They bring sophisticated photo-editing and darkroom effects within the range of the complete novice.
I’ve been playing around with a range of photo-editing apps recently, and I’m impressed with what you can do in terms of creating photo panoramas, adding effects, frames and combining individual photos in a clean and elegant picture layout or grid.
It means you can create some very professional effects without any photographic knowledge at all – apart from having an eye for a good shot. After that the apps take over, turning your snap into something that wouldn’t embarrass the pages of a glossy mag, let alone a web page
Not all the apps do all of these things, most go for one aspect of picture editing and publishing, so you can use them best in combination, as I'll demonstrate below.
Because I use an iPhone, and believe it’s the best phone for journalism, my list is slanted towards that phone, but some of the apps are available for Android as well, and if they aren’t I’ve tried to identify a reasonable alternative.
1 Autostitch
Autostitch automatically recognises matching images – that is, images where some of the same information is contained in them. So if you take a series of pictures that overlap by about a third, Autostitch turns them into a complete panorama, which it builds with no input from you.
Perfect when you’ve got a line up of people to shoot, or a panoramic landscape, or if you simply want to take several shots of part of the scene you wish to capture and have the app knit those elements together.
So you can use it simply to make up for the narrow lens angle achievable on the smartphone own lens
Here’s a simple panorama:
Here'a scene that wouldn’t fit in one frame
I've left the borders as they are, but Autostich has a cropping tool so you can tidy the image up if you like.
You can also get creative with Autostitch. You can trick it, by loading pictures that while covering the same scene, don’t all overlap and have key elements of the scene in different places:
For instance, there is only one stone pillar in the middle of this labyrinth, but because I shot about 15 pictures, not all of which overlap, several viewpoints combine and it looks like
there are several ghostly pillars
Likewise, there is only one statue of Elgar, and one rock obelisk, in this park in Malvern. But notice how the shops in the background ahve bene stitched perfectly, because this element of my photos had enough common data for Autostitch to do its job:
Likewise, there's only one cat, and he wasn't moving fast at all:
The next masterclass on Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide will be an introduction to data journalism. It'll be a complete beginner's guide to using data to create visualisations and discover stories, and will cover the most useful software for non-coders.
Below is an example. This is a map created in Socrata, froma list of locations.
This is sneak preview of Masterclass 16 on MMJ, which is the first in a series of loosely linked sessions about publishing platforms that will go live over the coming weeks. It'll be going live on Saturday November 13 here www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/masterclasses
This one is about creating smart phone apps without having any knowledge of coding, and in future masterclases we’ll also cover website building for non-coders, platforms for hyperlocal projects, data-driven journalism, and look at what html and other coding you should learn, if you’d like to progress as a creator of mobile and static platforms for your journalism.
I’ve chosen the subjects partly because they are a logical progression from what we’ve covered so far in the book version of MMJ, and its supporting website, and also to build on what we’ve done in some previous masterclasses – particularly MC 11 on going mobile.
I’ve also chosen them because the MMJ community has been asking for more on these topics, and on such related things as creating RSS feeds and the use of Yahoo Pipes as a data-combining device.
RSS feed creation is something we dealt with briefly in MC 11 but we look at it in a lot more depth here. Because, with the use of Yahoo Pipes you can create tightly defined information streams, built from numerous sources, and use them to populate your mobile or static site.
It’s getting easier all the time for non-coders to create smartphone apps. While developers are charging anything from $2-3 thousand dollars up to $10 or even $15 thousand, it is now possible for you to create a professional looking app, which aggregates content either from your static site or from a range of sources chosen by you, and which includes text, stills audio and video, and which is listed in the Apple iTunes and Android market stores.
You can bring all your social presences together: your news feed if you have one, your blog, you Youtube channel, Twitter feed, Audioboo and the rest
I’ve chosen one from a handful of software companies that I think get us as close as we currently can to creating a truly professional multimedia smartphone app on our own.
It’s called iSites, and while it’s not yet perfect, and it will cost you from $9.99 a month to publish with it, it seems to me to show the way forward.
I’ve had some glitches with it, but I’ve been impressed at how the guys there respond to problems raised and work to iron out bugs.
It means it’s perfectly possible for you as an individual, or for a team on a journalism course or who are creating a hyperlocal or other project, to amalgamate their multimedia content in one professional app.
