1. The content is compelling.  Many people, including me, have entered into this debate and the student producer, Patrick Romero, used a simple point-counterpoint approach to shaping the story.

2.  The audio is audible.  If you read Advancing the Story, you know that we often make the point that good audio can save the day in a story, and poor audio can ruin a perfectly good visual piece.

3. Social media is powerful.  The video was produced as an assignment that the class watched on YouTube.  From there, students added the link to their Facebook pages and on the video went on to fame — including an airing on the CBS Morning News.

The story also had a tight focus, and engaging presenter and adequate production values. So given all this, can you make a video go viral? Or is it just luck that makes it happen?

From writing to sourcing news to using video more effectively, that’s what seemed to resonate with all of you.

We hope you’ll check out any that you may have missed and keep reading in 2012.  Happy New Year!

Top 10 Topics

1. Structuring a multimedia story

2. Getting freelance journalism jobs

3. 10 things journalists need to know

4. Finding news on Twitter

5. Online writing tip sheet

6. How to write a compelling TV news story

7. Why journalists should learn to love data

8. Handy rules for journalists

9. Get creative with your video storytelling

10. Writing for social media

Here’s how it works:

Beginning at midnight on Dec. 15, students ages 14 to 22 can tweet their support for the First Amendment with the hash tag #freetotweet, which will enter them in the “Free to Tweet” scholarship competition. Students are encouraged to freely express themselves in their entries, which can be posted on any publicly viewable social media platform, including blogs.

The goal is to spread the word that a free press and free speech matter, so even non-student journalists are encouraged to take part.

Sign up for an email reminder, so you won’t forget.

You should be on these sites to understand how people are communicating and the vocabulary of this communication.

If you ignore these sites, you will fail to understand how a growing portion of the population deals with the flow of information, and inevitably how more people will deal with this flow in the future. The best journalists will be problem solvers on the social web.

If you are a journalist your JOB is to understand and insert yourself into the flow of information. That’s what Google+ represents, the flow of information.

OK, so I buy that.  I joined Google+, but I admit I’ve yet to make much use of it.   However, others have jumped right in.

According to Mashable, KOMU-TV anchor Sara Hill is using Google+ to host a Hangout that allows viewers to go behind the scenes of her newscast and offer feedback on the day’s news events.

The post also offers four more journalistic uses for Google+.

Educator Jeremy Littau says understanding Google+ could offer a leg-up to young journalists about to graduate this year.

Plus will have a page feature for news organizations, similar to Facebook. This is a space you need to be in. By next year, newsrooms might want a journalist who can manage these pages on occasion. Will you be ready for this new job market reality? For my marketing/PR students, this is the most essential part of Plus that you need to be learning. Now.

And social media consultant Kathy Gill says there’s another good reason for journalists to be there.

Given Google’s decision to privilege Google+ profiles in search, journalists should be setting up shop there even if they don’t plan to hang around very much.

So, feel free to join and add me to your Circle.  Then let us know how you’re using it or why you don’t plan to do so.

The Washington Post’s Local Editor Vernon Loeb says, “No.”

“Social media are not really optional anymore,” says Loeb. “You can’t do your job without them. Social media are where news often breaks first. They’re a great way to cultivate sources, track events, find experts, and to drive audiences to our journalism. . . . You can’t be a good reporter unless you are involved in the social media realm.”

The Post is now instituting mandatory social media training for all reporters and editors on the Metro staff.

The ombudsman’s column on this issue says journalists’ social media efforts must not occur at the expense of the fundamentals and says this is not all about the chase “for the greatest number of page views, Twitter followers and Facebook friends, instead of the great story.”

What do you think?  Is social media a must?  Can you do your job without it?

In fact, the idea is that the Web should be the most important platform served — more important than any legacy medium, such as print or broadcast.

But the reality is that most news organizations just talk the talk, they don’t really walk the walk.  Now, Buzz Machine’s Jeff Jarvis says newsrooms will have to be “digital first” to survive.  And he shares some intriguing thoughts about what that means.

Digital first, aggressively implemented, means that digital drives all decisions: how news is covered, in what form, by whom, and when. It dictates that as soon as a journalist knows something, she is prepared to share it with her public. It means that she may share what she knows before she knows everything (there’s a vestige of the old culture, which held that we could know everything … and by deadline to boot) so she can get help from her public to fill in what she doesn’t know. That resets the journalistic relationship to the community, making the news organization a platform first, enabling a community to share its information and inviting the journalist to add value to that process. It means using the most appropriate media to impart information because we are no longer held captive to only one: text. We now use data, audio, video, graphics, search, applications, and wonders not yet imagined. Digital first is the realization that news happens with or without us — it mimics the architecture of the internet, end-to-end — and we must use all the tools available to add value where we can.

