It’s a common scenario in newsrooms around the world as broadcast and online newsrooms merge. It means you need to quickly learn new visual storytelling skills in order to adapt your stories for online publication.

While you can find loads of online training resources to help you get started, basic camera skills are only going to take you so far. If you’re required to produce photographs that document the story you’re covering, say an editor is suggesting to bring back eight photographs for a story or picture gallery, then you also need to employ skills from photojournalism.

OnMedia’s Guy Degen offers some tips for radio journalists to help produce strong images for their stories.

What type of camera?

Hopefully your organization places as much emphasis on good photography as it does on good audio. However, I like to think that it’s skill that makes a good image rather than a good camera. So before you go upgrading your camera, go upgrade your skills.

Of course, using the right tool for the job does make a difference. If I have to collect audio and take photos for the same story, then I prefer a camera that is small(ish), turns on almost instantly and is easy to use in manual and auto mode. But most importantly, the camera must be quiet. This is because I like to be less observed and there are times when I need to record audio and take photographs simultaneously.

For many years, I used a fairly basic point-and-shoot camera when  I was producing radio features – simply because it didn’t make the loud shutter noise of my DSLR. Later, a slightly more muscular, yet silent, Canon G10 offered the manual controls of a DSLR but in a small body. More recently, the near silent leaf shutter of the Fujifilm x100s has been my constant companion, and now the silent electronic shutter of the Panasonic GH4 (D)SLR will also be in my kit bag. I think even with a zoom lens the GH4 has a much smaller profile that a larger DSLR. It’s also great for shooting video.

Whatever camera you use, learn the essential functions.  It’s just as important to know how your camera works as it is to know how your audio recorder functions. Knowing how your camera works will make you far more confident when you’re out covering a story.

These days I also use my iPhone for taking photographs. Although the image quality is not as good my other cameras, it’s mostly fine for online publication. If you’re using a smartphone just be sure to use the silent mode or turn off any beeps or electronic shutter sounds.

The iPhone also has a neat trick of being able to record audio with an app running in the background and take photos at the same time – even in burst mode.

Planning is essential but keep your eyes open

Before going out to produce a radio feature, I usually write down a list of the interviewees (voices) I need to talk to and any potential ideas for sounds that might be interesting to record. Do the same for images. Write down a shot list of relevant people or locations or objects you need to photograph. As soon as I arrive on location, I walk around and get a feel for a place and add shots to my list.

In practice, I usually take photographs between recording audio. For example, if I record an interview with someone I’ll take a portrait shot of the interviewee immediately afterwards. But sometimes you need to plan a specific time for photography and a specific time for gathering audio. For instance, if you arrive at a location in the afternoon you might have to gather some shots quickly first to make use of available light.

But just as you would keep an ear open for interesting sounds to record, so too for photography – keep your eyes open to capture a moment.

What if you have to record and photograph at the same time?

I’ll be honest. Sometimes there might be a clash. Something visually interesting is happening at the same time as something essential to record. While reporting recently in Kiev, Ukraine, I wanted to record a group of old women singing in the Maidan square. They were so passionate and I knew it would make my story sound-rich. I also wanted to take photos as they were dressed in traditional costume, but I wasn’t sure how long they would sing for.

So to be safe, I began recording audio and taking photos at the same time – one hand holding a microphone, and the other hand snapping photos. It wasn’t ideal but sometimes it’s necessary. Once I had sufficient clean audio of singing, I put the microphone down and concentrated on getting better photos as the women were dancing with protesters.

Variety of shots

Having worked a lot as a video journalist, it’s second nature for me to document a scene or an action in sequences of shots: wide shot, medium shot, close-up, etc. This is a good technique to borrow for photography too and it will force you to keep moving and looking for interesting angles. What you don’t want to do is come back with photos that are all wide, or only taken from one point of view.

For a story about a building powered by a bioreactor I made sure that I delivered a variety of shots of the building’s bioreactor façade and of the bioreactor process for the editor to select.

And when you’re documenting someone in action think about capturing both the action they are doing with their hands as well as the reaction of their face.

If you need to get in close, use your feet to “zoom”, rather than just relying on the zoom function of the camera.

Remember, most of the time your editor will want photos in “landscape mode” (horizontal) instead of “portrait mode” (vertical). Landscape mode photographs look better in an online photo gallery.

Don’t forget detail

As much as a variety of shots is useful, don’t forget to look for fine detail – getting in close to show the audience what something looks like. There may even be a good reason to use the macro mode on your camera to get an extreme close up of an object.

