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.

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.

Multimedia Standards, a University of Miami class project on multimedia journalism standards

John Temple blogs the MediaStorm Methodology Workshop (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) and post-workshop reflection Ten steps news organizations should take to embrace a multimedia future.

Archived Chat: How Do You Involve Students in Multimedia Rather Than Just Teach It? (Poynter)

How to Use Digital Story Telling in the Classroom (Edutopia)

Video Tutorials from University of Oklahoma’s Journalism School
-Tutorials for Adobe products (Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Illustrator, etc)
-Tutorials for Multimedia Journalism course
-Tutorials for Interactive Multimedia Design course

Handout on Multimedia Storytelling from Steve Buttry, Gazette Communications

Also Mark Luckie of 10000words.net has a book called “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook” due out in September.

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I read through my course evaluations from last semester and in addition to comments like “he’s long-winded, but nice enough,” a number of students gave high marks to the free Web tutorials I assigned in my online journalism classes. I was pleasantly surprised because I wasn’t sure how to measure their usefulness, and I had to create graded assignments to make the student actually do them.

But overall, students said they found the tutorials helpful, liked that they could learn at their own pace, and returned to them over and over again.

I found out about many of these tutorials from Mindy McAdams, who has written a great series of posts called a Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency on her blog. NewsU and the Knight Digital Media Center are also great resources.

So below is a list of tutorials I’ve used in my courses. They are all free and all aimed at beginners.

Any you would suggest?

Also this fall, I plan to create a series of video tutorials for my students and will post them here.

STORYTELLING
Five Steps of Multimedia Storytelling (NewsU)
Ira Glass of This American Life on the building blocks of good storytelling (25 minutes of YouTube videos)
Part 1: On the basics
Part 2: On finding a great story
Part 3: On taste
Part 4: On common pitfalls

DIPITY TIMELINE
How to Make a Timeline Using Dipity (Berkey-Gerard)

GOOGLE MAPS
11 Exercises to Learn How to Make a Google Map (Berkey-Gerard)

Google Map Video Tours:
Getting Started
Add a Place
Google Street View
Create a Map
Add Third Party Content
Create a Google Map profile

HTML and CSS
Beginner HTML Tutorial (HTML Dog)
Beginner CSS Tutorial (HTML Dog)

PHOTOGRAPHY
Language of the Image (NewsU)
Photoshop How-To for Online Photos (Mindy McAdams)

AUDIO
Telling Stories with Sound (NewsU)
Gathering Audio by Brian Storm (MediaStorm)
How to convert .wma, .wmv, or .mp3 files using Switch (Berkey-Gerard)
How to Use Garage Band (Knight Digital Media Center)
How to Use Audacity (Knight Digital Media Center)

SOUND SLIDES
Photoshop How To for Sound Slides (Mindy McAdams)
How to Use the Sound Slides (Knight Digital Media Center)

VIDEO
How to Use iMovie (Knight Digital Media Center)

MULTIMEDIA COLLAGE
How to Make a Multimedia Collage Using VuVox (VuVox)

Today, I stumbled upon a worthwhile  interview with Brian Storm, the president of MediaStorm, in Nieman Reports.

MediaStorm creates multimedia documentaries for news organizations like National Geographic, MSNBC, Slate and Reuters. They take on serious social issues like the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo,  families facing economic hardship in the rural Midwest, and posttraumatic stress of American soliders in Iraq.

Here are few unique things about MediaStorm’s approach:

• The Web site doesn’t have an editorial focus other than to do quality social documentary storytelling.

• Although the company’s roots are in traditional journalism, its focus is on “advocacy, not just information.”

• It’s clients also include NGOs (Council on Foreign Relations) and for-profit companies (Starbucks).

• The stories aren’t published on a set schedule or deadline, but when “a project is ready.”

• The features are long for the Web (20 minutes or more), but most people who start watching a segment finish it.

• They do not advertise  in traditional ways, but rely on word of mouth and social networking.

Here are a couple of sections of Melissa Ludtke’s interview with Brian Storm that I found especially compelling.

