The Digital Reporter's Notebook

Mark Blaine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135950095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Powerful storytelling engages the senses, and today, there are more accessible digital tools available for telling multimedia stories than ever before. The Digital Reporter's Notebook teaches practical digital storytelling techniques that journalists can put into practice right away, using the technology they already have in their pockets. Mark Blaine demonstrates how to gather information and organize it into a successful multimedia story without losing sight of the essentials of good journalism.

These forty brief chapters provide a versatile toolkit for multimedia journalists, including activities and exercises to build a strong foundation in digital storytelling. Readers will also want to try the interactive app, which includes videos and animations that bring the concepts and ideas in the book to life.

Topics include:

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• Lighting & Framing

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• Collecting Sound

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• Scene Setting & Relevant Detail

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• Interview Techniques

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• Story Structure

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• File Management

The Digital Reporter's Notebook is ideal for online journalism courses and introductory reporting courses using a convergence approach.

1

The Digital Notebook

The digital notebook is a tool that you are probably already using. The principles that we’ll consider here assume that you have some kind of technology that captures images and records audio. It’s likely a phone but it may also be something more sophisticated. No matter. Using a notebook can be a starting point for developing good storytelling habits, whether you’re writing text stories or doing photo essays.

This book is about giving structure to those notes. It’s about where you stand and what you see rather than what a certain dial does or how many megapixels you have.

What makes for good habits? First you need to think about how you’ll organize things before you go out to gather information. How you structure your notes is important because they’ll be almost useless if you can’t find the information later. Be intentional about your information gathering. Avoid just capturing the things that catch your fancy and rather think about how those things fit into their environment. You’ll start to develop a structure for how you shoot, what kind of notes you write down and what kind of sound you collect. When you become consistent in the types of material you collect, gathering and organizing more complex information will get easier.

You’ll learn, for example, to hear the most useful things that a source tells you and let the non-essential stuff fall away. It takes a practiced ear to take efficient notes, but once you get the hang of how people talk, you’ll learn to pick and choose what you think you’ll need as you go.

The same is true for shooting pictures and recording video and audio. In the beginning, you’ll try to get everything, but you will likely get very little that’s useful because you haven’t focused on what you’ll need for the story.

You’ll also want to use your digital notebook for reflection. Review your notes or the sequence of images from a day. What do they tell you about your process? How long does it take you to find a groove? What do you consistently miss? Were you unnecessarily rushing a shot or talking over a source? When you understand where you’ve come up short, you’ll be in a much better position to smooth things out for the next time.

Accessible digital tools are transforming the way we tell stories. This book offers a process for using digital tools for gathering information and organizing it into a potential story. Digital tools give us the opportunity to reflect on the work we’re doing—listening to the interview, seeing the images as they’re shot. That listening and seeing will make you a better storyteller.

Using simple tools will help to strip away the distractions that a device can bring to you and to your sources. Fussing with knobs and dials, constant glances at the screen and too many floppy cables can completely overwhelm you and your source. Remember: the best stuff will come when you can appropriately focus on the work at hand and not worry about whether everything is plugged in or has batteries. Those concerns are important, but it’s also important to develop the real skills of collecting information before you add complexity with tools and devices.

Practice

Look at how you store your files, particularly images. What are your habits? Do you rely on date alone for organization or do you add information to photo sets that you’ve uploaded to your computer?

If you haven’t applied much organization to what you do, dip back into your old photos and pick a date. Think through the ways that you might want to search for those photos later by making a list of people and places. Give the set of images a name that would make sense to someone else trying to search your personal archive.

Look at those photos and try to see the patterns of what you shoot and why. What are you leaving out from a storytelling perspective? How would you add more information?

2

Why Do I Care?

What are the reasons that a reader would care about your story?

There’s story and there’s information. The first step is to seek quality, novel, and useful information. We are overloaded by information that’s mostly noise—your job is to organize, clarify, and add value. As you sift through everything you’ve collected, build your story on these values.

    Quality: The information is verifiable from multiple sources who have the authority to speak about the subject.

    Novelty: The information is new in some way to its intended audience.

    Usefulness: The information is useable by your audience.

Break this down into component parts—components, by the way, that you’ve spent much of this book reading about. Are the different pieces that you’ve collected contributing in the most effective way to reach these goals? Is the information best communicated with text, audio, or image, or a blend of two or three of those?

The second step is to assemble the story. Story is a more specific idea—it’s what you do when you assemble your information and make assumptions about how your reader will consume it.