For a story on how people make bicycles from bamboo in Berlin, I made sure that I captured shots of fine carving the bamboo frame.

Get a good portrait shot

There’s nothing worse than recording a great interview and then walking away and forgetting to take a portrait shot of the interviewee. Good quotes in your story are going to work well with a good portrait shot. Whether it is a composed portrait or a shot of the interviewee doing something, I always make sure I have a shot of the people I talk to – even if I know it probably won’t get published.

Hopefully by the end of your radio interview, you’ve also made a connection with that person and established some rapport and trust. That’s also going to be reflected in how they react to you with the camera.

Keep it simple. Observing the rule of thirds is a good place to start for portraits. But be open to experiment. I usually try to take a portrait shot at the location of the story for context.

Below are portrait shots of a designer who has developed a new type of humanitarian shelter. I offered the editor two shots to choose from. A “classic” all purpose portrait and one that has the designer demonstrating a structural component he invented and described in detail in the story.

Practice, practice and practice

Some people have a remarkable eye for photography – they’re naturals. But like a lot of journalism skills, practice will improve your photography. You can turn a weakness into a strength. Always keep your camera with you to take photos. Make it an extension of your hand. Follow good photographers online and via social media. Borrow and adapt their ideas and shooting styles. If I had to choose just one website, a great starting point is Time’s Lightbox blog – it’s a fantastic online showcase of the best of photojournalism.

Author: Guy Degen

(photo: flickr/rocío lara CC: BY-SA)

Several digital news projects in Europe have received a lot of attention over the past year due to their innovative funding method. They didn’t have a big publisher financing their start-up costs, but went directly to their potential audience and raised millions for their platforms. This kind of crowdfunding might be a model for others to follow, especially as other revenue streams slow to a trickle.

The drumbeat of depressing news about print publishing’s decline has been with us for so long now that it’s now part of the general background noise. But digital sites, even the big ones, are also hurting as online ad revenues have slumped. More and more are abandoning the “it’s free on the internet” philosophy and setting up paywalls, with some success.

But what about the new kids on the block? Those start-ups might have the drive and ideas, but aren’t the New York Times, which has enough clout to convince people to pay to access unlimited content.

Two European newcomers think they might have found a solution. Within a year, a Dutch online news platform called De Correspondent, and a similar German project, Krautreporter, managed to raise millions of dollars through crowdfunding campaigns. They wanted to launch sites following a new business model, and in a sense, to remake online journalism. In fact, Krautreporter declared on its blog: “Online journalism is broken. We can fix that.”

That’s a big goal, but one that enough people seemed to think is worth opening their wallets for. In one month, Krautreporter got more than 17,000 people to commit at least 60 euros (about $81) for a total of over $1.2 million.

Readier to pay for quality, even online (photo: flickr/401(K) 2012 CC: BY-SA)

Crowdfunding has been around quite a while, and this grassroots method of raising capital has been used by everyone from artists to fashion designers to gamers to computer manufacturers. One of the first local news crowdfunding sites, Spot.us, was founded in 2008. But as media budgets shrink, more journalists appear to be turning to the crowdfunding model.

In addition to the start-up projects highlighted in this post, crowdfunding supports one-off projects. Working journalists have turned to it when their organizations can’t – or won’t – pay for a costly assignment or lengthy investigative research. Freelancers use crowdfunding to raise money to follow stories they think need to be told, but who don’t have the resources needed to do the reporting.

One project-based crowdfunding effort helped send a small German team of reporters to this year’s World Cup in Brazil. After negotiations with a magazine fell through, three journalists put out a call, raising several thousand euros.

While a small amount, it helped send the team of three to South America where they took a different angle than the rest of the media pack, posting on brafus2014.com stories on the periphery of the games and recounting how the Brazilians themselves experienced the global contest taking place on their doorstep. Their approach garnered them a regular spot on Germany’s SWR3 public radio station.

A place for longer stories

Krautreporter founder Sebastian Esser and a group of other German journalists were increasingly frustrated at the growing popularity of tabloid-style news stories online. Longer, investigative pieces were becoming increasingly rare and pay rates for freelancers were somewhere in the sub-basement.

Krautreporter, which is set to launch in September, wants to be an alternative to that. The start-up money will support a staff of 25 part-time journalists for a year.

The pieces on the site – around five new ones a day – will be longer and more in-depth, Esser says. Gone will be the banner ads, sensational headlines, cute cats and other click bait elements.

While the articles will be free, supporters will be able to comment on articles, play a role in content creation and be invited to special events. The idea is to build a community of people around quality reporting.

