Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Tajik Jimmy edits

First I cut off the ad, the music at the end, and "thanks for listening".

I started the story at "a former stockroom clerk" because everything before that was leading up to the story instead of the actual story.

I cut out “and well, you can guess the rest of the story, the video became a smash hit” because it is redundant and understood.

I cut out “you can watch the video that took Russians by storm at the world.org” for two reasons. We got the story from theworld.org, so we know where to go already. But if the story is to be run somewhere else, you always want to direct people to your own website, where you can provide a link.

I cut out “that’s an unusual move, considering” because the story makes sense without it.

And then I just cut out a lot of the music for time.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Storytelling: what i learned from Ira Glass

what i already knew:
I'd like to think I have the basics down to broadcast story telling. I'm not saying I'm particularly good at it... but I like to think I'm good enough and know enough that I don't need to change career paths. If I'm wrong... I should probably quit my job... or I should be fired.
I also understand that it takes a significantly long time and tedious interviewing to find a great story. We report on the not so great stories, too... and we understand when they aren't good.
I can also relate to what he says about having good taste and wanting to great work, but that it takes time... years even. I hope to eventually be a great broadcast story teller.

as for what i learned... For one, you can't learn broadcast story telling from advice. Advice is good, but you have to get out there and apply the advice, make mistakes, and learn from those.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

wordle

why i'm passionate about mass communication :
















^ what makes me look at a multimedia story

multimedia in my career

I'm going to write this blog based on my current job... because I don't know what I'm going to end up doing, but I hope producing is involved.
I'm the weekend producer for KAUZ, and I love it. I write the 6 and 10 newscasts on Saturdays and the 5:30 and 10 on Sundays. Since my job consists of deciding what goes in the newscasts and writing the stories, so I don't use multimedia.
Although I don't post anything to the web, parts of our newscasts and news stories are posted on our website... so that's my first link:
http://www.kauz.com/
Many of the stories on the site use video, audio, text, and graphics to tell news stories and promote our station. This is a great use of multimedia. A number of our viewers might not catch one of our newscasts one day, but they can still see what stories we ran.

I've been told by experienced people in the business that some newscasts could be moving to online only. The economy has significantly affected TV broadcast... not as much as newspapers, but stations are making cuts. By moving to the internet, companies can hire reporters as "one-man-bands"... where they shoot, interview, write, edit, voice, and post their stories.

TV news is also taking stories from viewers, and letting them report. CNN is probably the most popular with their iReport:
http://www.cnn.com/ireport/
This use of multimedia is beneficial to TV news because it gives us more content for our newscasts while allowing users to be involved and contribute. I think we will be seeing much more of this as video posting becomes easier and easier.