'A human voice'

When you're out there, asking questions, talking to people ... or even just out there not asking questions or talking to people ... make sure to listen. Sometimes sound is the story.

Writers (and more), gather

Poynter's NewsU has lined up a really good-looking series of webinars on all kinds of writing: short writing, narrative, social media, revision, writing for visuals/sound, and more. Great lineup of presenters, including Chip Scanlan, Jacqui Banaszynski, Roy Peter Clark and more.

These webinars will offer a lot to anyone from the least- to most-experienced person in our newsroom.

Check the right-hand rail for dates and times and I'll see you in the conference room. I'm sure these sessions will give us plenty to talk about.

9/11 storytelling

Did anyone come across any strong storytelling related to the Sept. 11 anniversary? I didn't have much time to scour sites for good stories, but I did come across this audiovisual explanatory piece by the New York Times on how the World Trade Center memorial is taking shape, what will be there, what it means and how it's all being put together. Really good stuff.

If you came across any good storytelling today, please share.

As creepy as it is cool

Spotted this on the New York Times Web site.

Alec Soth went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but watched the festivities from his hotel room, only to headed out with his camera for the clean-up and people leaving Ash Wednesday mass. It's more art project than traditional journalism. But, between the found audio and snippets of video, there's definitely a story here.

Why can't we resist finding out what happens next?

You gotta watch this (scroll a bit down the page to see the video). You can watch the whole 30-minute video, of course, but if you fast forward to the 10:45 mark, you'll see/hear Ira Glass, brilliant storyteller on the radio show This American Life, tell a story about a story.

In between playing snippets of the story, he reveals why TAL stories are so damn compelling -- no matter what they're about -- and even better, he dissects why.

The story he's playing gets to a point of what's going to happen next when Glass turns off the tape and says, "At this point, nobody turns off the radio." And then he asks why. If you think about the facts in the story, he says, "This is actually not that interesting of a story. ... And yet, suspense has been created. Why? How does that happen?"

He breaks it down until about the 20-minute mark. It's gold.

Speaking of multimedia, listen here

Anyone listen to Radiolab? Just heard about it this morning. Two guys, Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad (Krulwich being a former national-level science reporter, not sure about Abumrad's resume), talk deeply but informally about science and other things that talking about science leads you to.

I'm going to check it out to see what there is to learn about audio storytelling (and not just because I love freaky nature stuff, like the video that's on the web site right now titled "Zombie cockroach revived by brain shot.")

If you've listened to it, or listen to it after reading this, let me know what you think.

Journalism prof's guide to multimedia journalism

... and, of course, to multimedia storytelling.

Mindy McAdams of the University of Florida blogged on how journalists can "transform themselves," as she puts it, into multimedia journalists. She collected those 15 posts and put them in a PDF. It's available here, but it's long, so I thought I'd do a quick abstract, based at least in part on Mindy's text, to help. If you want more, see the whole document; it's pretty good stuff.

1. Read blogs and use RSS -- Read blogs, especially ones about online & multimedia, to help you understand changes in media, keep up with the changes, and adapt. Set up an RSS reader (e.g., Google Reader)

2. Start a blog -- Helps, or in some cases makes, you search for new information and connect with other online/multimedia sites & people.

3. Buy an audio recorder and learn to use it -- In our case, see Chris Glass. A number of you have added audio to your reporting/storytelling already. Anyway, audio adds another level to your work.

4. Start editing audio -- Again, some of you have done this here. Great. And you know it can be time consuming. But it's similar to editing your notes or notebook as you turn from reporting to writing ... so you already have some skills. As McAdams notes, this also forces you to broaden your computer skills, a necessity if you're embracing multimedia.

5. Listen to podcasts -- You need to hear good audio stories to have something to model yours on, to have something to shoot for.

6. Post an interview (or podcast) on your blog -- So you're saying, Blanchard, why haven't you posted an interview or podcast on your blog? Guilty. But this is another area where doing this forces you to broaden your journalistic skills.

7. Learn how to shoot decent photos -- Because, as McAdams says simply, every journalist ought to be able to get a basic spot news photo. You might be the only one there.

8. Learn how to crop, tone and optimize photos -- Check in with Chris or Brad on this one if you want to learn. Again, McAdams is approaching this from the standpoint of, if you're going to be a fully-developed multimedia journalist, you've got to know how to work with your own photos.

9. Add photos to your blog -- This is quite easy in Blogger, but Movable Type drives me up a wall. Maybe I'm doing something wrong ... but in any case, if you have a blog, try to get art on it the same as you would try to get art with a story in print.

10. Learn to use soundslides -- This is a different, and usually very cool, way of storytelling, and something that our photographers do very well. Making your own might even be fun.

11. Tell a good story with images and sound -- If you have a story that's worth telling this way, you ought to be able to pull it off.

12. Learn to shoot video -- The natural extension of No. 11.

13. Edit your video -- The natural extension of No. 12. Again, many of you have done this. Chris and Brad and probably others can coach you.

14. Publish your video on your blog -- Tom Joyce seems to have taken to this nicely. Blogs are better when they have more than just headlines and text. (I need to find a picture to go with this post).

15. Maintain/udpate your skills -- To crib from McAdams: Get over your fear, learn to fail, find good tutorials. From me: Keep pushing yourself. You're not going to master any or all of these things in a couple of weeks, or after one coaching session or a three-day seminar. But by making time to work at them, you'll first learn, then get better. That's the point.

Stop to listen

Calling attention to good stories from 'This American Life' is a little like shooting fish in a barrel.

Or, is that shooting fish into a barrel, as was offered at our dinnertime conversation last night. Or is shooting fish in a barrel really that easy, my older son said last night, because of the light refraction and the fish is moving around and stuff. You can see how weird things can get around our table.

