Editor, revised

I was talking to a photog at work last night about video. He’s been in the business for a while, and his experience producing a few videos in the past year made him a huge help Saturday night while I was editing my caucus piece.

We were sort of marveling at what a challenge it is to move into this new medium; the fundamentals boggle the mind when you start to think about everything that goes into producing video that’s technically solid, visually compelling and narrative rich.

I remarked that I had it especially rough coming from my background as a word editor. My colleague came back with the rebuttal that photogs have to go from working with a single frame to thousands. Moreover, he said, the entire concept of storytelling is not something most newspaper photogs get much practice in, whereas the word smiths spend all their time honing narratives.

We dropped the debate, seeing it was going nowhere and my colleague had to get going. Which is probably good; the question isn’t especially useful for improving our videography.  But in analyzing our weaknesses, we also saw our strengths.

So I raise another question for any videohounds out there: How was your background slowed or aided your move to making video?

Here’s my street a couple weeks ago:

And here it is a couple days ago:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo-Unqheh2o]

What: A video of Spokane voters going to Saturday’s caucuses

Objective: To get some genuine voices and see what people thought of the process. The primary races this year are attracting record turnout in some states, so I expected an influx of new caucus participants. I wasn’t disappointed, and most of them were a little confused.

Gained wisdom: Watch out for bad echoes. Going without a tripod can allow you to blend in a little better and get people talking before they’ve had a chance to get nervous. However, I’m going to need to practice steady hands. Get more close shots.

If you paid attention to political news over the weekend, you likely read or heard about another round of caucuses and primaries. In Washington state, Obama carried the day among Democrats and McCain squeaked out a victory.

I visited two caucus sites to talk to attendees and produce a video for The Spokesman-Review’s election coverage.

Prior to this effort, I’d had a couple failures that I’ll chalk up to audio problems and user error. So it felt great to pull one off. Let me know what you think.

Welcome. You’ve stumbled upon my fourth stab at blogging. This time, the purpose is twofold:

• I want to record my experience learning to produce multimedia and other online journalistic content for a daily newspaper website.
• And I want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for anybody else thinking of or already going down the same path.

If you are interested in how members of the press are adapting to online technology, you’ll likely find something to read here. Same goes if you are into video, audio and journalism-related tools on the Web. You may even catch me sharing a few thoughts about news judgment.

But let me make this clear: I may link to content on the site I help produce, but this blog is completely independent of my employers, and the opinions are mine. Anybody with a bone to pick about the newspaper I work for or journalistic bias in general will probably walk away disappointed.

For the rest, I hope we both get something out of this endeavor. Cheers.