The third step is to develop the story. You’ll pick and assemble information that will be engaging to your audience. The story promises a satisfying whole rather than a loose collection of facts. Story is where you can develop empathy for characters and connect anecdotes with context. This whole satisfies a reader’s need for understanding a topic, issue or person. It informs them about trends or historical significance. It makes sense of what’s going on around the reader, both physically and virtually. It entertains.

If your story isn’t doing these things, it won’t be read, watched, used. Work to develop your sense of what’s interesting and useful to your potential audiences. Seek all feedback and talk through ideas with people who are likely members of your audience. Listen for the things that they ask questions about or assumptions that they have. Where are the gaps in their knowledge? What’s tired?

It doesn’t hurt to tell parts of your story to people before you develop and produce it. Think of it as an on-the-fly focus group for your stuff and also as a way to think through the important ideas of your story and how you can show them better.

Practice

Run through the quality–novelty–usefulness rubric for several local and national stories. How do you answer the questions that the rubric poses? Where do you struggle to define it? Try the rubric out with someone who’s not in your demographic but the same set of stories. Is their perception of what’s quality, novel, useful information different?

3

Thinking Multi-platform

Collecting multimedia content and arranging it into a story has been the focus of this digital storytelling process so far, but you’ll also need to consider both how your story will work across media platforms and how your audience will find it.

When we talk about platforms, we’re talking not about the media elements of the story—instead we’re looking at how those elements will be delivered across media channels or platforms. You’ll probably be delivering your story in a few common channels: live, social, web, mobile, television, radio or print. Where you focus your energies depends a lot on whom your audience is and where they will expect to find your content. It will also significantly shape the kind of content that you can provide.

Of these platforms, it’s a pretty safe bet that your story will have to be web-friendly. The web has fast become the hub for most media organizations, even if, at the moment, it isn’t their most profitable channel. Readers increasingly want to consume stories and information on their schedules, and the web offers that convenience.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s easy to overlook the targeted value of delivering your story live—which will likely include multimedia aspects, especially if you’re using presentation software. Subjects in your stories may want to use your story for presentations at conferences or to organizations, and it’s helpful to create your story so that it can be repurposed in this way.

Whichever is your primary platform, you should keep an eye on diversifying your approach and the accessibility of your story. Each platform works a bit differently and has different conventions and expectations for what a story is.

Without going too deep into the nuances of each, you can build in flexibility to the delivery of your story if you pay attention to and deliver a few key elements. First, pay close attention to quality control with whatever you do. It’s easy to overdo multimedia content and you want to be sure that all components are of sufficient quality that they don’t detract from any other component. It’s a principle that bad audio will kill great visuals. Weak, technically flawed copy will keep people from clicking play on a video. (And it will shoot you in the foot in search.)

Few readers come to stories at their intended beginnings. Searches send readers laterally into webpages. Magazine readers might start in the middle of the publication. Radio listeners tune in halfway through the program. Anticipating this variety of entry points diversifies the possibilities for readers to find your story. In print we use images, headlines, captions, copy breaks, and pull quotes to address this nonlinear approach. On the web, we have links, slideshows and videos as well as all of the print tools to work with. Mobile technology has the ability to personalize content in a way that has never been available before. Social media bank on pass-along content.

Having lots of edges to your story’s presentation is advantageous, but with those edges and that diversity of content, you also introduce the opportunity for content that fails to deliver, whether it’s slow to load, out of context, or broken. It’s important that you marshal all of your assets and be sure that each one will deliver on the promise being held out to the reader. If you’re the least bit unsure about whether to include certain content, don’t include it.

Practice

Map your story to a multi-platform approach. How will the main story appear? What opportunities can you create for passing it along? Is there a live component to it? Do you need to produce a full documentary-like video, or would something else interactive work better?

4

Letting the Story Unfold

Collecting information for stories rarely happens linearly. You will likely pull at a thread and continue to pull until you find that what’s unraveled is a completely different story from what you expected. And then you’ll have to pull another thread to figure out more about what you just learned. You might have to pull threads for a while to get what you need—and then you’ll have to sort through what you’ve got. The process is both thrilling and frustrating and the point of this small chapter is to give you a basic framework for making progress, checking that progress and developing your story.

It’s simple, really. Have an idea, ask questions, be ready to adapt.

To walk out the door, you need to have an idea about what you’re working on. You need to communicate this idea as you meet sources and collect information. You also need to hold two competing values in your mind—you must hang on to the original idea enough that you’ll continue to move forward...