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 [...]

Editing tips from one of the best

Digital editing allows you to do amazing things with video, but the 2007 NPPA Editor of the Year urges editors to show restraint. Josh Shea of KCNC-TV in Denver was one of my fellow instructors at this year’s NPPF Airborne TV Seminar in Rochester, N.Y., and Des Moines, Iowa. His advice is simple: [...]

Risk, initiative, persistence

You might think the news business is changing faster than ever before, but anyone who started in TV before videotape (like me) can tell you that it’s been in transition for years. John Goheen, the only three-time NPPA Photographer of the Year, has seen plenty of change in the 27 years he’s been [...]

Simple graphics make complex stories clear

Simple graphics sometimes work better than highly-produced interactives when it comes to explaining a complicated process. The Wall Street Journal accompanied a story about kidney transplants with a series of four illustrations that walk users through the problems people often face when looking for a compatible donor. Using stick figures, arrows and very [...]

Crowdsourcing the news

When Wired magazine first used the term crowdsourcing in 2006, it referred to “the productive potential of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts.” It didn’t take long for news organizations to take advantage of that potential to develop and report stories.

The Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, the NPR station in New York, now has regular crowdsourcing [...]

Blogs and data draw readers

News organizations are in a constant battle for online traffic, but what actually works to draw readers? Blogs, live chats and interactive databases, according to industry leaders quoted by Editor&Publisher. Jennifer Carroll, vice president of new media for the Gannett newspaper division, told the annual Associated Press Managing Editors conference that searchable data is particularly [...]

Use a voiceover, already

Why do so many news Web sites use full-screen text instead of voiceover narration for video and slide shows? Angela Grant, multimedia producer at the San Antonio Express-News, believes “producers are afraid of using voiceovers because they are ‘like TV.’” Her rant at NewsVideographer.com is right on the money. “For god’s [...]

Natural sound matters

Natural sound makes stories come alive. It lets viewers experience something close to what it was like to witness a story in person. A story without nat sound is flat and dull. Want proof? Watch this video from former TV reporter Mark Poepsel, who now teaches at the University of Arizona:

From infotoys to BOPs

Journalists have more options than ever to tell great stories online. But even as multimedia skills become more sophisticated, newsrooms are focusing on just a handful of approaches because they seem to be most effective. That’s the conclusion of a terrific review in OJR by Nora Paul and Laura Ruel of the [...]

Hyperlocal maps

How can you share data quickly and easily online? KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas, used simple PDF maps. Reporter Mark Greenblatt says in The IRE Journal that his station didn’t have time to buy mapping software or train the Web staff to use it, so they created PDF files of neighborhood maps showing where [...]