News-Record.com

As I mentioned, I spent last week at a seminar on multimedia and convergence at Berkeley. The seminar is held under the auspices of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism by the graduate schools of journalism at Berkeley and Southern Cal.

There were 15 of us, mostly working journalists plus an educator. We spent most of the week working in teams doing real-life reporting and editing on multimedia presentations (or at least the first couple of pages of them) while learning practical techniques of reporting for the Web: audio and video recording and interviewing, recording standups and voiceovers, editing sound and video and creating Flash presentations.

(For grins, you can look at my team's presentation here. Our assignment called for us to create a site of at least three pages, incorporating at least two video clips, at least one audio clip and at least one Flash presentation. But as a piece of journalism, none of us would would call this "finished," so you need not e-mail me about holes in the reporting, etc. Anyway, it's about a Berkeley professor researching the possibility that herbicides may be causing certain species of frogs to grow ovaries inside their testes. It's called "A Man and His Frogs," a title my team chose after rejecting my suggestion, "Dude! Where's My Gonads?!")

I've got a background in music and radio production, but the last time I edited audio was with Ampex tape and a razor blade, so my immersion in digital editing was quite the awakening. If this technology had existed when I was in high school, I suspect my life would have taken a very different course.

In addition to the practical work, we also learned more about the philosophy of online journalism vs. more traditional news media, including some things to keep in mind when attempting to report a story for the Web from the git-go, rather than reporting for print and then spinning off some sort of Web presence for the story.

We also heard from such new-media luminaries as Neil Chase, ex-Marketwatch managing editor and now with NYTimes.com; Bill Gannon of Yahoo; Craig Newmark of Craigslist; and Rob Curley of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, KUSports.com and Lawrence.com. I'll spare you the details (Curley's got a great story and tells it well, but his presentation ran more than 2 hours and included a 98-page PowerPoint file), but taken as a whole, their remarks and predictions were interesting ... and reassured me that, if there is a way out of the dead-end situation in which the newspaper industry finds itself, we're probably headed in the right direction, albeit too slowly.

I've briefed JR, outlining generally where seminar leaders think we need to go from here: 1) I need to practice my new skills and get really proficient (and I'm going to need some software to do that); 2) I need to get with others in the newsroom to begin a) getting them to start reporting stories for the Web and b) training them in the practical techniques; and 3) finally, once Nos. 1 and 2 are well along, begin training people in the community who are interested in multimedia reporting for our site.

Without betraying any confidences or scoops, I can tell you that I've already begun Steps 1 and 2a (and I can edit audio/video at home in a pinch). So this seminar is already beginning to pay dividends for me, the N&R and, I hope, you.

Below the jump, I'm posting a list of links to sites that helped inform our learning and discussion during the seminar, courtesy of seminar co-leader Jane Ellen Stevens.