Learn from your mistakes

The single most important thing you can do to improve as a photojournalist is to edit your own work, says KSDK-TV’s Eric Voss. “Learn from your mistakes and missed opportunities,” he wrote in the NPPA’s News Photographer magazine. “You will discover new avenues for creativity. Here are a few more of Voss’s [...]

No whining on the late shift

At a recent workshop, a reporter complained that she got her assignments too late to do anything creative with them. She worked night side at her TV station and covered a lot of meetings. The assignment desk would tell her what meeting to cover but never provided any background on the topic, and [...]

Find a focus and lose the jargon

KARE-TV’s Joe Fryer knows a little something about good writing. He’s won three national Edward R. Murrow awards and five regional Emmys. Joe was one of my fellow instructors at this year’s NPPF Airborne TV Seminar in Rochester, N.Y., and Des Moines, Iowa. He says one key to being a good writer [...]

News with a little attitude

Talk about how journalism jobs are changing! The Florida Times-Union is planning a daily news segment on its Web site, jacksonville.com, and is advertising for a video blogger, “someone who can report the news with a little attitude and a lot of personality.”
Are you entrepreneurial and creative? Are you Web savvy? Are you confident [...]

Behind the scenes on Live at 5

What goes on off camera during a local newscast can be perfectly hilarious. Unfortunately, most stations don’t let us in on the fun. But anchor Derek McGinty at WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C., lifted the curtain recently on his blog “What the heck was that?“
Sometimes the dearth of good material sparks creativity, and the [...]

Are social networks fair game for journalists?

Social networking sites now host billions of pictures and comments, a few of which might be relevant in covering a news story. Can the media use them? In the October 2007 NPPA News Photographer magazine, Brian McDermott reports that different newsrooms answer that question differently. KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh used photos from a [...]

What do you owe your newsmakers?

There’s no doubt that your approach to a story may change in the process of reporting it, but do you need to let the people you’re covering know that, too? 
For me, this question was raised by a little brouhaha involving a student journalist and her professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.  The reporter, Carla Babb, did a story that the John [...]

Improving Web video

Do three simple things and your online video will look better, says videographer Peter Ralph on his Shooting by Numbers blog.
1. Keep your lens clean. This is especially important if you are shooting hand-held, Ralph says, because you’ll be shooting wide open to keep the image steady and any smudges on the lens will [...]