It’s now very easy for us to bring really engaging visual storytelling techniques to our reporting
A number of great apps and tools let us use the full range of media
They let us geotag what we are creating – which means we can put it on a map
And some of them let us broadcast these great visual stories direct from our smartphones.
We’re going to look at a range of the latest apps here.
They don’t all do everything I’ve mentioned.
Some are great for live reporting, others are best at other things
At building mapped, multimedia travel features, for example
Or creating timelines
So here’s a quick introduction to the apps and tools we’ll be working with
We’ll look at:
Meporter – for live, multimedia, geotgagged reports filed direct from the scene of a story
At Intersect – for multimedia, mapped stories rooted in place and time, and which can intersect with other stories in the same place. (It’s actually a lot more straightforward than it may sound)
At iMapFlickr –which turns Flickr pictures into a journey told on a map
At Gowalla – a check-in site which has just reinvented itself with a focus on travel and storytelling
At Foursquare – another check-in site which is also developing its capacity as a storytelling paltform
At Dipity, which is great for creating embeddable timelines fast
And at Vuvox, which lets you create really professional timeline visualisaitons without having to learn Flash or Photoshop.
Those last two items have been picked up from a session we did in the MMJ summer school a couple of months ago. They’re added here to give an added dimension to our discussion and demonstrations of visual storytelling.
Some of the other tools we’ve looked at before, either in masterclasses or in the MMJ textbook. We’re returning to them now because there’s new stuff to be said – and new functionality to explore.
The whole subject of visual storytelling is a big, and fast moving one. There’s a good deal of other information on it elsewhere in the MMJ website and in the paper or ebook textbook. So we’ll finish up with a screen of links to other relevant tuition.
Here’s a technical explanation of how it does that, from the Shiny Shiny tech site: “Bambuser scales the quality of the broadcast to the strength of the connection. On fast connections it will push out high quality video at a full 35 frames per second, but on weaker connections it will drop frames but keep sending the video out resulting in jerkier but still continous broadcasting.
“One particularly smart feature is a recognition of key frames. So Bambuser won't drop just any frames when it's cutting quality to save the broadcast - it will try and drop ones it thinks are less important while keeping ones - keyframes - that it recognises as more significant. For example when the picture changes noticeably it will recognise the first shot of a new image as a key frame and make sure that is kept in.
"“Other video streaming apps don't have this capability."
And it can broadcast to your blog, facebook, to Twitter or to and RSS feed.
”Narration is the most important aspect of storytelling. As the author it is your job to guide the viewer from start to finish, just as you would if you were talking. Take full advantage of the Storify text feature to explain why elements appear where they do and what they mean.
”Without some kind of context, it’s easy for stories to become a jumble of Tweets, photos and videos. As the writer, think about how you can add context to the materials you’ve embedded inside your story.
Story flow
”When you begin writing a story, think about what story you want to tell, and how many elements you need to communicate this. One tactic is to start off by writing an interesting lede,[intro] choosing a compelling visual element or tweet, and branching off from there.”
Bubbleby allows you to create content round a spot on a map – so you could build a multi-location picture of a town and the incidents that are happening there. Updated over time, these create a record of the situation.
Now it’s easy to create a page for your journalism on Foursquare. On it you can post tips. While Foursquare is designed to recommend venues, you could use to to warn of danger at them.
The new journalism? Perhaps that sounds a little portentous
After all, some of us haven’t finished with the old one yet
Maybe not, but a perfect storm of change has conspired to pick us up and thrust into a whole new journalistic reality.
The key elements in this revolution are these:
The birth of new journalistic forms – key among them curation and live blogging
Smartphones that give everyone the ability to broadcast live, multimedia content from anywhere, any time
New mobile, geo-location platforms that combine news and community, and root reporting to place
World-changing events that can’t be covered adequately by traditional journalists using traditional means of reporting
The demand from many – call them citizen journalists or just eye witnesses - to be part of the reporting process
That’s not to say the old journalistic values, the old standards, aren’t just as vital in this new world, but it does mean they are under threat.
So how do traditionally-trained journalists respond?
I can only speak for myself.
I’ve tried to curate all that is going on, and to build a resource bank that looks at all the new developments, all the new software, publishing platforms and bits of kit.
I’ve drawn all that I see going on, and as much wisdom from as many informed sources as I can muster, and tried to build a range of tutorials that present all the new opportunities for journalists, and journalism students, with numerous examples of how the most inspired and adventurous are applying these opportunities and tools to their journalism.