Brian Storm on the state of the news industry:

For years I’ve been saying it’s time for us to take journalism back. To take it out of the business development role and back into the world of why we got into journalism in the first place. We have to remember back to the time when we decided, “I want to be a journalist.” Why did we want to be a journalist? Did we wake up one day and say, “I want to make a pile of money?” I don’t think any of us did that. That’s not what drives us. We’re curious and want to learn about the world. It’s an incredible gift to enter into someone’s life and tell their story.

On digital access:

The crowd has access to these great digital cameras, to this incredible powerful publishing tool called the Web, and they have expanded the conversation. They have access to distribution that we, as professional journalists, have. This doesn’t make me fearful; it makes me excited. That’s democracy—to have more people, more input, and more access to different perspectives.

On the stories journalists should be doing:

Why are we, as professional journalists, allocating our resources for such daily, perishable stories? We should be allocating them for things that are in-depth, investigative and require the kind of expertise and professionalism that we have. We need to take a deep breath and remember all the things that we used to do, then reconsider given the new landscape and decide what is going to give us the most value over time. What is the role that we need to play? I don’t believe that is day-to-day, perishable content. I think we need to be more in-depth, more investigative, and more robust in what we do. I know that over time, that will actually pay off.

When we started the semester, most of the students had limited experience recording and editing audio. Most had not taken a photojournalism course. And it was my first time trying to teach students each step of creating an audio slide show: how to record an interview, gather natural and ambient sound, take photographs, and then edit it all into a coherent story.

I found One in 8 Million to be a great learning tool for all of us. It is a series of personal profiles presented as two-minute audio slide shows with photographs by Todd Heisler.

The subjects are characters, often with quirky jobs, backgrounds, and stories to tell. There is a profile of an urban taxidermist, a bus-depot barber, a mozzarella cheese maker, a singing waitress, and a maid who has cleaned up after four different mayors at Gracie Mansion.

The story index even gives the visual sense that the viewer is standing on a subway platform and the faces of the people appear in the subway car windows as it pulls into the station.

I did not plan out how I would use the material before the semester began. I stumbled upon a routine as we went along.

I often began class by shutting off the lights and showing the latest profile on a big projector screen. We would watch the profile and then discuss it for several minutes. Then we would watch it again and discuss it a bit more.

Then I would turn off the projector and we would just listen to the sound. We talked about why the producer might have put the sound of the cash register at that exact spot or why a specific anecdote had been included.

Then I muted the sound and we watched it again. I asked students to pay attention to the composition, as well as the content of the photographs. “Why did the photographer focus on a person’s hand or a religious icon?” we wondered. “Why were the images arranged in that specific order?”

This process usually took about 20 minutes.

Basically, we broke down the audio slide show into its smallest parts – and we tried to figure out how the producers put it all together to make a unified whole.

We spent a lot of class time learning the technical aspects of audio and photography — and how to convert the files into the proper format. One in 8 Million helped us the focus on the storytelling.

I also stuck with the series because I like how the stories are presented.

• The profiles are often of “everyday” people – a store owner, a guy with the cool sneakers, a teenage mom – that we routinely pass by on the way to cover a “real” news story.

• The subject herself tells the story. The audience doesn’t hear the reporter’s voice, narration, or questions. There is no moral or kicker at the end saying what it means.

• The person’s story is the story. There isn’t a news peg, just an interesting person with something to say.

The highlight of the experiment came near the end of the semester as the students scrambled to complete their audio slide shows. I arranged a live video chat (using Google chats, nothing fancy) with Joshua Brustein, an interactive producer at NYTimes.com. Josh answered student questions about the profiles he produced, how he found a specific person, and how he approached the interviews.

Here are two examples of Josh’s work: Paul Bockwaldt, who joined a predominantly gay rugby team to bond with his brother and Ra Ruiz, a former Christopher Street pier kid.

When Josh said he usually spent 10 hours collecting and editing audio for a two minute piece, the students were stunned. But they also seemed inspired that they were attempting to do similar work.