Category Archives: Teaching

Alex Blumberg’s “And What’s Interesting…” Storytelling Test

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I recently stumbled upon a 2005 article by NPR radio producer and journalism instructor Alex Blumberg that offers some great advice for determining if a reporter is on the right track to a good story. I’ve been using it regularly in the classroom. It’s simple, concrete, and has helped my students focus their reporting.

Blumberg calls it the “and what’s interesting” test. He writes:

You simply tell someone about the story you’re doing, adhering to a very strict formula: “I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y.”

So for example… “I’m doing a story about a homeless guy who lived on the streets for 10 years, and what’s interesting is, he didn’t get off the streets until he got into a treatment program.” Wrong track. Solve for a different Y.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is there’s a small part of him that misses being homeless.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he developed surprising and heretofore unheard of policy recommendations on the problem of homelessness from his personal experience on the streets.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he fell in love while homeless, and is haunted by that love still.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he learned valuable and surprising life lessons while homeless, lessons he applies regularly in his current job as an account manager for Oppenheimer mutual funds.” Right track. In other words, who the hell knows what you might find out. Just don’t settle for the story you already know. Find the exciting or surprising or unusual moment, and focus the story on that.

Here are some other takeaways from the article that I’ve found particularly helpful for students:

  • Don’t confuse a location or premise with an actual story.
  • In order to find a story, you need someone to talk to and a situation to discuss.
  • Trust the first question that comes to you. Figure out what question you want to answer or what story you want to hear. If the question seems obvious, chances are it’s a story.
  • Just because something is a story or takes the form of a story doesn’t mean it’s an interesting story.
  • Don’t pursue a story just because it’s story you’ve heard before. In fact, do the opposite. Look for the story that is the most surprising and unexpected.
  • People often tell you the boring part first. Sometimes they think it is exciting or think it’s what they are supposed to tell a reporter. Dig deeper. If you are bored, your audience will be bored.
  • Everyone has a story, but it’s not always that interesting or something you can adapt. If you don’t have a story, find someone else.

Using Narrative Nonfiction to Teach Multimedia Storytelling

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This semester, I am trying something new in my advanced multimedia journalism course. In addition to studying examples of interactive journalism, completing a series of online trainings and tutorials, and conducting their own multimedia reporting assignments, my students will be reading Susan Orlean.

I selected Orlean’s book Saturday Night, which was first published in 1990 and was reissued this year, as one of the primary texts. Saturday Night is a collection of magazine-style feature articles that start with the question, “What makes Saturday night so special?” In her attempt to answer that question, Orlean travels the county and cruises in muscle cars in Indiana, polka dances with seniors in Maryland, interviews homeless people on the Lower East Side, and spends the night in a missile silo in Wyoming.

So what does The New Yorker-style narrative nonfiction have to do with multimedia journalism?

I’m planning to use the book in several ways to help students explore aspects of digital storytelling.

Finding Stories
Most of the subjects in Saturday Night are pretty ordinary, but Orlean’s eye for detail and skillful prose creates wonderfully vivid portraits of everyday life. My students’ assignments will have a similar goal: to find surprising and compelling stories about people and events that rarely make the news.

Insight into the Reporting Process
Orlean is a rigorous reporter and researcher, even when she is writing about a waitress or a babysitter. Also Orlean’s use of the first person provides occasional glimpses into her own process and how she interacts with subjects. My students are always wanting to know how a reporter finds a particular story or conducts herself when she’s doing a story.

Narrative Structure and Techniques
When I think back on own journalism education experience – in a time before the term “multimedia reporting” was invented – I learned the most about the art of storytelling in my magazine writing classes. We studied writers like John Hersey, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Dideon, Calvin Trillin and Lillian Ross. We learned how to structure a story, set a scene, select the most telling details, and incorporate quotes and dialogue. I’m hoping to bring a feature writing sensibility to the students’ practice of multimedia journalism.

Understanding Multimedia
My students’ assignments incorporate text, photos, audio and video. A key challenge is understanding when to use a particular medium to tell the story in the most engaging way. I have created several exercises in which students will brainstorm how they might translate one of Orlean’s profiles for the digital age. We will storyboard an article and discuss how it might be presented as an interactive feature on the web. Students will apply those concepts to their own work.

A Source of Inspiration (I hope)
This is an experiment. I know that many of the techniques of magazine writing do not translate to gathering audio or shooting video. Students will have three minutes to present a story, not 5,000 words. And many of the cultural references in Saturday Night are dated (i.e., in the future “people will eventually work from their homes via computer workstations and modem hookups.”) However, I’m hopeful that a book like Saturday Night is still capable of inspiring the next generation of journalists.

