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Made
for the Medium: Photojournalism at MSNBC.com
by Brian Storm
Redmond, Wash. –
I can understand
how many working in photojournalism have negative feelings about the
state of our profession. Assignments are rare, pay abysmal, and contracts
are far reaching.
As a result, some of the best people in our profession don't stay long
because they can't make a living. The business woes of journalism are
leading to an industry-wide talent drain.
Young,
energetic and naïve photojournalists spend the first few years
of their careers learning the craft, honing their skills for the privilege
of beating their heads against what seems to be an immovable legacy
of disrespect.
It's a vicious cycle that we MUST find a way to break.
I have a hard time standing still at a time when our profession seems
to be sliding off the edge. The decline is particularly galling when
a revolution in both storytelling and mass distribution in new media
are gaining momentum.
Although the economics of new media haven't caught up with its
storytelling capabilities yet, the coming of a transaction based Web
will assign hard dollars against quality images.
The race to have
the best content will become more aggressive as those with the best
pictures will make the most transactions. Publications need to have
the integrity to share the fiscal prosperity. This in turn will allow
photojournalists to stop worrying about money and go back to making
great pictures.
These challenges are our opportunities. It's clear to me that the still
image can survive in this whiz-bang medium, but photojournalists have
to work to extend their storytelling capabilities. For
those ready to learn new tools and work outside the box, a new level
of storytelling is emerging in mass media.
New media is a new chance for photojournalism.
Made
for the Medium Storytelling
At
MSNBC.com we live in a unique world where TV, radio, print and Web philosophies
coexist, often in a blend that creates more depth than an individual
medium could alone.
I'm fortunate to work with a passionate and talented multimedia team
at MSNBC.com. We are responsible for the audio, photography and video
elements of the site, and are encouraged to push the envelope.
As the audience for Web journalism grows, we want our users to be more
than readers—we want them to be viewers, listeners, and participants.
Photojournalism is the bedrock on which we build those experiences,
but we need to grow beyond that to fully realize the possibilities of
the Internet.
On some levels, the Web has moved past newspaper and broadcast-style
publishing. We already tap sophisticated radio conventions and will
soon move into a high-end video world. Technological advances on the
Web will offer the best of all these media – with full-frame video,
rich, surround sound audio and huge photographs.
Our focus at MSNBC.com is now on playing to the strengths unique to
our medium by adding value to still images with in-depth captions, tightly
edited audio/video components. Our goal is to
use new technology so well that it disappears and the story is what
the reader remembers.
That said, we don't need to reinvent the basic rules of great picture,
audio or video editing. We can -- and should -- leverage the core ideas
from traditional media.
National
Public Radio Meets Documentary Photojournalism
I
often refer to audio that complements a photograph as a "caption
on steroids."
Gathering ambient sound and recording a subject's interpretation of
a story are the perfect complements to a documentary photograph. NPR
reports often paint a vivid picture of characters and their surroundings,
putting the listener on the scene and providing evocative context in
a style complementary to slice-of-life photojournalism.
How many times has a subject told you a story or provided a detail about
his or her life that you remembered in the picture-editing process?
Wouldn't it be powerful if you could share that experience with your
readers as well?
Investing in a mini disc recorder and microphone is probably the most
important thing a photojournalist can do to get into the new media game.
Instead of photojournalists TAKING a picture, we can GIVE our subjects
a voice.
Working
with Torsten Kjellstrand (who later was named the 1995 Newspaper
Photographer of the Year) during his master's project on "Black
Farmers in Missouri's Bootheel" was a pivotal, ear-opening
experience.
Torsten told me that he learned more about his story during an afternoon
of interviewing farmers than he had in the first three weeks of
shooting. Listening to his tapes, the realness of ambient sound
paired with fly-on-the-wall photojournalism hit me like a sonic
boom. |
A screen
from Torsten Kjellstrand's
"Black Farmers in Missouri's Bootheel"
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In late 1996
Laura Kleinhenz and Michael Lutzky teamed up to document Australian-born
John Graham's battle with illness and his desire to end his life.
Kleinhenz covered the story in stills and Lutzky in video.
The audio track in this project, particularly slide 4, is a great
example of how sound can take a picture story to a new level.
Another example worth hearing is Amanda Otter in Allan Detrich's
Children
of the Underground package.
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Unfortunately,
very few photojournalists are thinking about gathering audio in
the field. Ideally sound comes from the actual event, but phone
interviews can also work well. Listen
to 9-year-old Collier Wimmer explain how she decided to help in
the World Trade Center relief effort.
