Bree Sison is passionate about covering politics and local government.  The weekend anchor and reporter for WEAR in Pensacola says she believes in the watchdog role of journalism.

“Primarily, I love it because it’s a challenge.  It requires out-thinking an opponent.  The power that our elected officers hold is vast and it needs to be checked up on occasionally,” Sison says. “It’s healthy for them to have oversight, and I enjoy being a part of the process that puts me on the side of our viewers.”

Sison says government meetings offer great stories, if you approach them the right way.

“My challenge is to make the impact of the issues discussed explained in an entertaining way.  Sometimes that seems impossible; other times, they make it easy for me.  The things that come out of the mouths of our elected leaders are often the most hilarious things I hear in a week,” Sison says.

Right now national politics is eating up lots of TV time, but Sison says a reporter may have to work even harder on local political news.

“The shifts and divisions in my community are more gradual and more difficult to spot.  They take really knowing your community to be able to cover effectively.”

Sison says she regularly pitches story ideas she finds at community meetings and grabs opportunities.

“Yesterday the newsroom management didn’t have a story idea for my nightside shift, so I grabbed a photographer and went down to the Tourist Development Council,” says Sison.  ”I came out with great information our competitors didn’t have about the opening of a multi-million dollar baseball park being built in town.  Had I not checked the agenda or made the decision to go watch, our station wouldn’t have known the city is planning to spend $250,000 to bring a national entertainer in for a concert on opening day.

Sison says journalists with a nose for hard news should make sure that their bosses are aware of their interest in government and political stories and should be sure to keep asking to cover those topics.

She also suggests that reporters work on stories that matter to them on their own.

“It might take a lot of work to get the gem but it’s worth it when you beat your competition.”

But what on earth is action-reaction-reaction? CBS News photojournalist Les Rose introduced that idea at a workshop I attended recently by showing this video of a TV commercial:

At first, there’s really no action at all. The first action is merely hinted at about ten seconds in–a slightly obscured shot of the soldiers entering the airport. Three shots later, you first hear the reaction and then see it when the man reading a newspaper looks up. As the clapping spreads, we see the reaction to the reaction, 24 seconds in, when the soldier smiles.

Think about this simple structure when you’re putting together a news story: Anticipation, action, reaction, reaction.  The structure can be applied not only to video and natural sound but to sound bites as well. Using what comes before and after the action puts the action itself in context.

“My goal is to go out and cover a story to make someone care about it,” says Huppert, “make you laugh or shed a tear.”

The award-winning reporter shared five solid pieces of TV storytelling advice at the Excellence in Journalism conference in New Orleans.

1. Find your focus. Huppert says he always takes time on the front end to ask, “What’s this story about?” His ability to find that focus and to stick with it, helps even potentially mundane pieces, such as an assignment to show how the economy is affecting people, become memorable TV.

“Focus equals the emotion and/or character and/or concept that holds the disconnected pieces together,” says Huppert. “It’s the spine that runs through it.”

2. Try the Christmas tree structure. Huppert likes to reward his viewers for sticking with him. So instead of the inverted pyramid approach, he likes to use the Christrmas tree.

“Each point on the tree is a reveal — I share the surprises I’ve uncovered with the viewer.  Before I write, I outline my surprises and build up to each.”

3. Sentences build to the most important point. Huppert also crafts his sentences carefully; his goal is to put the most important word in the sentence at or near the end. The reason? Your writing will have more impact on the viewer and they’ll have better recall of key points.

4. Write into your stand up.  ”Almost all of my stories have a stand up or live component,” says Huppert.  ”The best thing ever said to me by a photog is:  ’What are you saying BEFORE the stand up?’”  Huppert says that If you write the  lines in and out of the stand up first, the stand up itself will be more focused, shorter and better.

5. Try to get a “handshake shot.” When you meet someone for the first time, it’s not unusual to put our your hand and look them in the eye during a handshake.  Huppert likes to have that “handshake shot” in his stories, where the viewer can look the primary character in the face and get a sense of that person.

Huppert’s stories don’t just happen, they’re a result of his personal challenge to go beyond the standard.

“The time you spend on the front end standing back and thinking really pays off on the back end.”

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?

That said, there are some skills and values every multimedia journalist should bring to the job. On the SPJ Net Worked blog, Jennifer Peebles shared a terrific list that I’ve excerpted here.

1. Write a basic breaking news story in the inverted pyramid. The story must be accurate, fair, interesting and not plagiarized, among other things. To do this, they’ve got to have basic skills in interviewing people, basic writing skills (nouns and verbs have to agree, dammit) and a basic knowledge of journalism ethics (when we call someone up for an interview, we identify ourselves as a reporter, not as some long-lost cousin from out of town, etc.).