A new take on the news

Krautreporter is not the first journalistic endeavor to the look to the crowd for support. In the US, there’s the aforementioned Spot.us and well-known blogger Andrew Sullivan’s crowdfunding endeavor early last year when he decided to go independent. But topping the Germans’ inspiration list is certainly de Correspondent.

Helped by an appearance on Dutch TV by founder Rob Wijnberg, de Correspondent raised commitments from 15,000 people in just eight days in March 2013. In two weeks, 19,000 had signed on and $1.7 million committed, all for a product that didn’t exist yet.

The project’s founders were also fed up with the mainstream media. What they wanted was an ad-free site that focused on the kinds of stories that usually don’t survive the daily editorial meeting. The emphasis is on background, analysis and investigative reporting. For Wijnberg, “new” was more important than “news,” and he wanted to look at developments that might be less spectacular than most news events, but which have an impact on people’s daily lives. This was not a goal shared by editors at the big legacy paper where he worked, so he left.

Some skeptics

While both sites have attracted a lot of attention, not all of it has been positive. Several spoofs of the Dutch site went online, including one that raised 90 euros to “deliver a completely unknown journalistic surprise.” At one point, someone created an exact copy of de Correspondent and put it online with a nearly identical URL, saying the whole thing had been an April Fool’s joke. But, in the end, it wasn’t. The site went live on Sept. 30.

Germany’s Krautreporter has also been the target of criticism, especially regarding the diversity of its editorial team. Of the 28 journalists featured on the site, six are women. Ethnic diversity also appears to be in short supply. In addition, while a launch date has been set for this fall, some commentators have wondered if the site will be ready.

Last month, German media reported Krautreporter was still struggling with technical issues and needed to figure out how big a role to give its funders in determining the site’s form and content. In fact, founder Sebastian Esser told the Nieman Journalism Lab, “I’m not sure we will make it beyond a year.” He describes the site as a club in progress.

Wanting something new, willing to pay for it

Whether the two sites can keep the lights on in the long term is an open question. But enthusiasm of a substantial number of people willing to cough up cash for these new kinds of endeavors suggests there’s a widespread sense that many journalism outlets have taken a wrong turn in the digital age. The need to be first at all costs and to strip articles of context, background, and yes, essential content, in a race to match allegedly shrinking attention spans has left people yearning for something else.

Giving the public what it wants? (photo: flickr/Ol.v!er [H2vPk] CC:BY-NC-SA)

But these two recent crowdfunding success stories suggest that people still want quality news – stories they might have to sit down with for a while instead of reading on their tablet as they down a morning cup of coffee before rushing out the door.

For entrepreneurial editors willing to look beyond the familiar conventions of news gathering/writing and to try something new, the early success of De Correspondent and Krautreporter is encouraging. For independent journalists with a powerful story idea but weaker bank account, appealing to the audience is a very feasible option. But you need to be smart about it, as this list of crowdfunding tips recommends.

It won’t work for everyone, and not every crowdfunding appeal meets its goal. Last year, the photojournalism crowdfunding site Emphas.is closed after two years of life, saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

In addition, sustainability is always a challenge. Perhaps an innovative thinker can inspire the public with a novel idea or approach, but learning how to create social and economic value once the site is up and running is probably even harder.

But if the idea is good and the execution done well, the wisdom and wallets of the crowd might well start changing the digital news landscape for the better.

Author: Kyle James

The benefits in training workshops are numerous:

– most blog platforms are free to use and useful for training the basics of writing for the web;
– a blog post can replicate a standard online article;
– a blog is an easy to use, creative digital space;
– trainees can experiment with embedding multimedia and even adjusting html code;
– and, particularly for print journalists moving to digital media, the CMS of a blog often functions in a similar way to the CMS of a news media website.

However, if you’ve ever shown trainees examples of scrolling style stories such as the NYT’s Game of Sharks and Minnows or the Guardian’s Firestorm, you’ll often hear the question: how can we produce the scrolling style, especially for long form writing such as magazine style feature stories?

I usually point out the obvious, explaining that blogs do in fact let you scroll down the page. And depending on the level of experience of the participants, I might also suggest storytelling applications that onMedia has tested such as Creatavist.

But more so these days, particularly if I’m training short workshops, I like to introduce trainees to Medium – the blog platform developed by Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams.

Why Medium for training?

Using Medium, trainees get simple, yet very visually pleasing results, very quickly. And that can be hugely beneficial when trying to get your workshop participants enthusiastic about experimenting with new ways of storytelling.

