learned that can make the difference in giving you confidence and competence with video reporting:

• The camera fits in your pocket. Carry it with you everywhere. In case news breaks, you can whip it out and capture it. This will also guarantee news won’t break out around you. Meanwhile, you can finish the following steps.
• If your editors are smart enough to buy a camera with an audeo input, hit them up for a microphone, too. You can buy an “L” bracket to attach it all, and it still won’t be that much bigger than a notebook. You can get a whole outfit for less than $200.
• Just as you read great writers to get inspiration for writing well, find great videos to watch.
• Watch as many documentaries as your Netflix queue will hold. Even if someone else will be editing the final product, you’ll know what kinds of shots work to go with the interview of your main subjects.
• Don’t have Netflix? Watch “Independent Lens” or “Frontline” on PBS. By seeing how it’s done right, and you’ll get pick up some techniques you could use. Ira Glass of “This American Life” says when we start learning a new skill our level of expertise is never up to our level of good taste. But if we know what good looks like, we can strive for that. Oh, and listen to “This American Life” to learn how to put together interviews into great stories that aren’t text.
• Can’t take pretty pictures like your photo counterparts? Use the stills that the photog on the assignment got – but who often doesn’t have time to do the video. You can help with that. I did that on this breaking news story.
• Mine your archives or the AP photos your news org pays for to get good illustrations for B-roll. See if your interviewee has family pictures or other stills you can use. Take some stills on your flip cam. Crime scene photos that are used in court can be great, too.
• Subscribe to this group. Yes, you’ll hear a lot of moaning about how bad it is to give reporters video cameras. But occasionally, you’ll see a post about technique or workload, which will help you. And frequently you’ll see great examples of how it’s supposed to be done and what you should be aiming for in your own work. You can also post your videos and get feedback from real pros.

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.

Make an editor happy: take a picture with your phone

Today, I covered a drowning in the river that runs through our downtown.  I did the normal coverage of an event. I sent updates to the web and tweeted it.

Our photographer had a good vantage point on the other side of the river, but I knew he had no way to post. I held up my Blackberry and took a picture, then sent it to our online team. It wasn't a great photo, and I couldn't crop it on my phone. But they used it.

When I returned to the office, I was greeted with, "Thanks for the picture," from Eba Hamid, our web producer.

For a while it was in the featured position of our home page. Until, of course, they got a real photo from our real photographer.

"We need to remind more reporters to do that when they're at a scene," said Lori Buselt, our web content manager.

Sometimes, it is the little things that make a difference.

Sonya Smith and I recently had a conversation about smartphones for reporters at Mojos Unite, which has some good suggestions. It also reminded me to take that picture today.

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.

A pocketful of software just for journalists

Here’s a useful new tool that fits in your pocket: a USB loaded with software you may need while working on computers in other places.

Josh Sprague, writing for Mediactive, has compiled an interesting list of applications for both consuming and producing media, that fits on a USB drive, and he shows you how to load up your own.

An interesting workaround to problems you might encounter working with computers in the field.

Why I was the only reporter allowed to tweet from the courtroom during the Roeder trial

From the World Series to murder trials, the bigger the event, the tougher it is to cover. I’ve done both a seven-game World Series and murder cases drawing national attention.

You always have to find space to operate between all the reporters, and in both events, everyone is seeing the same thing and it’s tough to come up with a fresh angle. As the reporter pool grows, there are more restrictions.

In the recent trial of Scott Roeder, the judge decided not to allow laptops in the courtroom. That meant no live tweeting from the courtroom, only a media room two floors away. Well, for most reporters that was the case.

Cell phones were allowed as long as they made noise, and from the time I started covering cases on Twitter, all I’ve used is a phone. I call it the laptop in my pocket.

My phone and Bluetooth keyboard always draws curiosity from the other reporters, which reminded me that I should probably explain it again, because the set-up comes in handy, when you want to travel light.

The current edition combines a Blackberry Curve with a Freedom Universal Keyboard2. The keyboard saves your thumbs and is small enough to go unnoticed. It’s allowed me to tweet from federal courtrooms, and in trials where judges think a row of clacking laptops would distract jurors. But I can see this setup being used in other events. It still leaves room to take notes.