2. Be able to record the audio of an interview with someone, do a simple edit on the audio recording of that interview and upload it to the Web for an audience to hear.

3. Be able to take a decent photograph, even if it’s with their cellphone camera… They should understand a bit about the rule of thirds and basic photo composition (don’t have a tree growing out of the head of the your photo subject!)

4. Be able to make at least a short video story that doesn’t turn out looking like the Blair Witch Project.

5. Be able to perform basic functions in a spreadsheet and have at least a general understanding of how journalists use data to find stories.

6. Have an understanding of HTML and CSS and understand how they’re used to make Web pages.

7. Be able to decide which platform best suits a given story.

8. Understand the basic concepts of libel and defamation and understand that these aren’t old-fashioned concepts that only apply to us geezers who worked for newspapers… The same goes for invasion of privacy and copyright issues.

9. Understand the basic concepts of the First Amendment, freedom of the press and the people’s right to know, which everything we do is built on.

If you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that the list mentions only nine things while the headline promised ten.  What’s missing? Perhaps you’ve figured it out. Here’s my addition to Peebles’ list:

10. Recognize the importance of fact-checking and know how to review every story element for accuracy.

Have I proved my point? What would you add to the list of “must have” skills and values for multimedia journalists?

1.  WeTransfer.com – a free Web-based service for transfering up to 2GB of files to up to 20 people at once.  Need to get large files back to multiple people in the newsroom all at once?  Here’s an option.

2) Dig.ccmixter.org - if you’re looking for music to use without fear of copyright violaton, check out this site, or for images to include in a graphic or a blog post, look to Compfight.com. 

3) Flavors.me - for all those soon-to-be graduates of journalism schools out there.  Consider this a source for an “instant portfolio site.”  To see a good example of how one journalist used the site, you might check out Adam Westbrook’s page.

Thanks to Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, for these cool tools.

Take the story Kara Matuszewski, a Web producer at WBZ in Boston, turned up last week about schools in one local district having been closed for a week.

She found it on Twitter, when she just happened to run across a message from a friend of hers offering to be interviewed if anyone was having a “slow news day.”

The message was directed to a couple of Matuszewski’s friends at different TV outlets, as well as a Boston television station–notthe one she works for, as it happens. But hey, it was on Twitter for all to see.

I wasn’t about to let these guys be the only ones to talk with Tyson about this. So I jumped in on the conversation and asked Tyson what more to the story there was.

After exchanging a few direct messages with the original Tweeter, the story emerged. Frustrated parents were begging their district to let them shovel snow off the schools’ roofs so students could go back to class. As Matuszewski writes on her blog, this was one time when social media paid off. The story wound up leading the 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts the following day.

The pony reference comes from one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite jokes, which I must have heard dozens of times when I covered the White House in the 1980s. A pessimist confronted with a stable full of manure would be gloomy, Reagan would say. But an optimist would dig right in, convinced that with all that manure, “there had to be a pony in here somewhere.”

Sourced from: NewsLab

Among his Top 10, are three of my own faves.

1. MPEG Streamclip

What it does: Put simply,  MPEG Streamclip is a video transcoder and compressor. It takes a video file and converts it into a smaller, bigger, different video file to suit your needs. I use it to compress the HD footage from my DSLR camera into a smaller high quality file so Final Cut Pro can handle it for editing.

Why you should have it: If you’re involved with the shooting or editing of video, MPEG Streamclip is a big problem solver. If you’ve got a film shot in .mov files, but one .avi file from another source, MPEG Streamclip will convert it. It’s also vital for making sure all your video uses the same codecs. You can also use it to resize footage.

How to get it: MPEG Streamclip is produced and published for free by Squared5. To download it for Mac or Windows, click here.

2. Audacity

What it does: Audacity edits audio in lots of ways and is particularly effective for editing speech. It’s used in plenty of radio newsrooms around the world as an alternative to Adobe Audition. It allows for multilayered editing and lets you add plenty of professional filters to your audio.

Why you should have it: It’s useful as a simple converter (to turn a big .WAV file into a nice .mp3) but you’ll get more value from it if you’re editing podcasts or audio slideshows or using audio regularly in your work. It’s a bit tricky to get used to though, so give it time.

How to get it: It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is also released – for free – under the GNU licence. Click here to get a copy.

3.  Quicktime Pro

What it does: Why have I added Quicktime to this list? We all have it anyway right and it just plays .mov videos right? Wrong. Turns out Quicktime (on a Mac at least) is a bit more interesting than that. Did you know it can also record audio, video and even screencasts?

Why you should have it: You can use it to record footage from your webcam and Skype interviews. If you want to demo something on your computer, a screencast video is great.

How to get it: If you’ve got a Mac you should already have it. Again, a quick scout around the internet suggests this isn’t available for Windows users with Quicktime. Sorry guys!

