I was present when multimedia began to take over the world. Around 1994, interactive multimedia and internet technologies—new media—made its way into higher education. One of the first journalism schools to teach classes in this emergent field was the Boston University College of Communication. William Lord, a former Vice President of ABC News and ABC News Interactive, headed the program. I was one of Bill’s first students. For my multimedia project, I produced a CD-ROM, Balikbayan: Return to the Homeland, and for a graduate project, I wrote and produced a documentary on cyberspace and education, Cyberspace@COM.
The first Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention I ever attended was in Boston, in 1997. As a newly-selected Hearst-Argyle Fellow in television news, I remember that Sangita Chandra, a past fellow, and I helped Carol Fulp, the administrator of the fellowship program, set up equipment for a workshop by WCVB–TV 5, the Boston ABC affiliate.
I also attended the 1998 AAJA convention Chicago. A year later, at the UNITY ’99 convention in Seattle, I was the New England chapter’s representative to the National Board and the AAJA National Scholarship Chair–the same year AAJA/NE won chapter-of-the-year honors.
These singular memories are very meaningful to me. Fifteen years later, I would launch a personal website, StrangeTango.com, during the 2009 AAJA convention held at Boston’s newly reinvented Seaport district. It took 15 years for interactive multimedia technologies to become sophisticated enough for my collaborators and me to design and build a personal website that expressed my multifaceted vision of life as art.
The creative collaboration’s advisers include a Pulitzer Prize finalist in public interest reporting and an Emmy Award-winning television arts and culture producer/reporter based in a major media market. Early in the morning on the first day of registration, a journalism student in the AAJA Convention News program interviewed me about StrangeTango.com. Jackie Watanabe conducted and taped the interview with a cell phone as part of the mobile journalism training. The interview was later edited with additional clips, uploaded on YouTube, and placed on the AAJA website.
With AAJA’s return to Boston, Sangita co-chaired the convention. Carol is now John Hancock’s highly influential Vice President for community relations and corporate philanthropy. Carol was also the co-chair of Boston 2004, which brought the Democratic National Convention to Boston and gave a global platform to an electrifying keynote speaker, Barack Obama.
New media, as well, has advanced in startling ways: what was then a technology that mainstream media seemed reluctant to embrace is now ubiquitous in newsrooms around the globe. I have culled some of the best take-away information and cutting-edge concepts gleaned from my attendance at five panel presentations on digital multimedia.
Audience Engagement and Development
Doris Truong, Copy Editor, Style, The Washington Post
Joshua Benton, Director, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University
Angie Goff, Reporter, WUSA9, Washington, D.C.
Vindu Goel, Deputy Technology Editor, The New York Times
How can multimedia platforms develop and engage an audience? The panel offered valuable tips on the use of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, to drive traffic to a website. Mobile technology and crowd sourcing were brought up as low-cost ways to outsource labor.
Doris introduced the panelists and moderated the discussion. Social media is the new SEO. Vindu emphasized that social conversation is the way to build audience, that there is an etiquette to using social media. Blogging is the most powerful tool used in evolving stories and breaking news, from on-the-scene Twitter updates to links in the blogosphere.
Twitter acts as an echo chamber, and users tweet to be re-tweeted. The Nieman Journalism Lab has more than 13,000 followers. Joshua estimated the Lab sends out 15-20 tweets per day, re-tweeting the day’s news later in the evening. Followers can also ask questions via Twitter. He suggested using crowd sourcing, like an open call, as a way to tap the collective wisdom of the audience and to cultivate audience engagement.
Accordingly, journalists now act as curators for readers, sifting through what is important and finding the best sources of news and information.
Angie offered specific examples of how social media helped her build a loyal following as a traffic reporter—Angie’s Army—to gain leverage within her workplace and to transition into money-making franchises such as a clothing line and jewelry. Do not expect to go viral right away, she cautioned, keep it simple by using Facebook and Twitter as initial, cross-media platforms.