The keyboard connects via Bluetooth, and is much more reliable than the old infrared devices I used to pair with a Palm phone. You can find a Bluetooth keyboard for just about every kind of phone, except for an I-Phone and Android. I really wanted a Droid, but I needed one that worked with a keyboard. I went with the Blackberry, because I liked the feel of the Freedom Keyboard and it was made for the Blackberry. Plus, Blackberry has a lot of apps available similar to the I-Phone and Droid.

It proved quite the soldier during the Roeder trial. I tweeted with the keyboard for eight hours in court each day, including checking the Internet throughout he days for replies from Twitter followers. At least one day after the trial, I then went to the gym and worked out for an hour while playing Pandora. I still had battery left when I plugged in to recharge it at bedtime.

Can your I-Phone do that?

Getting videos even your photographer buddies will think is cool

Face it, as reporters we are still on the low end of priorities when it comes to video.

Yes, it's now a requirement for us to know how to shoot, capture and edit video stories in a multimedia world. But try arm-wrestling for equipment, and you're going to lose to the real photographers in the newsroom, whose jobs are increasingly dependent on video expertise. And they should.

I'm not one to sweat the small stuff.  Online video is still an open adventure, and to be truthful, most web surfers would rather watch "On A Boat" (33.8 million views and counting) than any serious piece of news you're going to produce (200 views and hoping for more).

For the new video series, I'm using a Canon Elura 85 that our newsroom bought in 2005.  I don't think they even make the model anymore.  Our photo department long ago graduated to Canon HD cameras.

So I'm using the old camera no one else wants, and I'm okay with it. But it's funny, when I started asking for feedback from people I know and respect, everyone complimented the production values of the new courts vlog.

My main mentor, Stacey Jenkins, who taught us video two years ago, said I've got my lighting right. One of our most prolific videographers, Jaime Oppenheimer, said it was "awesome."

That's the beauty of this DV camera:  you have control over the settings, so I can adjust exposure to the low-light situations that sometime plague the courtroom. No matter what the price, try to get one where you can switch to manual in a pinch.  Also important is a jack for an external microphone. If you've got those, you can really do some good work.

What is most important for reporters shooting video, is capturing decent audio.  And let me just say, the audio on your beat is better than mine.  Courtroom acoustics tend to really suck. Even the television guys, who've been doing this for years, complain about courtroom audio.

I'm still working on perfecting the audio, but for the meantime, I've got a wireless mic set on loan from the photo department.  It was one they're not using. Scored on that. Another tip, show an interest and work hard, and you'll have friends who will help you out, such as pointing out the good equipment that no one else is using (thank you, Jaime)

I'm still also carrying the $10.99 Nady microphone I bought two years ago. It still works great for interviews. I also pack an Azden shotgun mic I found collecting dust in a closet, which can pick up sound from across the room. My next experiment will be to use both the shotgun and the wireless to collect even better audio from court hearings.

I'm hoping not using this camera forever.  We're holding out hope for some more higher resolution video cameras for reporters in the next budget. In the meantime, I'm using what I have.  And I'm not complaining.

I'm finding it matters less about being a gear head and more about what you're collecting with the equipment you have. I mean, in the old days, I don't remember ever hearing good reporters complain about what kind of pen they had.

What are you using to shoot video for your stories?

Hot links this week on online journalism

Jack Lail says "We'd get more readers if we gave them less frickin' news to read": “The news junkies, however, are the users that move the metrics and we focus even more on what they want because they are generating more pageviews and longer times on site. And thus we have less of what more casual news consumers want. Sort of like drinking ourselves to death?”

"We Were Print" – the blog of “former and soon-to-be-former print journalists” – chronicles the dark humor that is our business with links to this week's Doonesbury.

Don Himsel gives us the latest generation of point-and-shoot cameras as News Videographer.

Mindy McAdams reports on a session she attended on pro video at the Online News Association’s annual conference.