One other I would include:  HandBrake.  When someone hands you a DVD and says you’re OK to use the footage in your story, you may need to rip it and convert it to a usable format.  HandBrake works like a charm.

How about you?  Anymore you would add to the list?

So Herbst has found other ways of getting her stories told–mainly by having reporters read the scripts. “I always assume a story is going to be written,” says Herbst, who does only a few nat sound packages a year.

How does she do it all? Here are some of her best tips:

1. Pitch stories. Herbst tries to read every news tip that comes in to KUSA. That can add up to a thousand a day, but it’s worth it to find one good story idea. She also finds stories by checking Craig’s List and listening to conversations at coffee shops. And she networks all the time. “I call my contacts probably a couple of times a week or check in by email and they’re actually calling me now,” Herbst says. “I go to editorial meetings, I pitch story ideas all the time and because I do that I kind of get to do a lot of what I want.”

2. Shoot efficiently. “Make sure your shots count,” Herbst says. “You don’t want to be fishing through shots that are shaky at the beginning or end.” Mark bars or flash a hand in front of the lens when you know you have something great so you can find it quickly when logging. “At the end, I shoot 10 or 15 really tight shots, so I’ve got something to go to if I get in a rush.”

3. Develop a comfort zone. While setting up, Herbst doesn’t talk about the story. “I want [people] to get to know me,” she says. “It’s awkward when you’re alone. Become comfortable talking about yourself.” Because she’s low key, she believes she gets better SOTs. “I act confused and they help me,” Herbst says.

4. Log carefully.Go through everything you have. “If I have three hours to log and write I will give more than two hours to the logging.” Herbst doesn’t just log interview bites, she logs nats and even facial expressions. With a good log, she says, “the writing goes really quick.”

5. Ask for help. If you’re working by yourself, Herbst advises giving your script to someone else in the newsroom to read. “Give it to a few of your favorite people to check out. It’s going to make you better.” Herbst says she wants viewers to think that whoever voices the script actually wrote it, so she’s more than willing to let reporters change things. “They add something to my scripts and I appreciate that.”

Herbst must be doing something right. She’s been at KUSA for just five years and already has some regional and national NPPA awards to her name. Here’s a sample of her work:

Update 1/24: Herbst emailed to say she didn’t write this particular story, which she called “a total team effort.”  She did, however, write this one:

Sourced from: NewsLab

Hinkle says he had to re-learn a lot of technical skills when he took the job in Austin last year but he’s now shooting and editing his own stories daily. “I am expected to turn a package for the 5 p.m., file VO/SOTS for the 6 and 10 p.m. news, do a Web report first thing and update it throughout the day,” he says. “I do the same thing a reporter and photographer together would do.”

That includes demonstrative, multi-part stand-ups, which Hinkle produces on a regular basis. He decides what he wants to say and show in a stand-up and plans it out, selecting different shots or locations for each segment of the track.

“Sometimes, especially if it’s a multi-part stand-up with more than three parts, I draw out a very quick, rough storyboard on paper, so I remember exactly what each shot is,” Hinkle says. “The storyboard might sound ridiculous, but thinking about the stand-up as a movie instead of just a portion of the story has really helped me.”

Then he records the entire stand-up in every location, so he can use a single take if he doesn’t have time to edit.

Hinkle typically shoots with a 25 lb. XDCam and heavy-duty tripod. But on a couple of occasions, he’s shot entire stories with a Flip cam. On his blog, Living Off the Air, Hinkle describes covering a firefighters’ training exercise in a network of caverns. Photographers from other local stations couldn’t fit through the small opening, but Hinkle grabbed two Flip cams out of his pack and crawled in.Good thing he had two. The first one died.

Taking the camera apart, I noticed moisture was collecting inside around the lens cover. I hadn’t dropped the camera, but I figured the air was saturated enough that far down to cause something like this to happen. I wiped a film of cave condensation from my face and had an idea, as I replaced the out-of-service camera with the one from my pocket.

As we continued on our course, I would stop recording every two or three minutes. Next, I pressed my lips up to the camera lens and breathed in hard. Weird? Sick? Okay, whatever. It worked. I was able to suck away any moisture from inside to keep the camera running the rest of the trip.

A Flip cam also saved the day when Hinkle was overcome by pain that turned out to be kidney stones while on assignment. He couldn’t lift the big camera but managed to shoot this story with his Flip:

Hinkle says he’s often asked how he manages to do it all as a solo journalist. “Car time is phone time,” he says. While driving, he sets up interviews and looks for places to shoot. Like most solo journalists, he uses a light stand to help him frame and set the focus for his stand-ups.

What else? You’ll find the answers in this light-hearted video Hinkle showed at a recent journalism workshop:

Right. Don’t forget to have fun!

 Sourced from: NewsLab