It's time to jump into the multimedia pool, editors told

By Raechal Leone
Gazette Staff

Newspapers that have not yet embraced multimedia need to wade in now, warned panelists at Thursday's APME session on "Making the Case for Quality Multimedia."

"If you don't start today, you're never going to be there," said Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor for news video at washingtonpost.com.

Rhodes said he has trained about 140 print reporters to shoot basic video and has come to terms with the fact that the quality may not initially be the highest. "But we had to say we've got to get started with this," he said, with the understanding that the quality would improve with practice.

In a few years, he said, audiences will expect higher quality video all the time from their news sites.

Josh Meltzer, a staff photographer at The Roanoke Times, advised newspapers "to start slow and small" when training print journalists in multimedia. Ask reporters to collect and edit audio before expecting them to shoot video, he said. They'll learn a lot by doing so.

"You can only learn to shut up while interviewing someone by listening to yourself say, 'uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh' " over and over, he said.

The news staff at the Detroit Free Press didn't start that way, though. The newsroom didn't own a video camera until late 2005. It plunged into multimedia by making video soon after editors with the newspaper's new owner, Gannett, asked for it, said Nancy Andrews, deputy managing editor/online at the Free Press.

"We did some of the worst video known to man," Andrews said of those earliest attempts.

Then, the staff worked on improving the quality, she said.

The newspaper now offers in-house training for staffers learning to use video and can also send them to a multimedia training program offered by Gannett, she said.

All of the panelists said they've found that staffers with roots in traditional media, such as reporters and still photographers, learn about their reporting styles from using video and audio. Watching or listening to footage, they hear how often they talk over or interrupt sources, they said.

By working in multimedia, journalists can sometimes turn a dreaded assignment into a higher quality story than it would have been, Meltzer said. He demonstrated with an audio slideshow about a woman who had remodeled her home. The photos were boring, Meltzer said. But the audio, in which the woman detailed her reasons for remodeling, made the APME crowd laugh.

The panelists showed some of their successful projects, but they also talked about problems that keep them from producing more multimedia. Some journalists are reluctant to take on new responsibilities, they said, in part because they might not have time.

Some newsrooms have limited equipment and training and poor communication between departments, they said.

But training is essential, they agreed. Especially at publications with small staffs, it's no longer acceptable "for a reporter to go out and just take notes," Meltzer said.