Summer multimedia lessons: coming full circle

It's really been an incredible summer.

Amid 10 days of triple-digit heat in Kansas, I've received a few signs that maybe I'm starting to do things right.

Like video.

When I started this blog in 2007, there were few places to learn how to add multimedia to your work day. I searched the web to learn video and found Angela Grant's News Videographer blog. I sent Angela my videos and she critiqued them. I read her tips and followed them.

Then this summer Angela, now Morris, emailed me. She wanted to ask me how I was doing video. It was kind of a shock.

I had started looking at video, because I wanted to capture the raw emotion of my court beat. There were times when witnesses broke down on the stand, talking about the crimes committed against them. When I was strictly a print reporter, I never felt like I actually captured that. I wanted to add video to my arsenal of tools, so I could combine those snippets with my stories. Angela introduced me to video storytelling and how to edit complete stories that could stand alone or augment my articles. I dove in.

Now, Angela covers courts herself and came to me asking what I'd learned in doing legal videos. We did an email Q&A and she posted some examples of what I thought I'd done right.

Angela then posted a recommendation on my LinkedIn profile:

“Ron and I became Internet buddies when I was writing regularly for my blog, News Videographer. Ron was teaching himself to shoot and edit videos at the time and he would email me questions and links to videos for critiques. Ron is eager to learn new skills and humble enough to ask questions and listen to advice. From his progress to date, I can see he truly implements the lessons in the real world. Now, I am turning to him with my own questions and appeals for advice!”

The real lesson for me here reminds me of what I've learned as a reporter. I've always followed a personal goal when working on major projects that I knew I was ready to write when I started giving sources information they didn't know. I don't mean that to sound arrogant. But it's happened. I start reporting and keep reporting and eventually I'll contact a source who I have talked to a dozen times with a bit of information, and they'll reply, "I didn't know that." Then I know I'm finished.

It was the same with Angela's post. I could never have gotten through my first year of shooting video without her tutorials, lessons and tips. Now that she's asking me questions, I feel I must have learned something.

And I must be doing something right.

It's been four years since I started this blog. Multimedia is not something you learn overnight. It's like writing. It takes years. But if you keep at it, eventually you start to get a feel for it

Journalism has suffered mightily in the past several years. I've watched good friends walk out the door -- and not by choice. I've heard doomsday predictions for a profession I love.

But it's these little steps, and my belief that we provide our communities with valuable information, that keeps me eager to go into work every day.

Planning an investigative project for the home page, not just the front page

At 3 a.m. last Sunday, I put the final touches on the multimedia project I’d been working on for months, squeezing it between daily assignments.

“Presumed Guilty,” was live on the web. It’s about Ronnie Rhodes, who’s spent 30 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and the disturbing nationwide exposure of wrongful convictions.

For the first time, I had spent more than a year planning how a story would look on the home page of Kansas.com, instead of just the front page of The Wichita Eagle.

Used to be, you’d work on a project for months, and end up with a story in the Sunday paper. That was it.

Rob Curley inspired me to change the way I thought about that process, after visiting him in Las Vegas during the SPJ National Convention.

What Curley told me in Vegas didn’t stay there.

“Every project we plan, we plan for the web,” he said. Then the stories go to print.

That was my goal.

I’d begun blogging the report the previous summer. That would become more valuable than I ever imagined. When the blog needed a post, I dug deeper to create a current entry. Video posts became rough cuts for the final multimedia.

As I collected documents, I threw them up on Document Cloud. As I came across web resources, I posted them to Publish2, so I could easily compile link lists.

The story was done a week before I’d normally turn in a Sunday piece. I spent the last week doing the final cuts of videos.

By then, we’d had more layoffs. This time they hit the copy desk. We left on Friday the stories still awaiting a final edit.

Consequently, the stories hit the desk like every Sunday piece for print – that Saturday night.

So Eba Hamid, our online producer, and I waited until the stories went live at midnight. We got on our home computers, fired up the Gmail chat and worked furiously into the wee hours of the morning.