You’ll also find information here on a number of other outfits that let you build your own app.
So, I hope you find this masterclass helpful. If there are questions it doesn’t answer, please get in touch. You can use any of the comment buttons on the MMJ site, or go on Twitter, Facebook, the blog or any of the other platforms you’ll find lined to on the site.
This is Masterclass 16 on MMJ and it’s the first in a series of loosely linked sessions about publishing platforms that will go live over the coming weeks.
This one is about creating smart phone apps without having any knowledge of coding, and in future masterclases we’ll also cover website building for non-coders, platforms for hyperlocal projects, data-driven journalism and look at what html and other coding you should learn, if you’d like to progress as a creator of mobile and static platforms for your journalism.
I’ve chosen the subjects partly because they are a logical progression of what we’ve covered so far in the book version of MMJ, and its supporting website, and also to build on what we’ve done in some previous masterclasses – particularly MC 11 on going mobile.
I’ve also chosen them because the MMJ community has been asking for more on these topics, and on such related things as creating RSS feeds and the use of Yahoo Pipes as a data-combinig device.
RSS feed creation is something we dealt with briefly in MC 11 but we look at it in a lot more depth here. Because, with the use of Yahoo Pipes you can create tightly defined information streams, built from numerous sources and use them to populate your mobile or static site.
It’s getting easier all the time for non-coders to create smartphone apps. While developers are charging anything from $2-3thousand dollars up to $10 or even $15 thousand, it is now possible for you to create a professional looking app, which aggregates content either from your static site or from a range of sources chosen by you, and which includes text, stills audio and video, and which is listed in the Apple iTunes and Android market stores.
You can bring all your social presences together: your news feed if you have one, your blog, you Youtube channel, Twitter feed, Audioboo and the rest
I’ve chosen one from a handful of software companies that I think get us as close as we currently can to creating a truly professional multimedia smartphone app on our own.
It’s called iSites, and while it’s not yet perfect, and it will cost you $9 a month minimum to publish with it, it seems to me to show the way forward.
I’ve had some glitches with it, but I’ve been impressed at how the guys there respond to problems raised and work to iron out bugs.
It means it’s perfectly possible for you as an individual, or for a team on a journalism course or who are creating a hyperlocal or other project, to amalgamate their multimedia content in one professional app.
You’ll also find information here on a number of other outfits that let you build your own app.
So, I hope you find this masterclass helpful. If there are questions it doesn’t answer, please get in touch. You can use any of the comment buttons on the MMJ site, or go on Twitter, Facebook, the blog or any of the other platforms you’ll find lined to on the site.
Yoodoo is a free, interactive learning website that takes you through the whole process of deciding what your business should be, testing and refining your concept.
They do it with short videos and quizzes, taking you through 40 steps to hone your ideas. It’s an impressive free programme that gives you all the material you’d normally expect to pay for in a business manual or ebook.
You could use it to go through the steps that entrepreneurial journalism students at City University New York complete as they begin a business (details here) but while Cuny is about starting the business, Yoodoo goes further along the path and looks at running it as well.
In addition to identifying your product or service and finding your customers, it deals with the nitty gritty of budgeting, sales, marketing, accounting, costs and break-even, Vat, employment law, finding offices and much more.
I’ve taken the course. Here’s a video taster of what they put me through, in a segment about web marketing, and how I got on.
Working on your elevator pitch
You'll find a full outline of how to create that all-important elevator pitch, and your own journalism business, in Masterclass 12 of Multimedia journalism: A Practical Guide here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/711
Gary Wright is group editor of Kos Media, which runs a chain of local papers and allied multimedia websites in Kent.
They are free, hyperlocal, incorporate multimedia and citizen journalism.
The video covers Gary’s advice on how to get a job on a local paper. His main points are summarised below it
Get a feel for storytelling
Read as widely as you can, see how it’s done.
“Get a feel for the way people write and the way they present their stories.” Get qualified
"It’s a tough world, the more qualifications you have the better armed you are to get a job."
“Any employer is going to look for as many of the skills you are going to need right from the outset.” What kind of course? Three year, postgrad, fast-track?
It depends on you, although three years might be too long
But the best practice you get will be doing the job.
“The main thing is to get those basic skills and understand what you need.”
NCTJ pre-entry course is the most common qualification he sees.
