Power Performance

Multimedia Storytelling for Journalism and Public Relations

Tony Silvia, Terry Anzur

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444340624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is a unique and definitive guide to the skills necessary for on-camera journalism and offers an invaluable behind-the-scenes look at the profession.

• Tailors the traditional skills of writing, reporting, and producing to the needs of journalists working in front of the camera
• Includes chapters devoted to the role of the storyteller, reporting the story across multiple platforms, and presenting the story on-camera
• Incorporates profiles of leading multimedia journalists and public relations practitioners
• Addresses the key ethical issues for the profession
• Offers practical advice for putting presentation skills to work
• Storytelling skills covered can be applied to a variety of traditional and new media formats including television news, radio, and podcasts

1

The Role of the Storyteller

It’s one day after the death of Michael Jackson, June 25th, 2009. All across the country, newsrooms have expended the level of resources once reserved for covering political conventions, presidential elections, and the passing of heads of state. In our burgeoning celebrity-first culture, that part is not surprising. What is remarkable is the path the story takes, not through any one news medium, but across many: newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, and social media.

The first contact with the story of Michael Jackson’s death was, for many, through social media followed by the web, then radio and television, and, finally, newspapers – and by extension, other print media, such as magazines. Within an hour of the pop icon’s death, the message was being received and relayed by people with cell phones, Facebook or MySpace pages, and Twitter accounts. For the current generation, there will always be the memory of where they were when they got the news that Jackson had died; in many ways, it is similar to those of another generation who will never forget the details surrounding how they learned of the death of President John F. Kennedy over four decades earlier.

For the news media, the difference was palatable. It wasn’t so long ago that when a major news story broke, the path to an audience was first and foremost through a traditional medium: print, radio, or television; then and only then would thought be given to posting it for the web, and social media weren’t even on the horizon. Now it’s web first. Just ask Mark Douglas of Tampa’s WFLA-TV. Douglas, a 30-year veteran of television news, would think television first. Not any more. “I sometimes joke that I’m a web reporter who every once in a while does television,” he says. In fact, a 2010 story Douglas wrote about a regional coyote infestation “broke” first on the station’s web site and didn’t end up on its TV newscast in a different form until weeks later.

His parent company, Media General Corporation, also owns the Tampa Tribune, WFLA radio, and the news web site tbo.com. Their “converged newsroom” concept dates back to the 1990s when theirs was one of the first newsrooms in the country to adopt a multiplatform approach to newsgathering and storytelling. It is illustrative of the very different demands placed upon journalists today. In a word, these demands can be summed up as “multimedia.”

What is Multimedia?

First and foremost, it’s an approach to storytelling that bestows new power, both on the storyteller and the audience. Control over the elements of a big story is no longer the exclusive domain of the print reporter, the broadcaster, or even the web journalist. It’s the domain of the storyteller, the person whose skills and judgment contribute to a story that has maximum impact both for and with the audience. We call that level of storytelling Power Performance, because it harnesses the power of today’s multimedia to tell the story in a more compelling way. It involves every aspect of the storytelling process, from print to broadcast to web. It invites the audience to be part of the process by including them through all forms of social media. There is much misunderstanding about the role of multimedia. Is it just applying new technology to old skills? Or is it an entirely new form of storytelling that requires a whole new set of skills? In many ways, that discussion is framed by the rapid development of online media compared to the adoption rate of traditional media. The Internet is unique for its exponential growth over an incredibly fast period of time.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, but cost and distribution meant it was hundreds of years before books were adopted by a significant segment of the world’s population. Compare that to the growth of television, which we think of as having always been part of our media experience. It took over three decades to reach just half of the American public. By contrast, it took the Internet ten years to reach the same audience level. As for social media, five years after its inception in 2003, Facebook alone had reached 350 million people. In 2011, that figure rose to half a billion. As author and media watcher Ken Auletta puts it, “That’s extraordinary.”

With the tools available to us, it’s useful to distinguish what is expected of us as storytellers in today’s multimedia environment. In doing so, let’s summarize what separates best practices in multimedia storytelling – Power Performance – from those approaches that neither advance the story nor the storyteller.