It was finished -- a piece I’m as proud of as anything I’ve ever done.

Then we waited for reaction. We offered several avenues for community communication.

For months, people commented on the blog posts, and I listened, letting them point me to addtional reporting they wanted, such as Rhodes’ disciplinary reports in prison.

For the final piece, we set up a live chat on Monday with the law professor whose students had helped research the case. Although we’d done those chats about weather and sports, I’d never done one with a crime story. We added a Twitter hashtag in case people wanted to comment there, instead of on the stories. I posted a link on my Facebook profile to provide more opportunities for interaction.

On Sunday, I made sure to check out the comments on the stories, respond and answer questions.

Later that day, Curley tweeted about the package and then posted a comment on my Facebook page:

“This is how it's done folks: great text/real journalism. multimedia/video/photo galleries. reader access to documents used in reporting. audience interaction via twitter and chats. blog entries from throughout reporting process. great background info provided for readers. not afraid to link off newspaper's site.”

“Wow, check this out,” I said to my wife.

The phone rang.

“Maybe that’s Rob Curley,” Gaye said with a laugh.

And it was.

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?

The ultimate in mobile: Multimedia with an I-Phone

Andy Bull has set up a course on producing multimedia reports with an I-Phone.

It begins Oct. 15. Andy said it will cover both the tools and apps with the I-Phone as well as creating a platform to showcase your work.

(via Sonya Smith at Mojos Unite!)

Get a good head start on hardware and apps to turn your I-Phone into an essential multimedia tool, courtesy of Multimedia Shooter.

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.

This is also CNN: getting out of the way of innovation

LAS VEGAS -- After blowing up their silos, CNN began hiring All-Platform Journalists, or APJs. They do about everything, but don't call them one-man bands. That'll just rile up Victor Hernandez, who thinks it makes them sound like a carnival act, instead of the innovative, hard-working reporters they really are.

Hernandez talked a lot about being "platform agnostic" at the SPJ National Convention, and it's something we all need to start taking much more seriously -- finding the best way to tell stories, instead of digging ourselves in where we're most comfortable. If video is the best way to tell the story, use it, instead of falling back on text, because there's a news hole somewhere that needs to be filled. If text provides context and explanation, then tell it that way, even though someone still thinks there has to be a video over a talking voice.

Or use both. Text with video.

Journalists are listening. I hear a lot less whining that "I'm a newspaper reporter, so I shouldn't have to learn this video." The multimedia presentations this week were packed. People were eager to learn to work on all platforms.

Hernandez said the skills are developing, but there's still one piece that needs work:



Some examples:



Or look what APJ Sarah Hoye did on a multimedia project on natural gas fracking with CNN Money's Steve Hargreaves. It included this video, which follows more of a documentary style than the typical TV formula:



Of course, inspiration for following a different path remains print icon Jimmy Breslin, who wandered off from press pack covering the funeral of John F. Kennedy to interview the man who dug the president's grave.

So as we left the convention, we carried the question: Are we moving toward the future or living in the past?

At least that's what Mark Briggs wondered, while leaving Las Vegas to the tune of John Mellancamp:

"If you’re not part of the future then get out of the way."

How CNN rethinks its newsroom

Updated
LAS VEGAS -- The struggle is one felt in newsrooms across the nation. The demand to change is there. We hear it from our audience. They consume news differently than they did. They want more. They want different. But newsroom structures and old habits are difficult to overcome.

“We’ve always done it this way,” becomes a mantra. Those who try to innovate may face hurdles from their own organizations. Rocking tradition can get you labeled a troublemaker, even if it succeeds.

This is a culture in many newsrooms. I know this from conversations with reporters, producers and editors I talk to from around the country each year during the SPJ Convention. I hear the same frustrations repeated as often we as hear “We’ve always done it this way.”

Such struggles came out in the session “Smashing the Silos” where some of CNN’s most innovative management talked about how they broke some conventional cultures to open the doors to innovation.

Victor Hernandez, who I’ve gotten to know the past several years, and always seems to be a little bit a head of the curve, is director of domestic news for CNN. He talked about how continuing to do journalism the same way creates what he calls “Zombie Journalism.”