At the end of the semester, I’ll post an update of what I learn.

Resources for Incorporating Mobile Reporting into a Journalism Course

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I’ve been hunting for resources that might help in adding mobile reporting assignments to my exiting courses. Here is a round-up of some guides, tips, articles and advice from instructors and journalists in the field.

Mobile Journalism Reporting Tools Guide – A guide to dozens of services, hardware and apps for on-the-go reporting with social media, photos audio, and video. Compiled for the Reynolds Journalism Institute by Will Sullivan, self-described “journalism nerd.”

7 Tips For Teaching Mobile Media To Journalism Students –  Staci Baird reflects on her experience teaching a course at San Francisco State University, including the suggestion to “forget about offering an entire class that focuses solely on mobile media unless you’re going to concentrate on the technical side of things and students are actually going to create mobile websites or apps.” Also here is a list of links from Baird’s talk at a mobile symposium. (Knight Digital Media Center)

Contemporary News Media – Staci Baird’s syllabus from San Francisco State University

“I teach mobile” Facebook group for journalism educators

A website of an experimental Mobile Reporting course taught by Jeremy Rue and Richard Koci Hernandez at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Reporting live from the scene of breaking news… on an iPhone – Equipped with just an iPhone, a NPR reporter pulls off a broadcast that “might have required days of planning just a few months ago.” (Nieman Journalism Lab)

A reporter’s tale of using Motorola Droid on the job – Nathan Gonzalez, a cops reporter for the Arizona Republic, describes how he used his phone to report each aspect of a law enforcement gun raid. (Technically Journalism)

Former Newspaper Photographer Becomes Mobile, Social Journalist – How Jim MacMillan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, made the shift to mobile. (Poynter)

How One Radio Reporter Ditched His Equipment for an iPhone 4 – Neal Augenstein offers his tips and shows off his homemade jury rigged iPhone mic clip. (Media Shift)

The Building Blocks of a Multimedia Story

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You have pages of notes, hundreds of photos, and hours of audio and video. Now what?

Turning raw material into a cohesive and compelling story is the main challenge for a multimedia journalist. Often we have a sense that there is a story buried in there somewhere if we can just locate the essential elements and fashion them in narrative. As a teacher, I’m always looking for ways to help my students identify the building blocks of a story.

Here is some simple, yet effective, advice on how to structure a story from three  storytellers and educators:

“Anecdote and Moment of Reflection”

Ira Glass, the producer of the radio and television documentary show This American Life, says that every great audio or video story has two elements: an anecdote and a moment of reflection.

An anecdote is the sequence of actions that builds the momentum and raises questions to be answered. Stringing together a series of actions (this happens, and then this happens) makes the audience feel that they are moving toward a destination.

A moment of reflection is the point when someone clearly says, “here is the point of the story.”

Often a reporter will have one of the two elements, Glass says, but both are needed;

Your job to be ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions that works or you don’t have a moment of reflection. And you are going to need both. In a good story you are going to flip back between the two… and that is the trick of the whole thing is to have the perseverance that if you have an interesting anecdote that you also can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that can support it…and that together it will add up to something that is more than the sum of its parts.

“Find the Arc of the Story”

Like a feature film or a book of fiction, a short piece of multimedia journalism can still have a story arc with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Mindy McAdams, who teaches online journalism at the University of Florida, says that the first question a reporter should ask when creating a multimedia piece like an audio slide show is “what do you intend to communicate?”

McAdams writes:

This might be the most common mistake that journalists make: Often we give little or no thought to this question and its answer. Much of the time, we go out and cover an event, and then our (text) story is simply what happened and who was there. In the time-honored tradition of humans telling stories to one another, this is at the low end of the scale — unless the event was, say, the Battle of Troy (which was rather more exciting than the average charity fund-raiser).

Once the reporter knows what she wants to communicate with the story, McAdams suggests finding the opening and closing of the story. A strong and clear beginning is essential to hook the audience. Then a piece should make a direct track toward the conclusion with the ending clearly in mind.

On endings, McAdams writes:

A solid, satisfying ending has two parts. They can be called the climax and the resolution, and even though that sounds a bit overblown for a two-minute story. I think you’ll tell a better story if you think of the ending in those terms. The climax is the destination, the place you’re taking the audience, in a straight line from the opening. It will come near the end of the story, but afterward, you also need to provide closure. Make it feel complete. That’s the resolution.

“Someone Does Something Because”

The Common Language Project is a nonprofit multimedia journalism organization that focuses on international reporting and journalism education. In one of its tutorials, Sarah Stuteville of CLP urges reporters to frame their stories as “someone does something because.”

