hiatus

I will be on a brief hiatus until I reach California.

Keep in touch, I’ll be back in a week or two.

four quotes and a constant

Jay Bookman in his editorial piece 'When myths take priority over the facts' recently wrote that:

Nations, businesses and institutions also create and live by mythologies. To cite an example uncomfortably close to home, newspapers have long embraced the mythology — backed by some 500 years of history — that what we do is indispensable to an informed society. That mythology has now been exploded with the arrival of the Internet, pushing the industry into a desperate search for a narrative that better fits the world around us. We are coming to realize that if you ever let your mythology become too distant from how the world really works, you're in trouble.

Sion Touhig wrote at the end of last year on his blog that:

Bizarrely, the enormous audience drift from print to the online space is seen in some photojournalistic circles as a 'crisis'...it ignores the massive audience potential of the Internet and seeks to solve the crisis, by retreating further into a hermetically sealed world of books, galleries and subsidies from various grants and competitions.

Sion then he had another entry where he discussed:

The Fourth Screen & the Seventh Mass Media...
Visual audience evolution in four screens:
1/ Cinema
2/ Television
3/ Computer
4/ Online handheld devices, like the just announced Apple 'iPhone'

The potential audiences to be reached by visual material is potentially mind boggling in a new age of consumer defined media consumption - people will increasingly obtain visual information at times, places and in types of their choosing, NOT defined by the schedules of TV channels, or the print runs of newspapers.

It also represents a possible huge audience for photojournalism, perhaps surpassing the previous print audience...if we make efforts to engage with them via this route.

Finally, David Nordfors on his blogs about how 'Journalism Now Subject to Moore's law'

By going on the Internet, the news industry has become subject to Moore's law (things entering the market in two years time will have double the capacity of the stuff being released today).

Many newsrooms are bothered by introducing new tools and routines. They better start enjoying it, because as from now, as soon as they have made a change, they need start planning for changing it again.

So add it all up as the Violent Femmes would sing and what do you get?

News organizations, formerly newspapers, are going to have to innovate faster than they ever have in previous times. How you get news and stories to your audience will change, that is virtually guaranteed. What is the up side? More people can get to your content, local content will still be important and content will still be king. BUT, now you will have to complete cross platform and cross media and now nationally and internationally. Are you up to the challenge?

'we don't nedd to stinkin badges'

Richard Koci Hernandez, deputy photo editor and multimedia guru at the San Jose Mercury News, just posted results for his first online multimedia contest on multimediashooter.com. I loved the fact that there were 'no stinking rules' and that his comments and categories are somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

That being said he posted some very interesting projects that are worth experiencing, learning from and getting inspired by. In the end, or what links them is the sense of storytelling and pushing boundaries in different directions and with different approaches. But the sense of exploration is palpable.

Chad Stevens placed for BEST INDIE FILM APPROACH with his Buffalo Creek.

Scott Lewis garnered BEST PHOTOGRAPHY for his Arm Wrestling.

Susanna Frohman’s MOST INNOVATIVE APPROACH project called The Shape of Life really breaks out of the mold of most multimedia projects.

David Duncan’s SHORTEST SOUNDSLIDES EVER! B52 Fly over works in an odd sort of way.

Craig Kohlruss BEST USE OF AUDIO NARRATIVE for Cookseyville demonstrates how a powerful audio track can really carry a package.

Big congrats to Andrew Dolph for his BEST USE OF SOUNDSLIDES On Wrestling project that I critiqued. Well done Andrew. I believe it is his earlier edit.

Poh Si Teng, Matthew Raiche, Kirstina Sangsahachart, Justin Mott, Lauren Chin created the BEST DESIGNED/CHAPTERED SOUNDSLIDES Traversing Blindness which has a great interface and thoughtful design. I love the Braille.

Finally Kari Collins has the BEST AUDIO/PHOTO EDIT for her It's All Relative. It is a great slice of life package, well photographed. I really like the way she uses ‘blank’ slides to change the pace of the project.


If you want a laugh Patrick Yen and fakemustaches.org visit the upper left link for video.

if it was so obvious...

A nice story link via Mindy McAdams over at teaching journalism online. Matt Ericson, deputy graphics director at The New York Times, gave a presentation at Malofiej in Pamplona, Spain highlighted at the Society for Newspaper Design (SND) web site. 'The best piece of advice Matt gave was, as he said, simple in theory and difficulty in practice: Find the best way to help people understand the news.'