More tips for successful social media networking:
- Increase your search engine ranking and traffic
- Gain credibility in the eyes of the reader
- Foster transparency in reporting
- Jump into the social conversation to build reader loyalty
- Respect your audience, do not tease with refers – they will go elsewhere
- Share link love
- Use your actual photograph in your profile
- Have a unique voice, use social media and audience engagement to build community
Recommended resources:
http://twittercounter.com/ - Twitter follower statistics
http://bit.ly/ - a simple URL shortener
Creating a Web Site: A Quick Guide
Leezel Tanglao, Online News Producer, KCBS 2/KCAL9, Studio City, California
Elizabeth Jia, Multimedia Journalist, WUSA9, Washington, D.C.
Our collaborators and contributors took a year to create StrangeTango.com. Elizabeth and Leezel showed how easy it is to build a professional-looking website in no time, without any knowledge of HTML, Flash, or JAVA.
Online templates and tools, such as WordPress and Blogger, allow the user to set up a website or blog with little trouble. Elizabeth stressed the importance of physical location and reliability of the web host/server and noted that websites can be customized with themes, widgets, auto-updates, and by adding embedded videos and Twitter plug-ins.
Leezel and Elizabeth advised the audience to anticipate emerging technologies and to print hard copies of important documents as back up.
Design tips:
- Avoid clutter
- Use images wisely
- Pick smart website navigation
- Interactivity keeps a blog relevant
- Attribute by linking to original work with hyperlinks
- Use RSS feeds
- Promote your website on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, send email blasts
- Place your website URL on your Facebook profile
Recommended resources:
http://www.gettyimages.com/ - royalty free images
http://www.drpic.com/ - crop and modify photos without PhotoShop
http://www.vimeo.com/ - HD quality video sharing site
http://www.slide.com/ - create slideshows for websites
Doing It All: Tips for Working on Multiple Platforms
Niala Boodhoo, Multimedia Specialist, The Miami Herald
Victor Merina, Senior Correspondent/Special Projects Editor, Reznet
Ram Ramgopal, Executive Producer, CNN
Today’s journalists must be versatile enough to write for a convergence of print, broadcasting, and online media. This panel demonstrated how to take your writing, and your career, to a multiplatform level.
Print and broadcasting differ from online journalism in one fundamental way. In the former, the journalist can repeat and rephrase questions, or use these techniques as part of the pre-interview. Multimedia, on the other hand, requires planning and forethought. Broadcasting on the online platform has many of the same elements as a performance art piece. Whether long-form or short-form, the emphasis is on looking at stories in a new way.
In Ram’s artful and playful television packages for CNN, the tone was natural, conversational, and authentic—the narrower the focus, the stronger and more tightly focused the story. His advice was to keep the tone conversational, to use natural sound to capture a slice of life, and to know when less is more: cut in and get out.
Victor shared his comprehensive checklist for creating unique, one-of-a-kind online features.
- Try different things
- Seek a voice, appreciate the details
- Provide perspective—history, context, and culture
- Consider the language, hear the silence
- Be a reporter, whether it is a personal piece or an essay
- Write with authenticity, not arrogance
- Have a sense of place and of character
- Make the personal universal
- Make a point, and a clear one
- Use powerful imagery, what resonates
- Give telling examples, details, and anecdotes
- Use contrasting descriptions
- Use a quote that matters from a person who is meaningful
- Employ good structure and organization
- Have a recognizable tone to your piece
- Have a distinctive style or approach (experimentation, individualization)
- Emphasize good, interesting writing
- Finally, move the reader along—think story, not therapy
The media is always looking for new sources of unique and interesting content; aggregation sites are becoming increasingly influential. Twitter is especially useful as a community-building tool.
In answer to my closing question, “What is the next wave in online media, in telling a story?” Niala’s response was perceptive. She said the future is user-generated content on his or her own platform: everyone wants to be his or her own brand.
Recommended resources:
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ - a simple way to manage Twitter
Copy Editing, Big Type and Search
Gil Asakawa, Manager, Audience Development, MediaNews Group Interactive
Henry Fuhrmann, Assistant Managing Editor, Los Angeles Times
Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google
Publishing to the web extends your brand. In the competition to be the first to get the story out, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines play an important role. How the choice of headlines, lead-ins, and search terms matters in getting a story noticed.