Update:

View their presentation:

Smashing the Silos! on Prezi

Journalists' signal to noise ratio for Twitter

LAS VEGAS -- Even as Twitter becomes more popular among journalists, a lot of people still have problems figuring out just how they should use it. Some insist on posting only links and pushing out information, not engaging in the conversation. Others have questions about including both professional and personal information. In his session this morning on social engagement for journalists at the SPJ National Convention, Jeff Cutler described his 70/30 ratio.



Also get Jeff's complete notes on the session (pdf).

What happens in Vegas gets blogged

I'm headed to Las Vegas today for the Society of Professional Journalists National Convention.  I'll blog what I'm learning, and I always pick up some valuable tips. SPJ provides some cutting edge sessions.

You can also follow the #spj10 hashtag on Twitter to see what everyone is talking about.

If you're in Vegas, send me a message on Twitter or stop by the 60 Sites in 60 Minutes session I'm doing with Jeff Cutler at 3:30 p.m. Monday in Melrose A. We'll also be hosting a tweetup Monday night. Watch Twitter for the details.

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.

Getting to the source documents

It started out as the easiest "web extra."  That's what our bosses used to call it in the ol' days of the 1990s. What can you put on the news web site that increased the value of the print story?

Links and source documents, of course. Links to relevant material and .pdfs of research documents to show people we just weren't making all this up. The links caught on. People made careers of compiling links.

The docs?  Not so much. Just last year, our web team was saying no one clicked on the .pdfs. And who could blame them?  They're a good way to cut down on the paper on your desk (see previous post), but kind of clunky to share.

That changed recently, when I started using Scribd. It's among the growing document sharing sites popping up. There's Docstoc and DocShare and the old standby, Google Docs. They're communities based around documents, and some like Scribd allow you to embed your documents in the story, as you would a video.

When I signed up for Scribd, it allowed me to connect to my Facebook page. My Facebook friends who were already on Scribd immediately found me, and I ended up with a dozen or so followers before I'd uploaded anything to read.

Frankly, following me on only Scribd may be a bit of a disappointment, unless you're a legal geek.  What I'm posting now are legal documents from stories I'm covering on the courts beat.

But something happened when we started embedding those documents on the page with stories -- people started reading them. I've only been using this for about a month, so traffic isn't great, but it compares to some of our video views.

This is important, because it allows people to connect with our sources. The reporting process becomes more accessible, and that's crucial in a time where public confidence in the news media is at an all-time low.

My next step is contacting, Document Cloud, made especially for journalists. It boasts extra reporting tools, allowing you to make annotations, lists and time lines from dates in the documents. I'm still waiting for approval. Because it's restricted to journalists and researchers, they say they need a note from my editor that I'm really who I say I am.

Kind of like being back at school, and the teacher aksing for a note for my mom.

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.

Reporting for web only during the Scott Roeder murder trial

My first day as a web-only reporter ended promptly at 5 p.m. – a rarity in my three decades of journalism. That’s when court let out in the Scott Roeder murder trial in the shooting of a Wichita abortion doctor. It has been receiving national coverage.

I had been accustomed to staying late after court to rewrite the day’s events on the web for print. But for this trial another reporter is handling the print story, which also appears online as the day-after report.

Despite leaving early, I was exhausted. A courtroom deputy commented on how my fingers were flying across my Bluetooth keyboard with my Blackberry. One of my Twitter followers posted a picture of me taken from a screen grab of the television coverage, as I frantically filed updates. Note: I need to learn to sit up straight on those wooden court benches.

I was actually writing two updates. In addition to the filing Twitter updates, which were coming anywhere from 1-5 minutes apart, I was filing longer dispatches for our web site, which they were posting time-stamped, blog style. Online wanted those every 10-15 minutes.

All fed onto our trial page. We know some people watch the Twitter feed from our Kansas.com page, without ever having to go to Twitter. For people who don’t want to watch the up-to-the-minute tweets, they can come back to the page every so often and catch up with what’s going on, while having the Twitter stream available to see what’s happening at that minute.