Medium offers a simple blog design that lends itself to long format writing. Think magazine style features for example. You could say it does one thing very well. If your trainees have a story that observes the basics of good writing for the web and includes at least one strong image, then Medium’s design and layout enables them to produce a visually attractive piece, fast.

Opening an account is free and easy. All trainees need to do is log-in with a Twitter or Facebook account and literally start writing.

If all goes well you’ll usually hear a few “Aha’s!” and see some smiles from participants as they start to add text and images and scroll down their story.

Working in the Medium editor is very much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). You immediately see what your story is going to look like. There’s no going back and forth between edit and preview/publish modes as I’m doing right now writing this post on WordPress.

Embedding images or other shareable media such as video, audio, tweets or ThingLink images is straightforward – just a quick cut and paste of the hyperlink or html code into the desired location marked with a ⊕ will bring up the embed options.

Saving is automated (see top left of page in editing mode) which hopefully should mean no tears in class because someone has lost their work.

Medium also uses fonts that are well suited to reading on the web and mobile displays: FF Meta Serif and Myriad. Some might argue that’s a limitation, but it does mean you’re less likely to have a workshop participant publish their story in something completely inappropriate such as ComicSans!

Once you’ve published your story, you can group stories together under collections. For workshops, this is a useful function as you can make a collection of everyone’s stories. Don’t forget to add tags which make it easier for a story to be discovered and read by other users on Medium. It is after all a community of users that appreciate good writing.

And, Medium stories can be embedded into other websites and most blogs. Click on the example below and scroll down to find the embed option “…”at the bottom right of the story.

Keeping it simple

Medium is not a blog platform that you can customize with all the bells and whistles such as WordPress.

It’s not going to appeal to everyone, nor will it lend itself to every type of story.

But what Medium excels at doing is providing a simple editing interface and publishing platform. For more advanced trainees (there’s always one!) with a good knowledge of HMTL, Svblte might be appealing as an alternative blog platform to Medium that offers a similar clean magazine style of design and layout.

As with all free to use platforms, it’s worth reminding your trainees that a change in ownership or lack of funding could result in the service being discontinued and their precious work disappearing. (It does happen – Posterous was a popular blog site that had its demise in 2013). From the settings, you can export Medium stories as a zip file.

Author: Guy Degen

HTML is the language used to build webpages and makes it possible to display information on the internet. These days most content management systems (CMS) allow us to create stories on blogs and websites without having to get our hands dirty with HTML. But even with a good CMS, what you see is not always what you get, so understanding some basic HTML is vital for journalists who are serious about improving their digital skills.

In most cases your participants have probably seen HTML at some point in their web surfing: whether by an accidental mouse click that revealed the source of a webpage, or in the options to share and embed media such as YouTube videos or SoundCloud audio tracks.

To the untrained eye, trying to read HTML is like trying to read another language.

So the challenge for a journalism trainer is to introduce HTML in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your participants, but gives them enough knowledge to identify useful HTML terms, tags and elements so they can do some basic editing to their blog post or web article.

Pardon my French

Before we go any further, let me make a confession. My knowledge of HTML is about as good as my schoolboy French. In other words, I know enough HTML for day to day online work. For most journalists, just having some basic HTML knowledge is more than sufficient to adjust and customize text and media in webpages or troubleshoot some formatting in a blog post.

The beauty of Mozilla Thimble is it’s an easy to use editing platform for writing HTML and creating a webpage. Thimble lets you write and edit HTML and CSS in your browser, then instantly preview your work.

As you see in the screenshot below, you can write your HMTL text in the left hand side of the editor and see the preview results on the right hand side.

For many participants this is often a little “Aha!” moment and begins to demystify a technical language that is usually hidden to them.

Practical work

Before using Thimble in workshops, I suggest you prepare a few things to make sure training runs smoothly. For example:

– Checking that all workshop computers are running an up to date version of Mozilla Firefox, and/or all participants have the Firefox  browser on their laptop or netbook.
– Open a common Mozilla Webmaker account if you are planning to do a lot of HTML exercises. This saves time because everyone can log in with the same account rather than opening individual accounts during training. You can, of course, use Thimble without having to log in, but you won’t be able to publish.
– Ask your participants to have a couple of extra tabs open in their browser with either a webpage or something with a media file embed code that you can copy and paste such as YouTube.

Once all participants have opened Mozilla Webmaker and found their way to Thimble within Tools, I keep it simple and ask everyone to press Start from Scratch which opens both the Thimble Editor and the Preview page opposite. And this is when it starts to get interesting for your trainees.