For example, she writes;

Think of your story as someone does something because.  You should always be able to sum it up in that skeleton, fleshing it out as your story develops:
• Some guy starts a school in India because it’s a good thing to do.
• Sam Singh starts a school in India because he’s from there and wants to help the community.
• Sam Singh, a retired top executive for Dupont Corporation, founds a revolutionary vocational school for girls in rural India because he sees the need for development in rural communities in a country where the elite and the ‘technological class’ are moving fast and growing rapidly, often leaving the people – and potential – of rural communities behind.

In other words, the story should have character(s), action, and a motivation for those actions.

And the difference between a series of sound bites and a real story is the combination of all these elements.

For more on Sam Singh and the school see NPR’s recent multimedia story in photos, audio, maps, and text.

Online Journalism Courses – Spring 2011

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Let the fun begin…

Online Journalism I (Spring 2011)
-Download Online Journalism I syllabus (pdf)
-Link to Online Journalism I class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, student work, and lecture notes

Online Journalism 2 (Spring 2011)
-Download Online Journalism 2 syllabus (pdf)
-Link to the Online Journalism II class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, and lecture notes

NYC Marathon Has 45,344 Multimedia Story Possibilities

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In recent years, The New York Times has developed a multimedia obsession with the New York City Marathon.

In addition to the dozens of articles that appear in the newspaper and the online edition, NYTimes.com has featured:

Recently, I gave my undergraduate journalism students the list of links above and let them explore. I observed as they clicked, surfed, read, listened, and watched. Then we discussed the various storytelling formats and what lessons might be learned from the multimedia coverage of the marathon.

Here are a few interactive storytelling “take-aways” that emerged from our class discussion:

Winning Isn’t Everything
Of the 45,344 participants in the 2010 New York City Marathon, only a handful of professional men and women had a chance of winning. While it is amazing to watch someone cover 26.2 miles in a just over two hours, every runner has her or his own experience, motivation, and fan base. “Who won?” isn’t the only – or most compelling – story.

Consider the Angles
A marathon is a sports and human interest story. But as The New York Times demonstrates, it can be pursued in dozens of ways, including as a transportation, religion, immigration, or a science story.

Participatory Events Call for Participatory Coverage
At a marathon, everyone is involved – runners run, spectators cheer, and volunteers hand out water – so it makes sense that news coverage of an event would invite the audience to participate online as well.

Give the Online Audience a Front Row View
My students gravitated to one multimedia feature in particular: the Faces of the Finish slide shows.

In 2009, The New York Times photographed more than 400 runners as they crossed the finish line.

In 2010, the Times repeated the idea, this time with post-race portraits.

My students found this presentation the most intimate, vivid, and compelling. They felt like they were experiencing the event firsthand. “I could sit and look at this all day,” one student said.

Web Site Traffic Is Only One Measure of Success
After the class discussion, I contacted Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor at The New York Times, to ask if all of the effort pays off.

“Why do it?” DeVigal wrote in an email. “Because I think its compelling visual journalism. The audience response has been positive. And I’m not sure about the traffic on this particular package. Luckily we’re not hung up on metrics. We don’t ignore them, mind you. But it’s not a reason not to try out a specific piece of compelling journalism.”

Multimedia Journalism Tutorials – Updated List

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Here is the list of online classes, instructional videos, and handouts that I am using in my multimedia reporting workshop (officially titled Online Journalism 2) at Rowan University this fall.

Tutorial 1: Finding a Good Story and Telling It
Listen to This American Life’s “Rest Stop Episode”
Watch Ira Glass talk about the elements of storytelling on YouTube (Parts 1-4)
Part 1 – The Building Blocks of a Story
Part 2 – On Finding Great Stories
Part 3 – On Good Taste
Part 4 – Two Common Pitfalls

Tutorial 2: Reporting Across Platforms (NewsU course)

Tutorial 3: Audio Interviews
Read Interviewing 101: A quick and dirty guide to getting the scoop (CLP)
Read Audio 101: A quick and dirty guide to recording your story (CLP)
Read Gathering Audio by Brian Storm (MediaStorm)

Tutorial 4: Telling Stories with Sound (NewsU course)

Tutorial 5: Audio Editing
Watch “How to Convert Audio Files Using Switch”

Garage Band (Mac)
Watch video overview  Garage Band Basics for Journalists
Then read though GarageBand Podcast Setup and Overview for detailed instructions.