If you get audio and no one hears it, does it make any sound?

The chemical plant explosion shook buildings. The call from our desk told me to go directly to the emergency command center, which was under the big cloud of black smoke the officials weren’t so sure we should be breathing.

I was glad that I had been packing my briefcase over the past several months with microphones and at least a cheap digital recorder. The big gear we’ve ordered hadn’t arrived yet, but I’d been playing around with my Olympus recorder and $10 Nady microphone.

In the trunk of my car, a tool I hadn't used. The first time I’d tried to get audio in a pack journalism setting, my arm was wedged between two TV lenses, trying to hold a microphone close enough while losing feeling in my forearm. I longed for the days when I could stay back with my pen and little notebook, within earshot, jotting down quotes and pertinent information.

Screw this, I thought. This must be one reason for boom mics. Ever priced a boom? About $1,000, and I knew my boss wasn’t convinced getting audio is quite that important yet. I do, but I didn’t have that kind of cash.

When I was researching shooting video for the web, I’d read on Make Internet TV about fashioning a boom pole out of a broom. I didn’t want to tote a broom around to news scenes, but I liked the idea. I found a telescoping stage boom with a stand on sale for $22 from Musician’s Friend. I unscrewed the base and threw the pole in my car. I tried it out for the first time that day, going over the crowd, sticking the boom arm through the crowd. It worked. I even got a few nods and compliments from the TV folks, and they’ve been doing this much longer than I have.

I recorded everything. I ended up with some good emotional audio for a slide show on deadline.

I also ended up with audio that we could’ve used to better effect but didn’t.

Photographer Travis Heying shot some great video of the fire from a helicopter, but didn’t have sound to go with it. I had some compelling audio of fire chiefs talking about the difficulties of these kinds of fires and the reasons for evacuating residents because of the health risks from the smoke. I could have edited a minute of audio to put down as a track for Travis’ video. But he was up in the helicopter. I was on the ground. There was no way to get it back to the newsroom.

Despite all of our work, as a newsroom, we’ve still got a long way to go on a breaking story.

The good news: the community flocked to our web site to find out what was happening.

Oh, and despite having no audio, we were the first ones to put up video of the fire – even before television.

We’ll celebrate small victories. For now, that’s all we can do.

Quest for maps

It’s easy to be seduced by video and audio slide shows. They are like magic to print reporters who, until now, have been confined to words and the dreaded “info” boxes to relay information.

But multimedia isn’t just about pictures that move or fade, zoom or pan. We now have all sorts of tools to convey a story. We don’t have to do this all by ourselves. Photographers will produce better visuals. Graphic artists and designers will make it look prettier. But it will be up to us to bring home the information, the details that give the artist’s canvas color and detail.

Just as we’ve learned how to make graphic requests and photo assignments, we need to understand the tools.

Rule No. 5 of Multimedia: Embrace Google Maps.

Go ahead. You can even make one.

Get started right away with Atlas or MapMaker.

Mindy McAdams has blogged about this in detail.

There's a great tutorial to learn the basics.

Look at what my colleague Hurst Laviana did last week on a story about unsolved homicides. Each point gives a thumbnail of the cold case. All he needed was an Excel spreadsheet with the location, and pretty much the map programs did the rest.

OK, nothing’s perfect. Our programming goddess Katie fixed all the random dots that turned up in another hemisphere, even though the spreadsheet specifically said Kansas. Doesn’t Google Maps know we have a street that runs right down the Sixth Principle Meridian? The street is even called Meridian. It’s not in Arizona somewhere.

So everything has bugs. But Katie is skillful in Google Maps, so if there’s a problem, she can fix it.

To learn more about Google maps, courtesy of the experts at NICAR, especially Matt Waite and Jeremy Milarsky:

Read this, or at least talk someone in your newsroom into reading it: "Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional," by By Andre Lewis
Michael Purvis, Jeffrey Sambells, Cameron Turner
(Apress 2007)

Check out the Google Maps blog. If you want to go even deeper.

Google Maps Mania: The Beatlemania of Google Maps. Kind of.

