Month: May 2009

Five tips for video stories

Let’s say you’re already pretty good at the fundamentals of visual storytelling. You’ve mastered the camera, you understand lighting, and you’re capable of shooting sequences and capturing crisp natural sound. What else do you need to know to tell great…

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Multimedia portfolio creation

We keep telling everyone that it’s important to create a new kind of resume that showcases multimedia skills.  The best way to do that, of course, is online, but what should your Web portfolio look like? At Arizona State University,…

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TV news producing tips

What does it take to be a successful newscast producer? More than you might think. There’s a lot more to producing than just stacking a show. The decisions a producer makes about what stories to run and in what order…

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Tweeting the news

CNN’s Rick Sanchez has almost 90,000 followers on Twitter, making him one of the top TV news Tweeters in the US. His frequent posts are a mix of requests for feedback on the news, commentary and personal observations like this…

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Writing better news stories

Tom Hallman, Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who conducts narrative writing seminars for the Society of Professional Journalism and writes a column for SPJ’s Quill magazine.  This month he wrote about what separates a great story from a good one, and…

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Make your Web story count

Most television Web sites have left the age of shovelware behind, thank goodness. It took a while, but stations finally figured out that simply posting TV scripts online wouldn’t entice anyone to visit a site twice. That said, there’s still…

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Student journalism taken seriously

The fact that the Web gives almost anyone a publishing platform has created significant opportunity for student journalists.  Instead of producing class work for an audience of one – the instructor – students now have the opportunity to create their own Web sites…

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Writing great Web headlines

If you aren’t already reading any of Jakob Nielsen’s work about online writing, you should start.  Just recently he published his pick for the news organization with the best Web headlines. And the winner is….the BBC. According to Nielsen, good headlines should…

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How TV news reports audience decline

Joe Flint of the Los Angeles Times posted a very short, but interesting tidbit yesterday. A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication found that over the last nine years, newspapers and wire services wrote more than…

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There will be jobs

Optimism doesn’t exactly rule in newsrooms today, but the AP’s Micah Gelman is bucking the trend. He’s just been named executive producer for domestic video, a job that didn’t exist when he got into the  business a decade ago as…

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