"It’s behind in some areas such as sound and an understanding of video on the web.” The skills you need
Storytelling in text, stills, video and audio.
“Any newspaper will expect you to be able to take pictures, to shoot video and to tell your story in a variety of media.” What local papers offer the trainee journalist: Find the full Masterclass here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/569
'In minutes' means without having to use any code, redesign it, create a new version or anything else.
There are free platforms that can automatically convert your existing site into a version that works very effectively on mobile phones. All you need is a site with a feed url.
You have to keep things very simple. I took the branding on my website and accompanying blog, and adapted it, keeping the background, typeface and colour palette in line with them both.
You also choose the colours for your header, text, links and so on.
A very similar mobile builder, http://oviappwizard.com, also allows you to create a customised logo that will appear as a navigation button you can load into your mobile’s opening screen. (More on Ovi below)
Mippin gives you a generic one, but you do get to put your mobile site’s title beneath it
Publicise
Next step is to set your url. It comes in this form www..mippin.com/yoursitename.
You can add a button, which takes you to this mobile version, to your website, either by clicking on a button, for Typepad or Blogger, or by cutting and pasting a bit of code.
Things Mippin doesn't like
Pictures can confuse it, so keep them to a minimim, adn don't try running text aroudn them. The four images I originally had in this post all bunxched together above the text in the mobile version.
Mippin also won't replicte a link embedded in text, so you need to leave the full url visible in your text.
A bit of background
The first mobiliser platform I found was Ovi, which is run by Nokia and designed to create mobile sites for access from Nokia phones. It was simple to use but, two days later, I was still waiting for it to go through the pre-publication approval process and, because I wasn’t sure that the site I’d created could be viewed on phones not made by Nokia, I looked around for an alternative.
When I tried to register at Mippin it said I already was, and when I tried the same log-on details I’d set up fror Ovi, I found the mobile site I’d created. So I went ahead and published it on Mippin, just redesigning the logo which I discovered was not easily readable. That has yet to update at the tiem of writing.
Maybe Ovi will publish me too. I’ll update this if they do.
This is a tale of two Andy Bulls. One is an Australian pop star, the other is me. Pop star Andy makes his music available for download on the internet. That's him on the left. I don't look much like him. I suppose I might look something like his dad.
He is big on social media, with a Facebook page, a MySpace one and a Twitter account. Fortunately I got to the Twitter username andybull before he did, which means that, on occasion, I get a tweet like this: "OMG I just bought your new album." Or:
My namesake has a new CD out, and he promotes it on social networks. I don’t know how much he expects to make from sales of his recorded music, but if he is like the average performer, it is not going to be the main part of his income. It’s much more likely that live performance earns pop star Andy his money.
Because the economics of the music industry have shifted. Once you toured at a loss to promote your records, which you made your money on. Now you pretty much give your music away in order to market your live performances.
In the music industry, they know that paywalls are exceedingly leaky things. Something maybe Mr Murdoch has yet to discover.
So what can journalists learn from the music industry? Can we do live performances?
I suspect most journalists’ immediate response will be no, obviously not. But let’s think about it. Because it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds.
Let’s take B2B as a sector. It’s long been part of the model to have live events – from conferences and conventions to exhibitions and awards ceremonies. Indeed, there are titles where the print publication makes little, but the events connected to its brand name are comfortably profitable.
But is there more that can be done with this model? I ask because the subject came up twice last week when I was interviewing two B2B practitioners for my project: Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide.
One publishes business titles and spoke of how readers were very keen on face-to-face events at which they could meet industry movers and shakers, and that his titles were facilitating that as part of their business model.
Another, serving the drinks industry, said that his title had a club, limited to 200 prominent readers, who met quarterly to learn about the latest techniques for improving their businesses.
So it seems that, certainly in B2B, the face-to-face model can work. I suspect that brighter minds than mine will find many ways to make it work much more widely.
But how about consumer and general news media? Part of the Murdoch paywall initiative is a club for Times and Sunday Times readers which gives them benefits. Alongside the priority tickets and exclusive openings there are events featuring high profile journalists.
I’m not sure that would sway me to cough up, but let’s not knock it until they’ve tried it.
My MMJ project follows the face-to-face model. It’s a book, website and community. I’d like the book to sell some copies, and you need an access code found inside the shrink-wrapped book to get onto most of the accompanying website, and contribute to the community. However, it’s obviously going to be hard to keep non-buyers out.