If you would like a personalised learning plan to help you develop your skills in any of the areas discussed above or, indeed, in any other aspect of multimedia, mobile journalism, then please get in touch.
My training company, Andy Bull Multimedia, has a wide range of elearning and in-person courses available.
Location is the fastest growing aspect of communication
Providing location-specific content holds out huge opportunities – and challenges – for journalists and publishers
How do we harness the potential of geo-location for our journalism, whether we are working in hyperlocal, local, B2B, specialist or any other media?
Whatever your beat or specialism, the exponential growth in the use of smartphones and other mobile, wi-fi enabled devices, means that we must look at ways we can make our content relevant to our users when they are on the move.
Mobile devices offer consumers information that is tailored to where they are, and what they want to do, right now. We need to put our own content on the leading mobile platforms.
The challenge to local media: Geolocate or die
The message to local media companies is: geo-locate or die. Or, perhaps more acurately, continue to fade.
For any local journalist, or local publisher of a blog, hyperlocal news site, or local newspaper then the question of locality is central to what they do.
Newspapers were, once upon a time, the best way to get information to those in a particular locality.
What geo-location does is bring a massive advance in the opportunities to do that.
The challenge for any local journalist or publisher is to ride this development.
If you don’t, if those in your area can’t immediately find information from you that is relevant to where they are and what they are doing, or want to do, than you are failing as a provider of local content and information.
I don’t see many local papers getting abreast of this. I do see some pioneering hyperlocal sites and blogs doing it.
What geo-location platforms to use?
At the moment there is a competing array of localising platforms out there.
You can’t build your own and you wouldn’t want to if you could.
What you can do is see which platforms people are beginning to use, and find out whether you can get your content on them.
That’s our aim in this masterclass.
Are they on Foursquare, for example, and could you use Foursquare as a platform for reaching people?
We’ll look at the breakthrough one hyperlocal site, BlogPreston, has made using this platform. What about Gowalla, another check-in site that lets you create local journeys?
There are other potential publishing platforms that are far less well known, and I’ll be demonstrating some of them, including a very promising one called Bubbleby which I think has great potential for local journalists because it lets you create content and community – in what it calls bubbles – around a particular location.
Great for campaigning, or focusing discussion on a particular distinct area in the town you cover.
Mapping platforms
Then there are the various mapping platforms that enable you to put information on a map of the area you cover and then embed those information-laden maps into your website or blog. We looked at using Google Maps as a backdrop to a feature on pages 417-8 of the book version of MMJ, and here: http://www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk/node/98 on the web version.
We’ll look at a range of other ways of exploiting the potential of mapping in local journalism.
Build your own GeoGuide
There is the opportunity, from a company called Geodelic, to create a guide to a particular area, called a GeoGuide, that can be read on a Blackberry, iPhone or Android smartphone.
We’ll look at Geodelic, on which I’m building a guide.
The GeoGuide I’m building is not local in the local paper sense, but locality is important to it. It’s an app that brings together the best places to train as a multimedia journalist in the UK. It’s a work in progress but we’ll look at how far I’ve got with it.
GeoGuides could be useful to any editor of a magazine where location can be relevant to some of the title’s content. A golfing mag, for example, might have a GeoGuide to the best courses and cluster a lot of relevant information around those venues. Any specialist-interest magazine could create GeoGuides.
Here are some thoughts:
A business travel mag might create a guide to each major airport.
A fishing mag could let readers see which is the best river or lake close to where they find themselves.
Real ale fans can be told where to get a pint of Owld Scroat in the strange town they happen to be visiting.
How to explore the potential of geo-location for your journalism
Mashable said this about geo-located content in its predictions for 2011:
“In 2010, we saw the growth of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR. Even Facebook entered the location game by launching its Places product, and Google introduced HotPot, a recommendation engine for places and began testing it in Portland. The reality is that only 4% of online adults use such services on the go. My guess is that as the information users get on-the-go info from such services, they’ll becomes more valuable and these location-based platforms will attract more users.
“Part of the missing piece is being able to easily get geo-tagged news content and information based on your GPS location. In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we’re going to see news organisations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a start-up will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.”
So how do we get on the bandwagon and use geo-location on our website, blogs and in the apps we create?
That’s the question this masterclass explores. It won’t give you all the answers, but it will point to some promising possibilities.
There will be some suggested projects along the way, to give you some starting points.
And, as ever, if you do experiment in this area, you must feel free to share what you have discovered with the MMJ community by clicking on any of the comment buttons and sending us a link.