POWER PERFORMANCE IN MULTIMEDIA IS:

• Recognizing the major elements of any story, regardless of media platform.
• Approaching storytelling across every media platform available (print, audio, video, web).
• Learning from the best practices in each medium by taking advantage of the unique elements of each.
• Becoming proficient with the tools of each medium.
• Thinking visually about each element of the story, including your own place in it.
• Using all means available to interact with and engage the audience in the process of storytelling.

POWER PERFORMANCE IN MULTIMEDIA IS NOT:

• Creating a story simply to accommodate the technology available.
• Cutting and pasting a story from another medium onto the web.
• Creating stories quickly and without much forethought.
• Having only a rudimentary knowledge of each medium’s strengths.
• Ignoring opportunities for interaction with the audience, who often possess defining elements of the story.

Keep these points in mind as you begin to consider why it is important to become proficient in the performance elements of multimedia; some might say it’s as important as being well versed in the nuts and bolts of basic journalism. Both have elements in common: solid writing, good storytelling, and credible research. Multimedia is, in many ways, a combination of the enduring values of good journalism and the modern visual tools available to deliver a more compelling story.

The oldest form of news writing has always been traditional print or newspaper reporting. While the influence of newspapers on other forms of media has been greatly diminished, early broadcast journalists took their lead from the local newspaper. Why? Not only because it was easy to do, but also because newspaper reporters generally spent time researching a story before writing it. Your venture into writing for other media in today’s newsrooms should, similarly, take time. As a general precept, keep in mind this paraphrase from a popular wine commercial of the past, “No story should be written before its time.”

In fact, for generations of journalists, the distinction between time spent on a story and the depth achieved in that story defined the qualitative difference between print and broadcast reporters. Newspapers were often defined by their appeal to the cerebral side of human beings and broadcast (TV especially) to the visceral side of our nature. What, then, of the Internet? Does it engage both our brains (cerebral) and our emotions (visceral)?

The web, with its multimedia potential, is the biggest change in the way people read and absorb information since Gutenberg invented the printing press. It is, as Eastman and Ferguson write, the primary example of “discontinuous change,” meaning it is unlike any change in media that predates it. While it’s “like” a newspaper, radio, and television, it’s none of the above, nor is it a simple combination of all of the above. It is an entirely new medium that exists, but doesn’t eclipse those media that came before it. In the best sense, it is the repository medium for most of what we think of as multimedia. As such, it has defined and redefined many of the traditional roles we think of in journalism, all of which, thus far, have been derived from what we often describe as “old” media.

Newspapers and Broadcast News

There are both similarities and differences between today’s so-called “converged” newsrooms, driven as they are by multimedia demands on reporters, and the manner in which the relationship between newspapers, radio and television developed in and around each other. To start with, those who owned newspapers found radio stations to be both competitors and allies. Fearing competition, newspaper owners intimidated the Associated Press into embargoing its news to radio stations until after 9 a.m. (when presumably everyone had already read the morning paper) and 9 p.m. (when they had already read the afternoon paper). This led radio stations to hire and develop their own news staffs, ultimately benefiting the station and the public.

Over time, newspaper owners came to see the promotional value of owning radio stations. Radio was a great way to give listeners some of the story and refer them to the parent company’s newspaper for the rest. Does this sound familiar? Today, newspapers use television to drive readers to their print product, while both use the web to entice the online audience. However, the staff for each medium – print and broadcast – were once separate and reporters had specific, defined duties related to the medium in which they worked. And, while they shared the same parent company, equality did not exist. The newspaper was primary; radio (and later television) was there to serve the paper’s best interests – and profits.

Of course, all of this began to change once radio started to garner the lion’s share of the company’s profits; it certainly changed once television became its profit center. Still, a “wall” of sorts existed between the print side of the news operation and its broadcast “second cousin.” Big stories were routinely withheld from the nightly newscast until after they first reached readers the following morning. Until the 1980s, broadcast news operations were often seen by a newspaper’s executives as a necessary evil – albeit a profitable one – but certainly media that should be avoided by the newspaper’s “real” journalists, lest they be tainted by broadcasting’s supposed superficiality and personalities.

Similarly, established radio newsmen shunned television in its early days; those who emerged as TV news stars were those willing to give the new medium a try. More recently, some television news managers have held back exclusive stories for the next scheduled newscast instead of allowing themselves to be “scooped” by their own web sites. Each established medium was reluctant to accept the presence of a new technology.