So, while I hope this project will earn me something, I don’t expect it to pay the rent.
What pays the rent is my multimedia journalism training business. So I also want the MMJ project to market that. Like pop star Andy I make most of my income from these face-to-face sessions.
So I’d suggest that any journalist, any publisher, ought to ponder the face-time conundrum and see if it can work for them.
Entrepreneurialism is in the air, with three events – two UK and one transatlantic – focusing on the subject in the past few days.
So I thought I’d draw together what is being done, look at the common threads in the discussion, and in the process make a stab at drawing together a template for what those who teach/train journalists should be equipping them to do.
First, what is entrepreneurialism?
It’s equipping journalism students and, indeed, working journalists, to spot a business opportunity, and then create a business, that will enable them to make their journalism pay.
Why is it necessary?
Because jobs in established media companies are scarce and getting scarcer. I blogged recently about where I think the jobs will be in 2010, but for increasing numbers of journalists, if you want to practise your craft, you’ll have to create a business that enables you to do so.
What should be taught?
Jeff Jarvis of Cuny, the CityUniversity of New York , organised a transatlantic conversation about that this week. You can listen to the conference call between teachers in the UK and US here, and find the source material to what I summarise belowhere
At Cuny they set out to tackle the fact that journalists didn’t understand their own business by establishing a course in which students must create a business plan for a sustainable (which they define as profitable) journalistic enterprise. Cuny won grants of $100k to give as seed money to the best of the ideas students come up with, as decided by a jury of experts.
Here’s what students learn:
How to create a plan for a sustainable (profitable) journalism business
That plan includes
·An elevator pitch – how to sell the idea briefly and effectively
·A needs statement – why does the world need this business?
·Market research and analysis – deciding who their customers are, and talking to them about the idea
·Competitive analysis – who do you have to beat?
·Product plan – what is it?
·Revenue plan – how’s it going to make money?
·Distribution/marketing plan – how will people discover it?
·Operations plan – how will it operate? What will that cost?
·Launch plan – what are the phases and milestones?
Here are some of the business ideas currently being developed
1 Making an iphone app around sports
2 Infrastructure for the assignment of news assignments to journalists, bloggers and students
3 Distributing radio shows in the student’s home state in Africa over the phone as phone calls
5 Serving the Ugandan diaspora in the US and the UK
6 A platform for educators to share their curriculum and news about science
Jeff Jarvis’s view is that what he characterises as the big old dumb media company is not going to be replaced by some big new smart media company. Rather, its going to be replaced “by an ecosystem of a couple of hundred individual players who operate under motivations and means and business models. That’s the world our students are going in to.
“There will be jobs in established media but students also need the means to start their own jobs
“So much is changing, we don’t know how journalism will look as a career in 10 years time – even five years. But our hunch is that there will be a demand for journalism, for our traditional skills – which is why we still teach them.
“But we need to be prepared to meet the type of demand that there is for journalists and journalism in the future, and the old model is only going to be one way, and maybe not the main way, of making a living as a journalist.”
Academic journalism courses must be dovetailed with media companies
Cuny also ties in with media companies, and that seems to me to be key.
Indeed, any journalism course that is not allied with a publisher – of a local or national news website, newspaper or B2B or consumer magazine is going to look increasingly cut off from the real work of journalism.
Specifically, at Cuny, says Jarvis: “We just added a course in hyperlocal built around running The New York Times blog, The Local, in Brooklyn. We are working with The Times and others to also tackle hyperlocal advertising opportunities and challenges (funded by the Carnegie Corporation).”
One contributor to Jeff Jarvis’s conference call was George Brock, professor of journalism at CityUniversity in London, who also gave the opening address at the news:rewired event organised by Journalism.co.uk. His contribution to the call was refreshingly honest: “I wish I could say that we have flourishing courses here at City on entrepreneurial journalism, with new business models and so on. But we don't, yet.
“Our magazine course does require students to shape and present a new business idea which then gets taken apart by experts and by the class. ...But this kind of exercise is not yet general for our 600-plus graduates and undergraduates and I'm keen to spread this sort of learning so that it reaches all our students and strengthens their hand in the years ahead.
“Two dimensions which I think are important: (1) sustainability and (2) the chemistry of teamwork in a small outfit.