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"Burns-style
video"
Video allows the MSNBC.com media team to blend the best of several
genres - the power of a still image with the movement of video
to guide the eye through compositional power points and narrative
actualities of audio to reinforce the message and tone of the
package.
It's a pretty simple formula, one that Ken Burns has brought
to the mainstream with his epic productions "Civil War,"
"Baseball" and "Jazz." In homage to Burns,
we call this production style "Burns video" around
the media cube at MSNBC.com.
One
of our finer examples, produced by Robert Hood, is in our Casualties
of War special project.
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 Going
cinematic
As
the next generation of storytelling on the Web evolves, the “couch
potato” experience of linear storytelling is colliding with
the forward tug of computer posture to offer cinematic presentations.
Single images in a slide show format with related audio don't provide
the cohesive, linear experience that video can provide, but current
video quality and image size on the Web still aren't as solid as
we'd like.
Sequencing images in Flash provides a larger image size as well
as audio synch in a streaming format. We are working aggressively
at MSNBC.com to provide a 3-D, layered experience in our storytelling.
Click the play button on slide 2 of “The Week in Pictures”
at
this link.
The
goal is to empower readers to spend as much time as they want while
providing our “director's cut” version of a story. The
hash marks on the blue control bar allow users to scrub back to
any image they might want to review.
More
examples of special projects that use the Flash sequencing technique
to enhance storytelling include the 2001
Year in Pictures, the Sept.
11th attacks and aftermath section, Hope
at Heartbreak Motel by Kari Rene Hall and Aging
in America by Ed Kashi and Julie Winokur.
The
Week in Pictures
TWIP, as it's
known in our newsroom, is a showcase for compelling pictures from
a diverse pool of sources. We hope to publish pictures that will
affect our readers, make them feel the emotions behind the news,
and help them better understand our world.
TWIP couldn't be produced as well in any other medium. TV can't
provide the archive of past weeks or the ability to vote in real
time. Print can't provide the related audio, video or sequencing
capabilities.
TWIP is the canvas we use to push our new ideas. Layers of new storytelling
concepts make their debut in TWIP and it's the portal for the
best of our visual storytelling.
Original
Reporting
You can't just put a TV station and a newspaper together to create
a great new media product. Sure, you'll have words and pictures
from the newspaper as well as moving pictures and sound from TV,
but that's not new media -- that's old media wrapped economically
in a new format.
Sites
that can gather information with a focus on new media's
strengths will have an advantage over those that simply
repackage existing content.
MSNBC.com multimedia producer Jim Seida and freelance
photojournalist John Brecher covered 65 straight days
of the 2002 Olympic Torch Relay. They explored the technical
and aesthetic edges of made-for-the-medium photojournalism
by integrating audio narratives with flash sequences and
360 experiences.
Some
great examples of gathering for the medium:
Day 6: New Orleans, LA., slide 4
Day 21: New York, NY, slide 4
Day 24: Lake Placid, NY, slide 4
Day 43: Monterey, CA, slides 3 and 4
Day 44: San Francisco, CA, slide 4
Day 48: Eugene, OR, slide 1
Day 50: Juneau, AK, slides 1 and 4
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Video
on the web
In the early days of the Web tiny 160 X 120 pixel video clips
lost their novelty after the first 10-minute download rewarded
you with a 25 second choppy, abusively compressed clip.
The ability to stream has created an opportunity to serve video
to a mass audience. In the month of September 2001, there were
over 70 million requests for video on MSNBC.com.
As compression techniques and bandwidth continually improve video
quality on a computer will eventually be as good as television
today. |
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At MSNBC.com, we integrate
video on our top stories and aggregate the best of the “Nightly
News with Tom Brokaw,” the “Today” show, MSNBC TV
and CNBC on our Video News page at http://video.msnbc.com. We also
offer numerous live streaming events on our Live Video page at http://livevideo.msnbc.com.
Video on the Web benefits from time shifting (watch Nightly News
anytime you want) and the ability to pull up keyword search returns
on demand. Related content to the right of video in the MSNBC media
player is a new media sweet spot. This area allows us to add value
to video with real-time voting and related links to learn more about
a story.
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Original
reporting with video
One of our goals with original
video reporting is to spill the video experience onto the
Web page. We are in the early stages of Synching interactive
applications with video but we believe in the concept of allowing
the reader to drill down through interactive layers of a story.
For example, click
the high bandwidth link in the lead graphic Then click
on the “enlarge interactive” link to swap between
a video and interactive experience.
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Should
you be shooting video?
