I am at Medill teaching two multimedia reporting seminars for the AAN Writers Workshop. Here I am demonstrating how to photoblog using Flickr and an iPhone in real time.
I passed around my cameras and recorders and favorite Web sites for producing Web graphics reports and fielded some great feedback from the participants. It is so much fun to turn the classroom into a big conversation and live demonstration. I really enjoy having to think fast and take the lead from the delegates questions.
So many great enquiries that will make it into a future post as I teach more seminars about multimedia reporting. It’s been a popular topic this year as I have taught it from Vancouver to Berlin.
It is never the same seminar twice because of the way that the lecture simulates the networked social media experience. The students decide the specific focus based on where they are in the game and what they are eager to know first. Some of it is disorienting to the self-proclaimed “luddites” - so I spend a lot of time going back through the techniques to bring it home.
Who knew it could be so much fun to demonstrate delicious but it is a great tool to help the audience members take notes and see firsthand the power of tagging, RSS and metadata and how at the end of the day, reporting fundamentals still matter.
Camp VJ Chicago has been a hit according to students and instructors who participated. Director of the J-School at Michigan State Jane Briggs-Bunting attended the fundamentals classes early in the week and blogged about she is leading the charge for her faculty to cross over as digital immigrants. Instructor and newsvideographer blogger, Angela Grant was enamored with her experiences with students, the Chicago venues and the work that Camp VJ students are able to produce in these two day classes. Her post says it all:
“A Photographer’s Paradise”
Those are the words of Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist John H. White enthused when he describes the venue Visual Editors chose for the training classes. He speaks in the video above about how he came to learn the importance of seeing with his ears when making news videos.
The films that the students made here in Chicago demonstrate a wide variety of locations and subject matter.
Hopefully they will post them soon at the Camp JV site.
This is the first post I have been able to manage (I am the CampJV conference organizer) because ever since David Dunkley Gyimah arrived Tuesday evening we have been filming, cutting and interviewing non stop. He leaves in a few hours on a plane back to his home in the U.K. - but right now he is cutting the Camp VJ promo film with his laptop on my dining room table in Naperville. We documented our experiences in stills and video. David did a long sit down with Angela Grant and we filmed all day yesterday in the Loop, at North Avenue Beach, at the Quincy El station, underneath Wells, and in Millennium Park.
There will be more films and David, perfectionist that he is, will likely recut the promo once he is back home. This iterative practice is so fundamental to capturing the essence of what Web reportage really is. As close to real time as possible and, increasingly, done by fully-trained journalists. At Camp VJ that’s what we expect our of our instructors and our students.
And this is only the start of Camp VJ.
I have been cutting a short feature film that wraps up what the Camp VJ training brings to students and to their newsrooms. So look for that, soon.
Also, David is producing a long-form CampVJ film that illustrates the potential of Web Video journalism and the training styles that connect with print journalists. Something unique to consider as we grow and expand our skills.
And we are not doing this alone. Camp VJ is not just immersive, mashed-up training but a community of like-minded souls. At the request of students who attended CampVJ Chicago - David and I have just launched a NING site at CampVJ.com.
Sometimes the journey is the reward. One of the media development partners in Cairo is large publishing house in Egypt - Aakhbar_EL-yom. This short film illustrates the passage from street level to a shoulder-to-shoulder meeting with the chairman of the board, Mr. Mohamed Ahdy Fadly.
Related multimedia blog entries
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Robb Montgomery is the CEO of Visual Editors and eduction consultant. He has worked as a visual editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune and partners with media groups and journalism associations in more than 16 countries to design training curriculum for video journalism, newspaper design and multimedia reporting.