“1) In almost anything to do with entrepreneurial activity, there's a huge concentration on the elevator pitch and preparing for the mauling from the audience. TV shows like Dragon's Den (apologies to the US - this is a massively popular British TV show featuring a jury of hard-bitten business gurus chewing, and mostly spitting out, new business ideas) only reinforce this. A business idea for sustaining a new form of journalism is not about making a quick killing: it needs legs, strength to survive imitation by new competitors, the ability to create a platform which lasts.
“2) On an assumption that was perfectly good in the past, many journalism courses assume that their students will join large journalism outfits of several hundred – if not thousands – of people. This is a particular kind of working culture and jobs in them tend to be relatively specialised. Working in teams of, say, less than 10, is a different business and requires a degree of flexibility and skills of collaboration which are worth drawing attention to.
“My hunch is that the very best way to teach this is in experimental local news sites working on the ground in central London, just north of the financial district where we're located. At the moment, our students on all platforms make their own papers/magazines/programmes/blogs from that local material but for internal consumption. If we could find a way to do that while helping experiments in local news in real time, the enterpreneurial aspects would be a natural part of the experience.”
I imagine all journalism courses get students to create a publication – print online or both as part of their studies – but very few insist that this be a viable business that will attract readers and advertisers and create the revenue to pay journalists. In future they should.
Some are working towards that.
Goldsmith’s College MA students created an online magazine called EastLondonLines, designed to serve the disparate London boroughs that will be linked when the East London overground railway reopens in a massively extended form later this year.
NewcastleUniversity is introducing business and entrepreneurial training to a number of disciplines, including journalism, and has twinned with the BBC and PAto “combine first-rate scholarship, and vocational training in multi-media journalism in a real-world commercial publishing environment.”
Entrepreneurialism isn’t just for students
The NUJ’s Making Journalism Pay conference was filled with examples of journalists who have – often out of necessity – become entrepreneurs.
There are two detailed reports on the conference
here and here. Below is my summary of entrepreneurial ideas that have worked.
Niche business news services that work
The conference heard from the founders of two business news services that took a lot of cash and promotion to establish but which are now profitable.
One was former Yorkshire Post business editor David Parkin who in 2007 set up Thebusinessdesk.com. It employs seven journalists in Leeds and Manchester covering business news for the north of England
Daniel Johnston is the founder of indusdelta.co.uk a niche news, analysis and community website set up in 2007 for the welfare to work industry. It sustains itself through advertising.
Making local media pay
Manchester confidential is a news and entertainment site for the city that is confident enough in its performance to plan to charge for content.
Eric Gordon, founding editor of Camden New Journal, an independent London paper launched in 1982, runs a newspaper with a £2m turnover and a staff of 30. It operates on a small net profit which he believes a larger, more commercially minded owner would not accept, meaning closure.
He told the conference: “Even now, despite the slump, we’re getting by.
“It’s so important to look at the market – and whether you’re going to get advertisers.”
New markets for your skills
If traditional media companies can’t or won’t pay you to do what you do well, you need to find someone who will.
Gavid MacFadyean, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, said 75% of investigative journalism is now carried out by foundations or NGOs.
Blogging
Paul Staines runs the 2m-page-views-per-month political blog Guido Fawkes.
And is a founder of MessageSpace.co.uk – an advertising network that represents 40-odd political websites. He told the conferencethat the single highest paid blogger on MessageSpace has sales on average of £3,872 per month.
The top 10% of bloggers had monthly sales averaging £2,861 in the fourth quarter of 2008 – and that you can add on perhaps 30 per cent to those numbers now.
Staines also makes money selling stories to newspapers, from T-shirt sales and appearances. He can get £20,000 from a newspaper for a political scandal story.
“The thought that a rival newspaper is going to get it drives them mad and they pay up for that reason.
“I have achieved the Marxist ideal. I own the means of production and distribution. I have job security, I can’t be fired and do much better than many journalists.”
Dominic Ponsford says: “When it comes to niche business and local media I think we are going to see ever more small web-based start-ups taking a slice of the pie.”
He told the conference how his title, Press Gazette, which has had a troubled recent history under a variety of owners, is made to pay:
Reach a mass audience online
Reach an elite audience in print
Attract people to linked events
I suppose its fair to say that, as journalists have only had to be entrepreneurial in the past few years, it's no surprise not many are much good at it right now. But that will change. It has to change if journalists are to be equipped to survive.
