So newspapers are going ker-plunk. But magazines are doing dandy. This is odd to me because I think most newspaper writing styles show a magazine envy. You’d think newspapers would just follow their noses. That’s what Pat Thornton thinks will happen anyway:

Print can be a great medium when it concentrates on its strengths. The Economist does a fantastic job of this. It is not trying to break news — print can no longer do that — but rather it is trying to take a look back at the news and provide context.

Pat proposes newspapers create an additional Sunday edition that will focus more on analysis. He adds that this would probably be best as a glossy.

For someone who works in the newspaper industry, I subscribe to a lot of magazines. I’ll spare you the list. I like magazines because they are more permanent than newspapers. You can put them in your bathroom or on your coffee table. They’re also nicer; they’re easier to manage and probably no one will be allergic to them. Earlier this month The New York Observer posited that magazines are becoming luxury items.

The Economist may be a little too luxurious for me; it is God-awful expensive. The Economist’s Web site provides some, but not all of its content. Instead it acts like a portal to subscribing to the magazine. That definitely sounds like something newspapers could do.

But I’m not quite sure that is going to happen very soon. Writers already whine about having to write a story for Web AND a story for print. Two stories for print?? Forget it …

Now your Web design 101 notes are even more outdated. Turns out people don’t mind scrolling anymore (at least vertically, I’d venture to say). This from Polish researcher Michal Pryslopski via this E-Media Tidbits post at Poynter Online:

Eyetrack research showed that conventional wisdom was changing — his audience had become more inquisitive than previously assumed. They are abandoning the habit of focusing on the top-left corner of the page.

Looks like readers are treating the Web less like print and more like the Web.

I wonder how many news Web sites still try to cram everything into the above fold?

I was very reluctant to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. I read Paul Bradshaw’s posts about how media orgs could use it as a distribution tool, and much more. It really depends on who you are as to what will make it useful.

When all of the new media douchebags (Ha, I just saw that video today) started trying to find a use for Twitter, none of them fit me.

It didn’t help that my friends were even less open to Twitter than I was. I mean really, it’s called “Twitter” and the updates are called “tweets.” How lame is that?

But then, I started a blog. A geek new media journalist niche blog. That’s when I found a use.

People will follow you far more easily on Twitter than they will on your blog. If you use Twubble to find like-minded people and follow them, they will likely follow you back (provided they like your “tweets.” Ugh. that word). Then you can use twitterfeed to syndicate your blog and whatever else to readers. And voila, you have a targeted audience.

That all sounds a little too utilitarian, so I’ll add that my targeted audience, the people I follow on Twitter, are actually quite cool. They have lots of insight into journalism and new media, and they aren’t douchebags - always a plus.

How can news orgs use this? By allowing readers to target news. That’s not the way orgs are using Twitter now, I think. TechCrunch today warns us about Twitter’s heavy noise factor.

Erick Shonfeld writes:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.

That’s really the problem I think the next big Web startup will solve: How to take the myriad search returns from Google and narrow them to five, to ONE. Eliminate the noise. To post every Web update to Twitter, as Julie Star reminds us, is not eliminating the noise.

News orgs should only post breaking news, like they do for e-mail now (Hm, seems like that need is already met doesn’t it?) Alternatively, Twitter could give users the option of having different Twitter timelines, an issue that has been brought up but not resolved.

News orgs are going to have to show readers that Twitter can be useful on the first attempt. They’re not going to do that by dumping info on them. They need to hit the sweet spot.

I was going to submit this video on two car show rivals to the NPPA monthly contest, but um, oops, the deadline was yesterday. (The embarrassing part was that I exchanged e-mails with the Webmaster thinking a glitch in my account was preventing me from entering. D’oh.)

It’s OK, the video probably wouldn’t have won anyway. It is what it is: Mississippi accents, rap music and suped-up cars. Not that I think the video is bad; it tells a story, too. But I notice the videos that win at NPPA are not of the format I normally use.

Take last month’s winning video for example. Good shooting, good audio, good editing. But otherwise, zZZZzzz. Check out the other winners. They’re chosen by NPPA members.

Don’t get me wrong, my videos need a LOT of work. But as well as mastering technical elements, I want to tell a good story that my audience wants to watch. Should I be taking notes from YouTube or the Discovery Channel? I like both approaches honestly. They both have value. I’d even watch both at my computer. But I picture my friends watching Web videos, circulating among themselves what they like. They want something short, funny, exciting. If I sent them video of an old man rambling, they would reply, quote: WTF?

I think my question at its core is about elitism vs. populism. If that is the case, we know which is succeeding in newspapers and which isn’t. We already know readers don’t care about Pulitzers.

Update: I want to add that I love NPPA and I appreciate the chance to see others’ work and learn from it. I do have a lot of learning to do.

Along the same vein as my post yesterday, but in the other direction: Reporters need to think multimedia, but multimedia producers are capable of thinking multimedia for them. Sometimes.

Reporter Susie has been assigned a big, complicated court case with a long history. That sucker sure could use an interactive timeline. “No way!” Susie opines. She just got assigned the story today and doesn’t have time to look up all that backstory. (I’ve heard it before … and lamer).