His post on the future of print is a good read.  It describes the cultural shift that still has not taken place in most newsrooms, and the article is just as relevant to TV news operations as it is to newspapers.

For example, television newsrooms such as WNCN in Raleigh have tried to embrace a modified version of Jarvis’ radical new approach with limited success.  In the early days of the station’s new focus on the Web, the journalists who worked there struggled with the idea that their stories were more valuable online than on air.

And therein lies the big question — can working journalists and those being trained for traditional journalism jobs change their mindsets and adapt to a more intense focus on digital delivery?  If so, what will it take to make that happen?  And what role should journalism schools play?

What’s different this time around? The new edition includes substantial revisions but retains the essential strengths of the original text: clear instruction on reporting and producing for multiple platforms; real-world examples and advice from professional journalists; discussion questions and hands-on exercises. New screen shots, images and examples are included throughout.

There’s also a new focus on the use of social media and mobile devices in gathering and disseminating news. Difficult to believe, but Twitter didn’t exist when we wrote the first edition.

We’re hard at work on a new companion website that will be available for use with the text this fall. You’ll be able to buy access to the entire site or to individual modules. Each online module–linked to a chapter in the text–includes interactive exercises, tutorials, resources and examples of multimedia storytelling. The “Ongoing Story” module allows users to report a story from beginning to end, and write a TV package as well as a Web version.

No matter what edition of the text you have, updated chapter-by-chapter content will continue to be available right here on the blog.

Thanks for your interest in Advancing the Story!

To that end, Tompkins shared his 10 Laws of Multimedia with a group of educators at the Poynter Institute.

Law #1 Make it interactive
It gives control to the user, and with our interest in metrics, interactivity increases stickiness — basically the amount of time spent on the site.

Law #2 Be search engine friendly
Design your site and your headlines with SEO in mind.  Avoid Flash animation or images in the upper-left of your page.  Spiders look at first 1-4 words in a headline, so you want to pay special attention to the way you write them.

Law #3 Aggregate and generate
Don’t be afraid to publish good work that other people do in addition to the work that you generate.

Law #4 Go raw, let viewers experience information on their own terms
Use raw video and other source information to let audience members see it for themseves.  Put your evidence online.

Law #5 Leverage your digital assets
You may be generating information that the public will be interested in, i.e. putting your editorial meeting online.  If it’s completely unique content that people really want, they’ll pay for it, i.e. at least one newspaper experimenting with a pay wall for obits.

Law #6 Involve the public, but make it meaningful
Give people a way to share what they know.

Law #7 Tap into local passion groups
Give people a place to meet like-minded individuals ala Facebook.  Help them form communities.

Law #8 Map it
Mapping gives you a wide shot and specificity in communicating information.  The washingtonpost.com “Faces of the Fallen” project is one example.  Try quikmaps for easily creating an interactive map.

Law #9 Feed your needs, too
Get yourself in front of the world online.  For example, check out the oil ticker on the NewsHour website, which they allowed other news organizations to embed in their own sites.

Law #10 Save elaborate presentations for projects with staying power
If it’s going to be a lot of work, make sure it has shelf life.

“The most important reason to do multimedia is to improve the journalism,” Tompkins said.

Sree Sreevivasan — On Twitter:  Sreenet
He’s a prof and dean of student affairs at Columbia Journalism School.  Quill calls him a “technology evanglesit and skeptic.”

Eric Kuhn — On Twitter:  KuhnCNN
As CNN’s audience interactio producer, Quill says he focuses on “social and emerging media for the network and television-Web integration.”

Megan Garber — On Twitter:  megangarber
Garber is assistant editor of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard where she “reports and writes on the future of news.”

David Cohn — On Twitter:  digidave
Cohn says he is a “new media scientist” who focuses on participatory journalism.  He is behind Spot.Us, pioneering “community-funded reporting.”

Mark Briggs — On Twitter:  markbriggs
Author of the ground-breaking textbooks Journalism 2.0 and Journalism Next.

And while we’re on the subject of Twitter, check out the website, oneforty, if you haven’t already.  The site allows you to search, browse and rate thousands of Twitter apps.

What I am sure of is that the announcement indicates that the more multimedia skills a journalist has, them more job security.  Take a look at a couple excerpts from ABC News President David Westin’s memo to the staff:

In newsgathering, we intend to dramatically expand our use of digital journalists. We have proven that this model works at various locations around the world. We believe we can take it much further.

In production, we will take the example set by Nightline of editorial staff who shoot and edit their own material and follow it throughout all of our programs, while recognizing that we will continue to rely upon our ENG crews and editors for most of our work.

Some of the concerns expressed about all this are quite valid –  it’s going to be harder for ABC News to do some of the things it used to, and yes, quality may very well suffer.   But what’s the alternative?  Continuing to do the same old things in the same old way is definitely not the answer.