Audacity (PC and Mac)
Watch video overview Audacity Basics for Journalists
Superfast Guide to Audio Editing (pdf) – includes instructions for installing Audacity on your home computer. (Mindy McAdams)
Editing Audio with Audacity (Part 2) (pdf) – more detailed instructions (Mindy McAdams)
How to Use Audacity (Knight Digital Media Center)

Tutorial 6: Photo 101 and Photoshop 101
Read Photojournalism 101: A quick and dirty guide to photographing your story (CLP) and watch How to Resize and Save Photos for the Web

Tutorial 7: Language of the Image (NewsU course)

Tutorial 8: Soundslides How To
Watch A Quick Tour of Soundslides
If you have questions, review How to Use Soundslides (Knight Digital Media Center)

Tutorial 9: How to Improve Your Audio Slide Shows
Read How to Make Your Audio Slide Shows Better by Colin Mulvany
Read Mark Luckie’s Five Common Photo Slide Show Mistakes
Read Mindy McAdam’s Tell a Good Story with Images and Sound
Read Mindy McAdam’s Do’s and Don’ts for Slide Shows

Tutorial 10: How to Ebed a Soundslides Slide Show on WordPress

Tutorial 11: Video Storytelling for the Web (NewsU course)

Tutorial 12: iMovie
iMovie for Journalists (Knight Digital Media Center)
iMovie 09 Tutorials (Apple)

Journalism Syllabus Exchange

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Poynter’s News University and the Broadcast Education Association are trying to create the world’s largest online database of journalism and communication teaching materials. The project launched a few weeks ago and currently contains about 100 resources.

The syllabus exchange works on a point system. For every resource submitted (i.e., syllabus, class exercise, assignment, handout, case study or rubric) a teacher can download two teaching materials. Everything is tagged and searchable by the professor’s name, school, type of course, and education level.

I signed up for a NewsU account and uploaded my syllabi for this semester. It took about 24 hours for NewsU to accept my submissions and award points to my account. Then I downloaded a few  interactive storytelling materials from professors at SMU, San Francisco State, and the Medill School of Journalism. Of course, many journalism professors have been informally sharing teaching materials online for years, but it is helpful to have a concentration of resources.

Here is a link to the syllabus exchange page -  https://www.newsu.org/tools/syllabus-exchange

But don’t use your points to download my materials. If you are interested, here is what I’m doing this fall semester at Rowan University.

Online Journalism I
-Online Journalism I syllabus (pdf)
-Link to Online Journalism I class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule, student work and lecture notes

Online Journalism 2
-Online Journalism II syllabus (pdf)
-Link to the Online Journalism II class blog with assignments, tutorials, schedule and lecture notes

A Few Lessons Learned from Teaching Online Journalism

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I recently finished my second year of teaching online journalism to undergraduate students. For me, that means that I have reached a point where I am not perpetually scrambling to prepare for the next class period and have an occasional moment to reflect on how and when some “education” might be taking place.

As I shift to my summer schedule, I wanted to take note of a few general lessons I’ve learned. Most of these are things I came to through trial-and-error, often with instruction from my students.

Lecturing is not the best way to teach that “news is a conversation”
Higher education and journalism are biased toward a “one-to-many” mode of communication; the web is not. In order to understand how journalism works in a digital age, a course on interactive news has to be participatory, conversational and collaborative. In my experience, this can also mean unpredictable and occasionally chaotic, but it is a lot more fun than lecturing everyday.

Follow smart people
My blog roll (see “Sites I Like and Use” on the sidebar) and my Twitter account are my key sources of information on what is happening in the profession and in teaching. If I don’t know something, I turn to those who do.

Don’t assume students are active web users
There is a difference between “passive” and “active” web users. Despite growing up with the Internet, some of my students navigate the web like they watch TV; they surf and consume. Or they only know how to participate within a defined structure like Facebook.

Don’t skimp on HTML and CSS
An assignment to build a simple web page can fill my email box with complaints. Then at the end of the semester, students say they want to learn more coding. So each semester, I give them more.

Raw audio interviews are gold
At the suggestion of veteran online journalism professor Mindy McAdams, I now require students turn in unedited audio recordings of interviews. They take a time to review, but they provide invaluable insight into a student’s interviewing and reporting techniques. I can hear the leading questions, the lack of a follow-up question, or the student reporter who does not allow the subject enough time to tell the real story. I can also tell if the student is interviewing a friend or relative.

Online tutorials are useful, but need follow-up
I use “how-to” online tutorials to free up class time and allow students to learn at their own pace. However, I’ve found that students will rush through them — or skip them entirely — unless they are followed up with some kind of review or assessment.

Experiment first, become an expert later
I used to spend a lot of time explaining a new piece of equipment or software before giving assignments. Now I cover a few basics and get students using it as soon as possible. I cover the more advanced techniques after they have some experience practicing.