While we don’t have to know how to program all this, we at least need a basic understanding of what we'll need to set up your spreadsheet, so someone else can map it easily.

We’re just training in Flash. Pretty soon, we may be able to do the kind of cool stuff they do in Oakland.

That's what I'm talking about.

Slide shows: they're not just for photographers

Fellow multimedia reporter Stan Finger was already grinning, when I walked into work this morning. He’d just found a slide show waiting in his in-box.

A teenager had fallen into a river outside Wichita, and emergency crews staged a daring rescue amid a raging undertow, worsened by the high waters from this spring’s notorious Kansas storms. An alert member of the emergency crew documented the rescue and sent the photos to us.

Stan grabbed a digital recorder and sat at my desk, which has a $17 phone recorder I’d picked up last year sometime. Stan called the director of pubic safety in Augusta, KS. He then passed me the recorder, like a baton in the multimedia relay, and headed out the door for the morning police briefing. Stan files more on-line stories before noon than most people in a day.

I used Audacity to edit the interview, trying to match up the descriptions with the pictures we had, and loaded it into Soundslides.

We had the slide show posted with Stan’s story by afternoon. Stan watched the show before he wrote, so he produce a story with minimal repeats that complemented the slide show. Once again, multimedia became the layers for the news.

Before we became what my editor Nick Jungman calls “multimedia operatives,” Soundslides had been loaded on the photographers’ individual Mac laptops and on a desktop over in Photo, which we now call Visuals. Since it only costs $40, our managing editor didn’t blink at buying another copy for a reporters’ projects computer.

Soundslides takes about 10 seconds to learn. I fiddled with it for a couple of months, before January rolled around before Richard Koci Hernandez provided this outstanding tutorial. After watching this, I had photographers asking me “How’d you get side captions?”

Writer’s tip: Launch side captions, bump up the point size to 18 and you can use it as a text block to provide additional details. Just don’t overuse it. Let the audio and pictures tell the story. Make title slides on a blank canvas in Photoshop. Soundslides recognizes “jpg” and “mp3” files.

Of course, as with traditional print, it’s best to team a photographer’s artistic eye and reporter’s interview skills. But when photographers are pressed for time, or numbers, be creative.

If there’s good audio, dig for visuals as vigorously as you would the mayor’s emails. I’ve experimented with slideshows by taking matieral from our photo archives and sources’ scrap books. I’ve even used computer screen shots - once, for a story I did on prisoners looking for dates on the Internet. I've used maps. I thought I was stretching on the screen shots, but I felt better, when our market’s leading television station picked up the story the next night and used similar visuals. You never know what will work.

Maybe there’s a gem waiting in your in-box.

Way-cool tool

Here’s something that fits everything multimedia into your back pocket with all the convenience of a notebook.
It’s the Nokia 93I: the latest generation of smartphone. I don’t have one, yet, but it looks impressive

The N93i has a screen that flips 160 degrees and gives you a viewfinder for a video camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, which is what comes with the Sony camcorders.

Pair it with a bluetooth wireless keyboard, and it looks like quite a powerful little phone. It even comes with mini-versions of Adobe’s PhotoShop and Premiere Elements video editing software.

Check out this demonstration.

Think of it: you’re first on the scene at a breaking news event. You take a short video clip, unfold the keyboard, bang out a brief description of what’s going on and you have it sent back to the newsroom and posted on the web, right out of your pocket.

Speaking of emptying your pocket, it retails for between $800 to $1,200. Now, when you think about it, that’s about what you’d pay for a new laptop, which doesn’t shoot video, take stills, or fit in your pocket.

And you really need a phone. This way you have only one thing to lose.

Not that most reporters can rush out and buy one. But the phones will get better, the prices might come down. You could save up and be the first one to have the cool new multimedia toy. Or it might even be worth pitching to the bosses, when they’re shopping for ways to equip reporters for multimedia.

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LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES: Angela Grant at News Videographer today posted critiques of three of my videos. This is a great site to get feedback to improve. Next time, I will shoot more close-ups.