Gil emphasized that users do not browse, they search. Traffic comes from search engines, other websites, and social networking sites. Henry added, “…channel what you’re already doing.” He called Craig a rock star, while Craig revealed that Google’s “secret sauce” is basically to think like a person. He advised journalists to “be smart” about writing articles that stand on their own, such as breaking up briefs to provide more stand-alone content for Google to search.
Much of the panel discussion focused on questions from the audience.
I asked why Strange Tango appeared at the top of Bing’s searches, while its position migrated between the top and bottom of Google searches. The personal website had launched two days earlier, and I wanted to know how to rise to the top of Google’s page ranks. In response, Gil kindly typed in the URL so the entire, standing-room-only crowd could view the new website. A Google search further revealed that StrangeTango.com populated the entire page: Google had found Strange Tango.
In internet marketing, the objective is to rise in the Google page rank—strategies include links to social aggregation sites, other websites, blogs, link exchanges, and using keywords. Content ranks higher in search as Google searches the tops of stories. The same keywords should show up in title bar, URL, lede and headline. Popular referring domains include Google, Yahoo, The Drudge Report, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.
The best tips to make your content search-engine friendly include:
- Use keywords where search engines scan: title bar, URL, headline, and tops of articles, use keywords in the first several paragraphs
- Front-load the headline–Google’s algorithm focuses on the first few words
- Use hard news ledes instead of feature ledes–Google searches the tops of stories
- Be first–what gets posted first, gets indexed first
- Break up briefs packages–post items separately for cumulative effect.
Recommended resources:
http://www.google.com/trends - analysis tool that allows comparisons of how often specific search terms are being searched on Google
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ - daily search volume of keywords
Multimedia Storytelling and Planning
Andrew DeVigal, Multimedia Editor, The New York Times
Victoria Lim, Multiplatform Reporter
Constance Hale, Director, Program on Narrative Journalism, Nieman Foundation at Harvard University
Alternate story forms engage the audience. This panel focused on writing for the web and nonlinear narratives, defining the elements of the best multimedia storytelling.
The collaborative team at The New York Times integrates interactive news, photography, graphics, video, and design as part of the company’s multimedia strategy. Projects designated as one-off projects may take weeks to produce, while templated projects, such as an audio slideshow, are built once and used recurrently. Andrew gave the audience insight into the process and technology of an innovative, interactive multimedia presentation that illustrated reactions of fans to Michael Jackson’s death. The proprietary software was created using Flash authoring software and was originally commissioned for another package before being redirected for this breaking news story. Representative figures of fans around the world could be clicked on to read each individual’s comments.
Compelling journalism innovates by using a unique narrative voice and style. Constance identified the elements of narrative journalism—modeled after literature—as human drama involving a hero or protagonist, literary structure, metaphor, and craftsmanship. The best storytelling is an emotional, cathartic experience, told in an artful way with foreshadowing and a layered narrative. Slide shows, videos, and powerful images enhance the emotional experience.
Victoria Lim gave examples of how her television broadcast packages were repurposed as online content.
Recommended resources:
http://www.10000words.net/ - tips on how to incorporate multimedia technologies into journalism
http://www.vuvox.com/ - create interactive slideshows and presentations
I came away from the AAJA convention feeling encouraged and rejuvenated. The meticulous planning that went into the yearlong, highly collaborative process of creating the personal website—serendipitously—had already integrated the cutting-edge concepts of engaging storytelling and iconic style highlighted by the panelists!
For my friends and me, in the near future, it will be very interesting to follow Strange Tango’s journey from its launch during the AAJA Boston convention to its positioning as a global platform.
Mission: Create a website that is edgy and ethereal
StrangeTango.com: Literature as an Art Installation in Cyberspace
“What remains as documentation of a life? Strange Tango mines the boundaries of digital streams and visceral storytelling, where pixels and dreams flow together. Video, reportage, and nonlinear narrative meld in captured moments from the life of A. D. Tejada, artist - traveler - citizen of the world.”