No worries. I, Multimedia Producer, will come to the rescue. An archive/wire/Web search should provide a thorough, albeit not entirely comprehensive timeline in an hour or so. We can hope.

That’s not a novel idea. In fact I think many reporters just assume multimedia producers should do that (which is annoying). However I think multimediers, me included, need to come down to Earth sometimes and realize we can do the nitty-gritty fact finding too.

What gets me though is how reporters can write stories without even knowing the all the information that graphics can provide. What if you missed something important, Susie?

I can’t wait until we get the new Maven video player. Gannett and Maven made their pact in November and now we’re finally starting to see fruit. The Maven player can be embedded at story level and can play videos on the front page. It’s so much better.

app.com (left), desmoinesregister.com (right), 4/14/08

The player provides buttons to e-mail or link to the video and to play it full screen. Nice. And did I mention you can embed the video at story level??

Of course, it all depends on how newspaper.coms will use the player, but I’m not seeing serious flaws with the tool.

I already knew about SAXOTECH’s content management system and Pluck’s social networking platform teaming up in the online news world. The partnership is a big part of Gannett’s GO4 design for its papers’ Web sites. But I missed this story last Friday.

The SAXOTECH-Pluck partnership is a big part of the crowdsourcing strategy Gannett implemented in its newsroom-turned-Information Center overhaul two years ago. Looks like the companies are trying to strengthen their hands.

SAXOTECH runs our CMS now. It’s the only CMS I’ve ever used beside College Publisher, but I assume it’s like most: restrictive. SIteLife’s Pluck is used at The Economist, FOX News, Gannett, Scotts, The Washington Post and us. It’s only crashed on us a couple of times, and it allows users to keep track of stories, blogs, photos and submit their own. But it does have its drawbacks.

The biggest for me is that you can’t search for other users - or anything really. You can friend someone if you run into his post or comment, but you can’t search an entire directory of users on the site.

With blogs, our resident editorial cartoonist Marshall Ramsey is quite vocal about his hatred for Pluck. He says it “doesn’t look like a blog,” and he isn’t satisfied with its functionality. His blog is pretty popular on the site, and his following bemoaned its switch to Pluck.

However the SAXOTECH-Pluck combo is getting people involved with our site. If it’s working I can’t complain.

When I try to encourage journalists to think multimedia, I try to sell it to them this way: “Don’t think of it as more work. Think of it as a better way of telling a story.”

But part of me thinks I’m being a little dishonest. If the journalist is doing extra work (multimedia), shouldn’t he have to do less of something else (writing a text story)?

I thought about this as I read a post by Andy Dickinson on his students’ interest in word count minimums. Assuming journalists are working at capacity and don’t already have unnecessary slack they can cut, what do we take away from their workloads because they now shoot video, research for graphics and write two versions, web and print, of the same story?

How about half of that 30-inch story? Many people won’t make it until the end anyway. The logical approach to me would be to remove (or rather, not write) the parts covered by the multimedia:

Video and slideshows could replace the anecdotal lede, maybe some perspective or some imagery, any info the visual multimedia covers. Flowery wording isn’t all that necessary anyway.

Databases and Graphics can replace lengthy examples and analysis in complicated stories. The text story could instead briefly summarize the main ideas.

Now wait. I’m assuming our audience will see every element of a story. But if someone just reads the print story and misses the rest, is anything lost? That risk is too high for me to justify replacing a part of a story with audio. Most stories hinge upon what was said. The audio is just, well, extra.

That’s journalists’ gripe. How much extra can they do?

So many T-Shirts in this country. When most new videographers have to interview someone wearing a T-Shirt, I think they get embarrassed and just clip the mic to the front, letting the nasty wire crawl all over the place. Me, in most cases, I pull out the stick mic. But in those cases when the subject has to walk around or the framing is really wide, the lavalier mic is essential.

The problem is lavaliers don’t fare well on T-Shirts. They often flop over and nuzzle up against the shirt instead of pointing up toward the source’s face.

To avoid that, this is what I do.

	Thread the mic through the shirt from the bottom. This can be awkward, so ask the interviewee to do it and turn around and adjust your camera while she does.
	Grab the wire just below the mic, pull it up and thread it inside of the clip.
	Gather a fold in the T-Shirt right at the collar, and clip the mic to the fold.
	Voila! The wire should come up through the clip in front of the fold and go back down into the T-Shirt.

If you can resist letting your record button fly free then you are a stronger person than I. Then logging your video - setting ins and outs to create each subclip during video capture in Avid - becomes a very time consuming process. You’re basically reliving your time in the field.

But if you shoot in DV and transfer with FireWire, you can use Avid’s DV Scene Extraction feature. It automatically creates clips between each stroke of the record button. (Final Cut Pro’s equivalent is called DV Start Stop Detect).

In your bin widow, go to Settings, then Capture, then DV Options.

You’ll have the option of Adding Locators and/or Create Subclips. You want subclips for sure. Locators appear as little red dots on your master clips timeline, which is occasionally helpful.

Your subclips won’t have unique names, but if you’ve shot cleanly, you can view them as frames and organize them visually.

In FCP, the process is a little more complicated. See page 257 of the user manual (PDF).

In Avid’s user’s guide, you can find more info on page 74.