For additional multimedia, we have a still photographer in the courtroom, and a laptop in the pressroom downloading the video pool stream. Travis Heying, at one point, was shooting stills in the courtroom and running into another part of the courthouse on breaks to edit and upload video from his Mac. Later in the day, Mike Hutmacher took over as the still pool reporter in the courtroom and Travis took care of video.

Also notice our links section on the trial page. We are linking to other local and national coverage, including blogs and commentary on the case.

Inspiration for the links came from a session at the SPJ National Convention last year called “All the News That’s Fit to Link.” If you’re an SPJ member, you can hear an audio download of that session.

Bill Adee, editor of digital media for the Chicago Tribune, spoke in that session about the success his staff saw when they started linking to other coverage within their own.

“People aren’t going to stop reading when they finish your story,” he said. They’re going to get on Google and search out other information. Why not be the launching spot to guide them.

After all, as Adee and panelist Scott Karp pointed out, knowledgeable humans ought to be able to put together a better list than a Google bot.

With this trial, we’re trying to put together all the learning we’ve been doing about web reporting over the last several years and put it into practice.

I’d love to hear what others think about our efforts: what you like, what you don’t like, what we’re doing right and what we could do better. After all, the news is always an evolutionary process.

Don't wait until the end of the reporting to think multimedia

When it comes to multimedia, journalists should think out a story in an inverted pyramid. But we don’t, especially in investigative or enterprise stories.

We’re used to digging for the story over days, weeks, and months. Yes, some of have spent years on a story. We’ve got piles of documents, stacks of notebooks, and we’re ready to write. Then the online producer asks, “What else have you got?”

Too many times, multimedia and the web packages become an after thought. Unlike the normal path ofinvestigative stories, when you’re ready to write, it’s often too late to be thinking multimedia.

Mark S. Luckie, whose blog 10,000 Words provides a great resource for multimedia journalists, says investigative reporters need to think in terms of how the web can help them tell there stories.

“The web serves as an all-encompassing platform for publishing interactive maps, multimedia stories built in Flash or other software, video, audio and other forms of media besides text,” Luckie wrote on The Muckraker Blog for the Center for Investigative Reporting.

But we have to think of them as we report the story, not at the end.

“The responsibility, however, requires the judgment to know which media is appropriate for a particular story. For example, interactive maps are great, but they aren't appropriate for every story,” Luckie writes.

As we gather documents and notes on a story, we ought to be thinking in terms of video clips and recording audio during interviews that we could turn into multimedia later. Also, keep feeding your web producer bits that could make an interactive map or timeline.

I’m in the middle of a long-term investigative project. As with these kinds of stories, I’m not certain where it will lead. The other day, one of our interns was helping with research. She had gathered a mountain of papers. Somewhere in all that paperwork, we expect to find the story. I pulled out a video camera and shot a minute of her working with all that paper.

We may never use it, just like we don’t use a lot of the notes we take. But I’ve filed it away in a box where I will keep multimedia for the project, just in case.

Update: ProPublica has a great example of how web tools can exaplain complex information with its map on the unemployment insurance drain.

Prying the print byline from the hands of an old newspaper reporter

Last week began the trial of Scott Roeder, the accused killer of a Wichita abortion doctor.  It’s the latest story I’ve covered through my courts beat that has gained national attention (strange how many national crime stories have come out of Wichita). The trial is still in jury selection so the true onslaught of national media has not yet arrived, but we’ve already been making plans on how we’ll cover the story.

But one suggestion kind of shook me.  My editors pulled me into the office and told me they wanted me to concentrate on producing for online: doing live updates on Twitter, as I had been doing for the past two years, filing behind-the-scenes notes on my blog and updating the main story each day that would go on our web site.

True, this was kind of my dream when I first started throwing myself into online years ago.  This is the future of news.  It’s where the audience is growing. I would be the lead reporter on our web site with a story on the national stage.