I couldn’t have said it better myself. News organizations, formerly newspapers, have a competitive advantage in understanding news. Now we need to help people understand the WHY. TV and the internet can provide the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE much faster, but not the context and the WHY.

Shan Carter in online graphics at nytimes.com is quoted as saying that he's trying to build work for 'both Bart and Lisa Simpson,' meaning that it can be surface and simple (like Bart) or deeper and thoughtful (like Lisa). It's a good way to think about making work that appeals to two very different kinds of readers.

Matt used the example, among others, of the good reporting that The Times has done at chronicling the war in Iraq in the Casualties of War interactive feature, which can be both a fast scan or a completely immersive experience. How you choose to use the data depends on your needs, and in that way it is a completely different tool than the print newspaper. Check it out to see how you can dig deep into complex data sets.

Obvious idea #2, understand who your audience might be and who your audience is and tell stories for them and to them where they are, not where you think they should be.

mk12 part trois

Ok, I am clueless. If I had explored a bit more, I would have realized that MK12 does in fact, on their site have some “Stranger Than Fiction” clips.
My bad.

So, check out their first pitch to the movie’s director.

Their second pitch.

And finally, take a look at the opening sequence that ran in the film. One or two observations. The first idea that caught my eye was the use of the nautilus shell as the 'mode' for the sequence to segue into the next shot with the previous scene rotating and getting smaller. You can see their work with this idea in Brazil Inspired: Macho Box. (Which is almost as good a name as 4D Softcore Sweater Porn.)

Secondly, their use of text and cascading letters in the second pitch is a very clever use of typography that you can only do in Flash or movies, but what a neat idea.

What also emerges in much of their work is their utilization of layering, selective focus and moving typography that moves your eye around the screen as well as anything you can do in print. Very interesting work if you really start to pull apart why they are so successful.

Like yesterday, you can over imagine or overuse many of these ideas in daily journalism; but as a stepping stone to think differently about stories, what a place to start.

mk12 part deux

My apologies.

I had all intentions of writing more about MK12 and 'embryo' yesterday but I did not. Our web guy, what a great description, and I spent the afternoon trying to pass a variable from an html file into a Flash .swf to then reach into the variable named folder and pull out formatted photos. TRANSLATION: We are trying to automate our 'photos of the week' section of our multimedia page. Another entry for another day.

Andrew asked: 'I watched "Embryo", and I don't understand. Can you explain further?'

My big push would be for folks to rent or watch 'Stranger Than Fiction.' That being said more about 'embryo.'

There are a lot of other 'shorts' and movies on their site and I have not explored all of them yet, but I look forward to doing so.

Like RKH (Richard Koci Hernandez) I really enjoy finding other art forms that can influence how I do my own work. In the case of the movie STF and MK12: how to provide an interface for users to navigate Flash packages or 'nuggets.'

In regard to 'embryo' specifically I really enjoy the way they blend 2-d and 3-d in such interesting and different ways. This is not all transferable to journalism, but it gets me thinking 'outside the box.' How people work in different mediums can help me think about how I do things in my medium.

The segment in 'embryo' where the suitcase opens up and files move out reminds me of something I have seen in Flash somewhere and it would make a great entranceway for a complicated package. How you display information and provide ways for people to interact with it can be just as important as the story you are trying to tell.

I am a big fan of the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principle but MK12 does some very interesting graphics work that could influence how you provide your GUI in your Flash package or graphically tell your story in print. More on this next entry.

off topic, maybe

I will get back to 'Stranger Than Fiction' later.....just wanted to go off topic for a moment.

May of you who visit may want to help make the world a better place. While I try not to preach on this site, except about journalism; I have found two interesting ways that people might be able to contribute worldwide and at the personal level.

One such group that is helping provide micro loans is kiva.org. William Kristoff of the NYT just published a story about this in Tuesday paper. The idea is similar to the work of Muhammad Yunus who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in this area.

Depending on your level of interest of desire, there is another group called globalgiving that just looks for grants or gifts.

I was reading today’s NYT about youth today who are strangling themselves for the rush and I really started to wonder about our culture and society. Alternet published a short excerpt on Bill McKibben's new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future on their site.

So, I know that many journalists want to make a difference with their telling the stories of their subjects also want to do something outside of work; here is your chance.