So here’s a thing. Many, many people now have the means to publish their text, video, audio and still images. And yet journalism has become one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century.
So, while the journalistic tools are now available to the many, professional journalists are drawn from the ranks of the affluent, well-connected, well-educated few.
Why?
The debate over the causes of the increasingly elitist nature of journalism has been rumbling on all week. It was sparked by an all-party report, Unleashing Aspiration, which revealed that social mobility in Britain has gone into reverse.
The underlying reason for journalism becoming a middle class profession is that the industry handed training over to academia.
Over a generation, the traditional pattern of school-leavers entering journalism via indentured training (apprenticeships weighted towards on-the-job experience) was replaced with a default model of an entrant to journalism having a first or second degree in the subject.
Roy Greenslade has reflected on how, when he joined his first local paper, staff from cleaner to editor were working class. Today, he says: “We have reached a position in which the working class do not even consider ‘the media’ as a career possibility.”
What got lost in this transition is sight of the fact that journalism is not a profession, it is a craft. You don’t have to be a genius to be good at it. You don’t have to be someone who thrives in an academic environment to write a sound, compelling news story, cover an event, review a book or movie.
Someone with an Oxbridge first might become a brilliant journalist, but they might just as easily be a lousy one. Likewise, a kid from a sink estate with a mediocre academic record could be a very bad journalist – or they might become a great one.
The only meaningful distinction in journalism is between those who can do it, and those who can’t. And academic performance is not a reliable indicator of that.
So what’s the solution? Unleashing Aspiration says universities must do more to end elitism by admitting thousands more students from poorer backgrounds.
Another proposal is to pay interns, so you don’t need to be rich enough to work for free to get on the first rung of the journalistic ladder.
Dominic Ponsford of Press Gazette has some practical advice. Instead of a City MA at £7,000, he says, go for an NCTJ fast track at £900 as a much more cost-effective way of training.
All good, but to my mind the real solution lies with journalists themselves: specifically those who hire other journalists. They must hire on the basis of demonstrable ability as much as, if not more than, academic prowess.
Let’s put this into the wider context: young people don’t read newspapers any more, nor do they watch or rate TV news. They do use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the rest. They do, in an unschooled way, create journalism which is popular with their peers.
If we can’t attract these people into formal journalism, formal journalism will become increasingly marginalised.
So here’s what has to happen: journalists who hire, training organisations and universities running journalism and media course need to attract those who show a relish and a talent for the multimedia publishing opportunities that are open to them. They should worry much less about a potential student’s academic background.
Teach these people well and we’ll protect and reinvigorate mainstream journalism. Fail, and journalism fails.
The Sector Skills Council for the Audio Visual Industries
There’s been a lot of discussion this week of the skills an online journalist needs.
The debate was begun here by Renee Barnes on the News Frontier blog.
Her starting-point list of requirements were:
Evidence of blogging and interaction with a wide range of blogs
An understanding and active use of social media (Twitter, RSS, social bookmarking etc.)
The ability to tell an engaging story using still images and audio (audio slideshow – see my previous post for great examples)
Ability to shoot, edit and tell stories using video
Basic ability to create interactive story elements using Adobe Flash
Ability to edit audio and produce podcasts
Ability to file from the field breaking news
Ability to moderate online discussion
Her initial thoughts were picked up my Mindy McAdams here
She said: "My ranking would be 3, 2, 7, 6, 1, 8, 4, 5."
Which would work out as:
1.The ability to tell an engaging story using still images and audio (audio slideshow)
2.An understanding and active use of social media (Twitter, RSS, social bookmarking etc.)
3.Ability to file from the field breaking news
4.Ability to edit audio and produce podcasts
5.Evidence of blogging and interaction with a wide range of blogs
6.Ability to moderate online discussion
7.Ability to shoot, edit and tell stories using video
8.Basic ability to create interactive story elements using Adobe Flash
Mindy explains: “I think that without the ability to [tell an engaging story using still images and audio] well, the rest just falls by the wayside.
“One skill I would definitely add, for a new ninth item, is interviewing.”
Mindy got this comment, which I agree with, from Craig : “I’m surprised to see Flash included, but not a basically ability or understanding of how web pages and sites are constructed.”