Start from Scratch opens with the example of a simple webpage with a line of text saying: “Make something amazing with the web”.

You can immediately point out the basic skeleton of a webpage in the Editor such as the Head, Title and Body. Make sure everyone has the Show hints box activated. By highlighting the text of individual tags with your mouse and clicking on the ? icon, Thimble’s Show hints function provides a definition and explanation of the selected element. That’s a really useful function for participants.

I also ask everyone to try changing the words within the Paragraph tags, or to copy and paste this line and to add more text. It’s very easy for them to see that text will be displayed between pairs of angle-bracketed Paragraph tags <p> and </p> and that this technique is applied to display different types of media as well.

Other useful HMTL tags to know are:

<br> Line break (essential!)
<b>Bold text</b>
<i>Italic text</i>

For more, check out this quick reference list of HMTL.

Perhaps the most common use of HTML for your participants will be embedding the HTML text of an image, video or audio into a website or blog. If participants have another browser tab open with something easy they can embed, for instance from YouTube, ask them to copy and paste the embed text into the editor.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/lz4ZdL5jZb4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

It’s very easy to see what the video frame’s width and height attributes are, and when participants paste it into the editor they can experiment with adjusting the frame size.

Seeing the big HMTL picture

Once they get the idea of identifying and adjusting these basic tags and attributes of media, you could even ask participants to copy and paste the HTML text of a full webpage into the editor – just so they can see what it looks like and how they can make some edits.

I find our own onMedia Blog is a simple example to use in training.

When everyone has the webpage open, I ask them to do a right mouse click and select View Page Source from the dropdown menu. Firefox will then open a new page revealing the HTML and CSS of the selected webpage. Ask your participants to select all, then copy and paste this text into the Thimble editor.

In Thimble your participants will now see both the HMTL and a preview of the copied webpage. I suggest they experiment (play!). For example, try changing the text within the blog’s Title Text ( in this case located on Line 135):

The great thing is they can directly see changes they make to the HTML text in the Preview. And by having a point of reference of something important in a webpage such as the Title, your trainees will be able to start looking around for other elements they can adjust, be it articles or captions or menus.

Mozilla Thimble is free to use and there are loads of resources on the Webmaker site for teaching web literacy skills.

Author: Guy Degen

Add extra layers of information to images by adding links.

Thinglink lets you embed “tags” – hyperlinks and text – into images. If you have a great photograph or image you can add a link to another photo, or a website, or video clip, or audio clip – literally anything. It’s a very useful tool for creating simple pieces of interactive media to compliment a story or to use as a basic story platform. This tool is always a winner with participants in online journalism workshops. As we roll our mouse over a “tag” revealing a link to another piece of media, there is usually a collective “Aha!” from participants. And if you’re a regular reader of onMedia, you’ve probably noticed that we like to use this tool a lot.

In a much cited example here in Germany, the Berliner Morgenpost used ThingLink very effectively with a photograph of the White House Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. The icons identify who was in the room and provide relevant links.

ThingLink is used by a number of leading media houses in different ways. For example, take a look at how the Washington Post uses ThingLink for interactive frontpages.

How can journalists use ThingLink?

Open up a newspaper or magazine and you’ll often see that print media uses the classic technique of pointing to objects within an image to identify them for readers, or to perhaps offer a brief explanation of their purpose.

With ThingLink you can do the same, and more. Simply press “Create” and upload an image to the site in JPEG or PNG format.

Once an image is uploaded, the ThingLink “Editor” dashboard opens and allows you to add an “icon” to the image for users to roll over or click on. You can simply add text the “Description” box and/or add a hyperlink to more content.

There is also “Search” bar to find relevant links to media hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Amazon and Etsy.

Take a look at the example below we produced for a blog post on mobile journalism equipment.

Earlier this year ThingLink released a free iPhone application making an interesting app for journalists to produce interactive media on the road.

Within your account, ThingLink also provides useful statistics for your image.

What else should journalists know about ThingLink?

Image sizes: ThingLink scales images down to 1024px. The largest file you can upload is 25MB. If you upload an image less than 130x130px then the editor will not open.

And don’t forget, you can also upload GIFs.

Cost: Free. Publishers can opt for an upgrade version.

Sharing: You can embed ThingLink images and there are options to share to blogs and social media networks including: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Edmodo, Google+, Pinterest. This blog post from ThingLink also lets you see how tags from a range of media will display on an image.

ThingLink images also play directly in Twitter and Facebook timelines.

Languages: According to their FAQ’s, ThingLink is available several languages including: English, Finnish, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Hindi.

Author: Guy Degen