The audience can be the best editor
I require that my students publish their work for an online audience (see a previous post It’s Not About the Blog). Despite the potential risks of this practice — like making mistakes in a public forum or having to endure spam and trolls — an online audience can provide a level of feedback that I cannot. Last semester, a student created an interactive map of all of the schools in his town. Eight minutes after it was published online, a reader contacted the student to say one school was missing.

Allow students to pursue a passion
I often ask students to report on subjects that they are passionate about. Some students respond, “I don’t have any passions.” I tell them to use my class as an excuse to find that new passion.  Then, over the course of the semester, I urge students to cover the topic as a “beat,” developing story ideas, cultivating sources, and digging deeper into the subject. It is satisfying to watch a student turn a hobby into an area of expertise. And reporters in the field routinely seek out students who have built up an online portfolio of work on a specific subject and quote them as sources.

Push beyond “write what you know”
While I allow students to write about things that interest them, I also require students to go places and cover subjects that do not interest them. I have found that it is essential to give very specific requirements (i.e. no quotes from anyone 17-25 years old) to get students to move out of their comfort zones.

Expect resistance to convergence
I have instituted convergence projects which require my online journalism students to work alongside broadcast journalism and photojournalism students. I underestimated how intensely students can identify with their particular specializations and can resent having to work with “those TV people.”

Storytelling is hard work
I can teach someone to edit an audio clip, crop a photo or compress a video. Or they can Google it and teach themselves. Teaching students to recognize, report and tell a compelling story is a real challenge, but that seems like a central goal of journalism education.

Students don’t remember PowerPoint presentations
I have now been teaching long enough to get an occasional “thank you” e-mail or note from a former student. While they often mention the content of my courses and how it helped in grad school or on the job, it is clear that interactions and conversations outside of the classroom are as meaningful — and often more significant — than the information I try to convey in the classroom.

Teaching Audio Slide Shows and Soundslides

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The audio slide show – a multimedia piece that combines audio and still photos – is a standard format in most newsrooms and journalism classrooms. And Soundslides, a program created by Joe Weiss, is the standard program used to create them.

Soundslides is so easy to use that it does not require hours of step-by-step tutorials. However, after a few semesters of teaching audio slide shows, I have collected a list of resources that I have found helpful for introducing and troubleshooting the process for beginners.

Examples of Inspiring Audio Slide Shows

For examples of great audio slide shows, I often turn to Interactive Narratives, a clearinghouse for the best of online visual storytelling. The audio slide show can also be a powerful way to profile individuals. For examples of audio slide show profiles, I like the New York Times series One in 8 Million and the Los Angeles Times series pop.u.LA.tion.

When Is an Audio Slide Show the Best Format for a Story?

NewsUniversity has an online course called Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling. It aims to teach which stories are more suitable for multimedia.

To understand the power – and limits – of an audio slide show, read a Poynter interview with Sounslides creator Joe Weiss. He discusses the potential and some common pitfalls of the format.

Also on the BBC’s College of Journalism blog, Kevin Marsh ponders the question: “Why would you choose a slide show when you could use video?”

How to Use Soundslides

The Soundslides user manual is the place to begin when teaching or trying the program for the first time.

Jeremy Rues has created a nice step-by-step Soundslides tutorial for the Knight Digital Media Center.

Here is a PowerPoint presentation I use to introduce audio slide shows and SoundSlides in the classroom.

Here is the step-by-step instructions I give students for creating an audio slideshow in SoundSlides and coverting it to video file so it can be posted on a blog (in .pdf format).

Also I’ve created a screencast video on how to embed a Soundslides slide show on a self-hosted WordPress blog. This is one of the most common questions I get from students, especially after my class has ended and they are doing their own independent projects.

Tips for Creating a Better Audio Slide Show

To avoid common mistakes, read the post How to Make Your Audio Slide Shows Better by Colin Mulvany.

Mark Luckie lists Five Common Photo Slide Show Mistakes.

Mindy McAdams has two great blog posts on the subject: Tell a Good Story with Images and Sound and Do’s and Don’ts for Slide Shows.

Soundslides Tools

On the Soundslides forum, you can read through questions and issues others have encountered and post your own questions. (I posted a message about a bug last week, and I received a reply within a few hours.)

Soundslides Embed Utility – This tool allows you to post your published slide shows to a blog, or embed them in other pages.

Soundslides Video Converter – This tool converts audio slide shows into an mp4 video file. That way they can placed on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, embedded on free WordPress.com blogs, or viewable on an iPod.