You
are a still photojournalist at heart and want to be a player in
new media. Should you put down the still camera and learn how to
shoot video?
My answer, in most cases, is no.
Producing a great video package is very, very hard. Producing 10
to 15-second audio clip is a cakewalk in comparison. Learning how
to handle audio well is a prerequisite to video. If you build the
skills of interviewing and script writing required to tell a strong
audio story you are in training to produce video.
If you really want to learn and get inspired about video go see
the video presentations at the NPPA Video Workshop in Norman, Okla.
It’s boot camp for video storytelling that features John Hyjek,
Mark Anderson, Doug Legore, John Goheen, Bob Dotson and Jonathan
Malet. These top-tier video thinkers will rock your world as visual
storytellers. Their use of natural sound is the backbone to some
of the best visual storytelling you will see this year. You can
catch similar presentations at the NPPA national conference in late
June.
I aspire to publish Norman-caliber video on MSNBC.com mixed with
equally strong documentary photography and NPR’s “This
American Life”-style narratives. If we can integrate the very
best of these storytelling formats, we can produce an experience
that will put storytelling at the forefront of new media.
The
Golden Era of Photojournalism in New Media?
The
still image has enjoyed a technical advantage over audio and video
in new media. Bandwidth limitations of the web have essentially
given the still image – at a measly 15-20k download - a window
of opportunity to be King Media.
I worry that those passionate about the still image haven’t
taken full advantage of this opportunity to establish visual philosophies
for its use in new media.
In the mid-90s, few Web publications employed picture editors. Many
publications didn’t have someone to champion their visual philosophy
and standards for image size, licensing fees and ethical decisions
were left unattended. The result was a visually unsophisticated
Web. With few exceptions, postage stamp-size images, sloppy crops
and generally poor edits resulted in a lackluster presentation of
images.
There are so many amazing editors and photojournalists working in
print today. If a small percentage of that talent pool could slide
over to assist with precedent-setting issues in new media, photojournalism’s
future would get brighter.
One of the important turning points for photojournalism on the Web
was when Tom Kennedy left National Geographic and took over the
visual direction of The Washington Post’s Web site.
Kennedy brought enormous credibility and experience with him and
photojournalism finally had a big-name player in new media. Kennedy
made his mark quickly by creating the lush Camera Works section
featured on Washingtonpost.com and has been a pioneer in the early
evolution of the Web.
The Web moved quickly through the first few years with some distinctive
eras. The dot-com frenzy is over, and so is the dot-com bomb. Continued
change is guaranteed.
Traditional media has had years to develop systems, conventions
and editorial philosophies. New media’s landscape is still
a wild frontier. Technical advances will continue at a rapid pace
and the allure of hypermedia to the next generation of newsreaders
points to the increasing importance of new media publications.
Mind share is one of the most important commodities now in journalism.
We are all fighting for the limited attention span of a mass audience.
Over time, the use of new technologies will become commonplace and
those who tell stories best will attract the most readers.
Brian Storm
Director of Multimedia, MSNBC.com
brian.storm@msnbc.com
Click to read more about Storm’s early experiences that lead
him to MSNBC.com.
Related Links:
MSNBC
The Week in Pictures @ http://msnbc.com/twip
Picture Stories @ http://msnbc.com/picturestories
Special Reports @ http://specials.msnbc.com
Video News @ http://video.msnbc.com
Live Video @ http://livevideo.msnbc.com
Sites to keep your eyes on:
Independents
JournalE @ http://www.journale.com
PixelPress @ http://pixelpress.org
Focal Point F8 @ http://www.f8.com
Photobetty @ http://www.photobetty.com
A photo a day http://www.aphotoaday.org
Editorial Photographers http://www.editorialphotographers.com
Newspapers
Washington Post’s Camera Works @ http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/photo
The New York Times @ http://www.nytimes.com/library/photos/index.html
Minneapolis Star-Tribune @ http://www.startribune.com/projects
The Herald Sun @ http://www.herald-sun.com/gallery
Magazines
Newsweek @ http://www.msnbc.com/modules/newsweek/showcase/gallery.asp
Time @ http://www.time.com/time/photoessays
Recommended
Reading:
The Master, Ira Glass from NPR's This American Life:
Choosing and structuring a story: http://www.thislife.org/pages/trax/comic/story/comic_story_1.html
Writing for radio (applies to video as well):
http://www.thislife.org/pages/trax/comic/writing/comic_writing_1.html
Editing tips:
http://www.thislife.org/pages/trax/comic/editing.html
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