One example is WEAN, in the 1980s, an all-news radio station in Providence, RI, then owned by the Providence Journal-Bulletin corporation. Each afternoon a printed copy of the top stories to run in the following morning’s Journal would be delivered to the radio newsroom, which existed in rented space several streets away from the spacious newspaper facilities to prevent cross-contamination. Today, that information in, say the Tampa Tribune’s newsroom, would be used to coordinate multimedia coverage across all the company’s platforms. In 1985, it was for informational purposes only. The radio news staff was forbidden to develop or air any of the stories the newspaper staff was developing until the following day, well after they had been published and read by the paper’s audience. It’s difficult to absorb in today’s multimedia-rich environment, but print reporters had their place and so did broadcast reporters, but they were in two different – and disconnected – worlds, sharing only the name of the corporation that owned them. How times have changed!

Today’s Print Reporter

Those who have spent most of their lives in a print newsroom are often nostalgic about the days of “ink-stained fingers,” synonymous with a time when newspapers were the premier medium and led the way for other news media to follow. It seems a better time, when everyone knew the tools associated with their job and security came from honing the use of those tools into a sharply defined set of skills. Jenny Cromie spent six years as a reporter at the Anniston Star and writes about the often difficult transition from print reporting to multimedia journalism:

It was a time when most people still took the Sunday paper. Computer-assisted reporting was just coming into vogue. And long, in-depth story features still had not met the short attention spans of online readers. Good old-fashioned print journalism still prevailed. And if you had a big story package in the Sunday paper, you could stay late in the newsroom, listen to the kerthunk, kerthunk, kerthunk of the press running in the background, and grab the first few copies of your above-the-fold story – barely dry ink and all. It was a great time to be a reporter.

Her reminiscences bring with them this reality check: the timeframe in which she worked as a print journalist wasn’t the 1940s, 1950s, or even the 1960s or 1970s. It was in the mid to late 1990s. It’s a strong reminder of how quickly the job of traditional print reporter has changed – and how those occupying what were once essentially newspaper jobs have had to change and, more importantly, adapt. In order to be successful, today’s print reporter must be not only a wordsmith, but a visual thinker across all media. He or she must become proficient with a digital still photo camera and small hand-held video camera, as well as develop an understanding of graphics, slideshows, streaming audio and video: the major elements of reporting for the web.

A typical day for today’s print reporter might look something like this timeline. The assignment: cover a breaking news story centered on a chemical plant explosion just outside the downtown of a major metropolitan area.

6:40 a.m.	Arrive on scene. Take several quick “snaps” with your digital camera. Interface camera with laptop or cell phone to send photos back to the newsroom for posting on the web.
7:00 a.m.	Interview fire chief and eyewitnesses using digital audio recorder or small video cam, preferably the latter, since it captures both image and sound – the sound can later be extracted for radio and the web; the video for the web and television.
7:10 a.m.	Using basic facts gleaned from the interviews, file a quick story for the web. Continue to gather facts and interviews.
7:45 a.m.	File second story, with updated information, maybe a few new photos, audio or video. Think about elements for TV story. If the only reporter from that news organization, he/she may do a “live shot” for the co-owned or partner television or cable outlet.
8:20 a.m.	Collaborate from the field with web editor to determine best way to present larger-scale package on the story, using not only the elements gathered in the field, but graphics, slideshows, history of the plant, identify former workers to provide perspective, either through profiles/sidebars or for audio interviews and/or podcasts.
9:15 a.m.	Begin to think about the broader, detailed story for the next edition of the newspaper.

Notice that it is over an hour and a half before the “print” reporter begins to think at all about her/his newspaper story. During that time, he/she is doing jobs formerly reserved for colleague...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The Role of the Storyteller
• 2 Reporting Stories across Media
• 3 Writing the Story for Print and the Web
• 4 Video Storytelling on the Air and on the Web
• 5 Presenting the Story on Camera, on Air and Online
• 6 Practicing Public Relations in a Multimedia World
• 7 Ethical Journalism in Multicultural Media
• 8 Putting Your Skills to Work
• Index