Mindy picks up on several other comments about the need to understand how websites work: “I think they are correct in saying there is a missing skill point, or numeral, in Barnes’s list. That point is generally one about broad, basic familiarity with the fundamentals of web production. How is a web page constructed, how does a database drive a site, how are photos optimised, and how is non-text content embedded? If you don’t understand these fundamentals, you’re borderline illiterate as far as producing online content goes.”
Renee Barnes says, in response to some comments that she has missed out on the essentials, that she is thinking of additional skills for online journalists and is not considering the fundamental skills of all journalists.
Which brings me to a very good post from the Journalistics blog that itemises 16 of those essentials. In my opinion 1-13 are essential, 14 I disagree with (see below) and the other two are bolt-ons.
You can find them here in full, with the justifications for including them. I’ll just give the highlights:
1. Name your sources whenever possible
2. Protect your sources when that is necessary
3. Be objective [news]journalism should be void of opinion.
4. Offer balance get information from all sides.
5. Avoid conflicts of interest don’t write about something because you like it. This works in the blogosphere, but not for traditional journalism.
6. Don’t censor don’t leave a company out of a report because you don’t like their PR rep.
7. Get it right better to be accurate than first.
8. Don’t plagiarise
9. Report the facts there’s no room for guesswork in journalism. If you don’t know the answer, find it.
10. Don’t be nasty you’ve got influence, don’t abuse it.
11. Don’t believe everything if it’s your byline, it’s your job to fact check.
12. Keep good records
13. Don’t write in a stream of consciousness - if you’re writing news, use the Inverted Pyramid.
14. Find your voice (he’s wrong here. News has no voice, it’s stylistically anonymous. Features have a voice.)
15. Never stop learning you can always improve …take part in new courses …pick up new skills. Your future employment depends on it.
16. Have fun
So, are trainee journalists being prepared for both skill sets? Well, in the UK, we can ask an outfit conveniently called Skillset
“Almost three-quarters of employers (71 percent) think there is a skills gap among graduates entering journalism. And said: "The main traditional skills gaps reported are: finding own stories, use of language, writing, media law, shorthand and newsgathering. In particular, the standard of written English among new entrants was flagged both in the survey and interviews as a major cause for concern.
" The main new skills gaps reported are: video skills, writing for search engine optimisation, writing for multi platforms (24-hour rolling news), assembling news bulletins and audio/video packages, using the Freedom of Information Act, and prioritising ways to tell a story.
"Voice coaching is a particular skills gap within television and radio, while within the magazine sector, new skills such as user-generated content, podcasts and blogging feature strongly."
Come the next academic year the Skillset-approved Joint Journalism Training Council will have accredited courses that provide the range of skills required for a modern journalist
Their latest published list of course requirements looks like this:
Basic IT and internet skills – competences in keyboard skills and internet use for data searching and communication, blogging or other web-based narrative construction, basic specialist software
Basic online production techniques including sound and video recording and editing
Awareness of online sites – news platforms, social websites, basic search engines, brand extensions
Basic ability to write web text, articles, blogs, SMS and picture captions
Basic ability to write for audio and video
Ability to re-version and re-purpose, use links, moderate and manage user-generated content for different platforms, organisations and purposes
Appreciate the differences between professional journalism and citizen journalism or blogging, such as truth, accuracy, checking, public interest and responsibility
Understanding optimisation eg for search engines, archiving, key words and tags, embedded coding, watermarking, click-stream data, story rating on sites like YouTube
Understanding of how a multi-platform editorial team works including the generation of ideas, presentation, commissioning, angle selection and treatments, work-flows, deadlines and priorities.
Understanding of choices and decisions facing the different platforms including cross-media publications and 24-hour rolling news. How to manage your time to deliver on all those platforms, how to make the different angles for each platform stand out from each other and the competition.
Understanding of how to assemble news packages for the web and what makes for high quality visual images and audio in telling and illustrating a story.
Ensuring the compliance of stories and information for publication on the web with legal and regulatory requirements.
Understanding of basic web layout and design eg how to work in website templates, the principles and aesthetics of web page design and construction
Understanding the different needs of voice, reading and presentation skills for different platforms and audiences
Understanding of risk assessment, health and safety and hazardous assignments.
And finally, the commercial. My book/website/community, Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide is designed to cover that emerging syllabus, and also drill in the basics.
