Creating the kind of storytelling that is rich and filled with passion means you can't sit on your butt and wait for someone to hand it to you. And if it hasn't been done before, you'll probably have to make the case that it's worth doing.
That's exactly what visual journalists like
Jen Friedberg, a photojournalist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are doing. Friedberg is among a handful of journalists who have been pioneering online visual storytelling in their newsrooms. Despite the lack of time, funding, and equipment, Friedberg has put together compelling online projects that provide another dimension to storytelling.
In an e-mail interview, I asked Friedberg to share her experiences creating media-rich projects for the web.
How do you choose, plan, produce, and design your projects? Until recently no one at my paper was very interested in multimedia, and I was not fast enough to produce projects on deadline, so I stuck to featurey stories that I thought would have interesting audio.
Lately, I'm much faster, I can turn a fairly complex project out in a few days, like the recent look back we did on school desgregation in our area.
It took a week to shoot, collect audio, and find archived pictures, and then three days to put together the 6 slideshows, edit the audio, and set up the main interface. I spent a couple of hours after that tweaking and troubleshooting.
So, because I was in charge of planning, producing and choosing the subject, I pretty much picked what I thought would be fun to work on. My early work was done almost completely on my own time, so if I wasn't interested in it, it wouldn't be much fun.
In the past few months, I've been working with other departments that want projects produced. Still, it's such low volume that we produce almost all of them.
I now work with the graphics department as well. In the future, I suppose, we'll have to consider what types of subjects have enough depth to work in multimedia. Any subject could be portrayed in multimedia, but the best ones have lots of layers of information and color.
I design the projects myself (except for some graphics which the graphics department does.) I've been studying design and learning from our graphic artists. Then I have other people try out the sites. If the design is too hard to understand, I change it to something more user friendly.
What software and hardware do you work with? Did you have to purchase it yourself? I work with ProTools (a free sound editing program) and Flash MX, which I did have to buy myself. Also, I use a mini disc recorder and 2 different microphones, which I also purchased. The paper bought my PowerBook G4 for my photography and that's the same machine I use for my web work. I use iMovie for the video editing and had to buy an external hard drive on my own to edit the video. I do have a music editing program called SoundForge which I paid for as well.
How does the Star-Telegram support your efforts? Do they give you extra time to work on the projects? Funding? At first, I did most of the work on my own time or between assignments. Now, I often get a few paid days to assemble them. I have been getting more support lately, although online projects are not given the same priority as the regular paper.
Where would you advise someone to start with such projects?
I would advise someone interested in beginning multimedia to start looking at other people's work on sites like Journale, www.joeweiss.com, Interactivenarratives.org, and National Public Radio.
Then, they should begin mentally breaking down all of the pieces they'd need; audio, photos, stories and possibly video and figure out how they'll get each bit. After they gather the software and hardware, the best idea is to just start working. The main thing to remember is to keep it simple.
How has it affected how your approach to your photojournalism work in general?
I'm much more aware of the sounds at my assignments. Every assignment I'm at, I keep my eyes and ears open waiting to see if I find anything that could be broadened into a multimedia project. Now, I don't limit my shooting because of space constraints.
Anything else you would like to add?
This is a new type of storytelling that combines the best aspects of radio and newspaper. It is a new venue for documentary photojournalism that provides a newshole that never shrinks. An online project is one of the best ways to provide vast amounts of information for our readers and an unprecedented amount of access to internet resources.
I love Jen's work, and I appreciate anything -- like...