Anyway, the point is, you could click on any archive of TAL and be rewarded. But I just listend to this and got a kick out of it, so thought I'd pass it on: Go to This American Life's archives, and click on 'Wrong Side of History.'

Ira Glass is talking to a guy about something that has been covered to the nth degree in national media, but he does a slow reveal here, and it made me smile. And then the rest of the piece kept offering humorous little moments. It's just good storytelling.

You couldn't tell it this way, exactly, on paper. But think about how you could do it -- the interviewing you'd have to do, how you'd describe the way the people in the story talk, how you'd use dialogue and when you'd narrate to bridge the gaps and give people information they needed to understand what was happening.

Now see this

Couple neat examples of visual storytelling, one on an unusual subject, one on a subject we all know and love (though no one loves it more than Jason):

• Here's a Washington Post slideshow on a girl born with dwarfism who undergoes a procedure to lengthen her legs.
  
• And here's Jason's take on overnight Black Friday. He spent the night out there, had tons of video, and edited down to this sharp piece. I'll ask Jason how he did that and have his thoughts in a future post:

The (multimedia) future

This is some fascinating documentary-type multimedia work. It's called MediaStorm, run by a guy (Brian Storm) who used to be multimedia director at MSNBC. Its mission, it says, is to "usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media."

Pretty ambitious, but this clearly seems to be where the best audio/visual storytelling is headed. Check out what they're doing. For example, a sound-slide called "The Ninth Floor" is introduced like this:

"In 2004, anywhere from 20 to 30 young addicts lived on the ninth floor of an elegant narrow building overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The squatters had turned the sprawling apartment into a dark, desperate and chaotic place."

Once you click on it, it will hook you like a strong narrative does.

How many kinds of narrative are there, anyway?

With Robb Montgomery in here yesterday talking about all kinds of narratives -- graphics narratives, voice narratives, etc. -- and us talking fairly regularly about true narrative stories, here's my take on the differences:

This is not a definition to exclude all others, but, as we've learned over the past two years in our storytelling focus, true narrative is a story with a beginning and end ... a conflict that is resolved ... a story told over time, usually chronologically, which allows the story to unfold as it actually did ... and a story that is reported so that you have the dialogue, scenes, action, tension, timeline and so on that you need to effectively tell the story.

A true narrative story is not a passage of descriptive writing, or an anecdotal lead that contains six grafs of narrative writing, or a piece of dialogue within a broader conventional story. And a true narrative story is most certainly conceived, planned, reported and written differently than news stories or feature stories or profiles or any other type of story we do.

They are emotionally and intellectually pleasing to read and experience, because human beings love stories, and in fact have used them and relied on them for centuries as a way of recording what happens in their lives and communities, of recording history, of passing on culture, and as entertainment; and because it is satisfying to have an experience in which someone you like or can identify with faces a problem you can see yourself facing, and finds a way out of it.

When Robb about other types of narratives -- say, graphics narratives, voice narratives, video narratives -- he's broadening and stretching the meaning of the word to include snippets of stories, or complete stories that aren't necessarily conflict/resolution, or layers of stories (like the text that would accompany a video.) Ideally, those 'other narratives,' say, text in a video, would not simply be for the convenience of the video's producer or just haphazardly included; the text would be written with the aim of telling in a different way, or reinforcing, the story being told by the visuals.

Robb is also talking about inviting readers/users to create their own narratives ... which can mean nothing more than information on a topic they discover by fooling around on your web site for an hour one day. In other words, he's not saying readers/web users are going to write our Sunday enterprise narrative story. He's saying that by using the info we put out, and that others contribute to our site, they essentially create a personal story.

For example, we could do Utterz at the fair and we could ask fairgoers to do them too. Then someone goes on their computer and listens to, say, half a dozen. They've just created their own personal narrative of the fair. It's not a true narrative, and it's not necessarily the story we offered them, but it's their story nonetheless.

One big thing to remember, I think, is that there is not only room for both kinds of narratives in what we do, there's a need for both. People are going to want to create their own stories by using bits of information we give them in various forms (the soldier death map, or posts on the biz blog, or fair Utterz). But people also are going to want us to make sense of things -- major events like the guy who got stuck on the spike fence, daily-life events like the woman who lost the scarf her dear friend had given her, and so on -- through storytelling. They want and need us to, in a paraphrase of something Hoover said yesterday, go out and find stuff out and come back and put it in a story to tell people things they didn't know before.

There is always going to be an audience for that.

And a P.S. -- Robb Montgomery says "the web is about small talk. Small talk leads to big talk." That fits right in with our focus on Felix Feneon this year -- essentially, the narrative story in three lines. That's one way to think about writing for the web -- make a little say a lot.

NPR's race in York: audio storytelling

I haven't listened to this whole thing yet, but Chris Glass reports that it's great audio storytelling, in which a true story unfolds in audio, as opposed to just a string of interviews spliced together.

NPR hung out with several people in York, getting to know them a bit, and then did a series of interviews with them to examine, as the hosts say, not whether these people were going to base their vote for president on the candidate's race, but rather on the racial experiences of the voter himself or herself.

The series kind of kicks off here.

If you want to go straight to the audio, try these links for the first report and second report.

Stephen King graphic short story

25 episodes, one a day beginning July 28. Watch them all here and deconstruct the storytelling techniques and framework of King's story, 'N,' and the techniques used in the visual telling of it.

Neat method of storytelling, local connection

In honor of our upcoming oral history project, check out this interactive from the NY Times on people exonerated by DNA testing.

It includes our very own Ray Krone, which is neat, but what's amazing is hearing how many people in this situation were willing to describe their experiences to the Times for broadcast in their own words.

In fact, the companion print pieces in the times were relatively thin slices of the whole project. The online piece is far more detailed.

Pretty cool.