Most digital still cameras have the ability to display a histogram–a graphic display of brightness levels in a scene. Photographer Michael Reichmann calls it “the greatest invention since the built-in light meter.” If you’re not using your camera’s histogram function,…
Breaking news is a staple of local TV, but it doesn’t often happen like this. Two minutes into the 10 p.m. newscast on Chicago’s WLS-TV on Dec. 23, 2007, a minivan crashed into the studio. The driver later was quoted…
Some news organizations have used the microblog site Twitter in the past to send updates about breaking news stories like the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the California wildfires. Now the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is “twittering” in a slightly different way…
Slide shows, videos, flash animations–there are lots of different ways to tell a visual story online. Now you can add one more: the photostory collage. A new service from VuVox allows journalists to build multimedia stories in layers. Watch Richard…
“Fresh political coverage like you haven’t seen before.” That’s how KDFW-TV in Dallas describes what it hopes will result from a new partnership with Southern Methodist University. FOX 4 News has teamed up with the school to cover the Iowa…
Convergence is a reality in local TV newsrooms, but what does it look like? A new research study finds that in most cases what stations call convergence is just repurposing, not truly reporting across media. The researchers surveyed producers and…
What does hyperlocal news look like? The answer is, it depends on where you look. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser has put together a useful guide to what constitutes hyperlocal news online, examining how it’s gathered, produced and sustained. He defines it…
Dwayne Dail’s story would be compelling in any medium. Wrongly convicted of rape, he spent half his life in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him. But Dail’s story is even more powerful told in his own words, with still photos…
A couple of years ago, I heard WNBC “tech guru” Sree Sreenivasan recommend the free social networking site LinkedIn as indispensable for journalists. I didn’t join then but I have now, and I’ve discovered a few things. First off, it…
A police chase leads to a head-on collision. Two people are killed. And it’s all live on TV. It’s happened before, and it always sparks a debate about how stations decide what to air and when. This time, it happened…