But I hesitated.  The old newspaper reporter of 33 years still takes pride in that print byline on the front page, above the fold.  After all, that’s when I can take the day’s 140-character dispatches from Twitter, the brief blog posts, the scratched from banging out the latest online update, and turn them into a well-written story at the end of the day.  Someone else would be doing that now with “my story.”

I was the only one who felt this way.

“Do you like working all day and all night?” my wife asked. “If they offer you help, take it.”

“Who still reads print anyway?” said my friend Emanuella Grinberg of CNN.com. “Your biggest audience is online, anyway.”  She should know. She's a full-time online reporter.

Of course, this is what I had been preaching on this blog, and to my colleagues for years.  I know online will eventually replace print.  But it also showed me that like others in this business. I was a little more hesitant to give up the print cycle than I would like to have admitted.

And for just a moment, I felt my age.

“Sure, no problem,” I told my editors. “I’ll do online only.”

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.

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?

So then I started this video series to expand the coverage of my beat

After the Twitter experiment worked, I began searching for other ways to expand my court beat online.

What I really wanted to do is reach past the types of cases that usually made news. There's so much that goes on in the courthouse everyday, you can't cover it all.  But I figured the web enabled me to go beyond what I used to do when I only had the newspaper, and its limited space, as a venue.

I always quipped that I could walk into any random courtroom and come out with a good story. Here was my chance to prove it.

So then I started this video series, which we would eventually call, Common Law.

As with most online experiments that have worked for me, Katie, was heavily involved in the initial development. My then-editor, Jill Cohan, gave it the go-ahead.  She even wrote the development of the series it into my goals for the coming year.

In future posts, I'll follow my work flow and how I try to get everything done.

What made this a little easier is getting regular sources follow.  That's served as the foundation for the series: I have a judge, a public defender, a prosecutor and two courthouse guards. I have to credit these folks for agreeing the jump into something that's so new.

I regularly check in with what their doing and produce 2-minute video segments which run several times a week.

I then asked for critiques from friends and colleagues, many of whom I've met through this blog.  They all gave some great tips and were very positive about what I'd done.  This fueled me to keep doing it and improve it.

Among them, Angela Grant, whose blog News Videographer has served as one of my main learning tutorials over the past couple of years.  With this series, I got to put everything I'd learned from her posts, and her past critiques of my work, into practice.

One of our concerns in all this is that while courts offer the height of human drama, it's often delivered in the sterile, clinical confines of people talking in court.

Wrote Angela:

Usually, talking heads are boring and do not make compelling video. But I think the way Ron is using the talking heads here is actually very compelling. Maybe it’s because the subject matter is naturally interesting. Maybe it’s the easy-to-digest format: One graph of info, followed by a short video. Whatever it is, I think it’s successful because I was able to watch like 4-5 of these in a row and I stayed interested the whole time.

Taking what is usually a 20- to 30-minute hearing the editing it down to 2 minutes helps keep the most compelling information about these cases.  I'm often checking back with the judge and lawyers, to make sure I'm keeping everything in context and portraying the gist of the hearings.  So far, so good.

The reason we called it "Common Law" (Jill's title) is because we deal with the everyday type of cases that come to the courthouse -- the stuff you normally wouldn't see.

The video views are comparable to others being produced for our site, and several people have stopped me in the elevator and the hallways of the courthouse to tell me how much they're enjoying them.

But I'm always looking for feedback. If you can watch a few, when you get time, leave a comment and tell me what you think. I'm always looking to improve.

I can also see a variety of beats lending itself to this kind of treatment.

60 sites in 60 minutes: stampeding the SPJ Convention

Jeff Cutler and I were overwhelmed by the response to our session Saturday at the SPJ National Convention.

"Site Stampede: 60 web sites in 60 minutes" drew a large, lively crowd anxious to learn what we'd linked to around the web.

You can download a copy of the links (.doc) and Mitch Davis posted a series of videos, for those who couldn't attend.

We're hoping to do it again next year in Vegas. And if you come across any sites we missed or want to explore more, let us know.

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.