NPPA Multimedia Immersion Summit

Posted on June 5, 2007

These videos will give you goosebumps — they’re well done (I love the style of the first one), and they’re so inspiring.

I didn’t get to go to this — I’m not a professional photographer, so that limits my participation, I suppose. But you bet I’m going to share these overviews and anything else I can find about the NPPA summit (that link has a lot of good stuff) with the photo staff at my paper.

Thank you to Multimedia Shooter for posting these videos, a podcast and a list of new, cool and old tools.

Video skills are in demand

Posted on June 5, 2007

I think it’s interesting to see what job postings are out there to keep an eye on the direction the industry is moving, and a friend pointed me to this one at the Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Online Visuals Producer - The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is seeking a journalist to join our multimedia newsroom in this newly created position. Recognized nationally for our print visuals and online graphics, we’re looking for someone who can help bring that success to video and multimedia at Sun-Sentinel.com. The ideal candidate will be experienced in video newsgathering and storytelling, and be able to develop skills in photographers and reporters. He/she will be responsible for the execution and programming of video, photography and multimedia on our site, our relationship with our TV partners, and the oversight of our five-member multimedia staff. We’re looking for someone with at least five years of experience in visual production, including deadline experience. Experience in television news is highly valued. Previous management experience is preferred. Demonstrated experience with AVID, Final Cut Pro or equivalent system is required. Photoshop and Flash experience are a plus. Candidates should submit a letter of interest, resume and a demo reel of no more than five work samples of different content and styles of presentation. Samples should be emailed as zip files, easily found on web pages or mailed on CD/DVD. Please send to: Kathy Pellegrino, Recruitment Editor, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 or to kpellegrino@sun-sentinel.com. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Sun-Sentinel.com cover South Florida, a highly competitive media environment and a region with some of the country’s most exciting news events. Sun-Sentinel is part of Tribune Co., which has newspaper, online and television news operations in markets around the country including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

Again, it’s amazing how quickly these multimedia jobs are changing. It seems like video production at newspaper Web sites just started, although I guess it HAS been about 2 years or so already that it’s become more commonplace.

I don’t know anyone over at the Sun-Sentinel so I can’t really recommend this job, but it certainly does seem like a great opportunity for someone to move from a video producer to a management level position — while continuing to concentrate on the storytelling aspects of the project. And interesting, I think, that Flash (coding, etc.) and Photoshop experience are listed as “a plus.” Used to be a requirement for multimedia work. :)

Multimedia training opportunity

Posted on March 25, 2007

Here’s your chance to attend an almost-all-expense paid training session.

Knight New Media Center’s Multimedia Training Workshops, May 20-25; registration deadline is April 13.

“We sponsor in-person multimedia training workshops for mid-career journalists and some journalism educators. The workshops are held at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and are funded by the Knight Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and other private sources.

“The expenses-paid workshops run for six days and provide intense hands-on instruction on how to do multimedia stories for the Web. Topics covered include using digital video cameras, photo cameras and audio recorders; doing storyboards, stand-ups, voiceovers and other broadcast techniques; digital video, audio and photo editing using Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro and Photoshop; creating photo slide shows with Flash; Web page creation using Dreamweaver, and multimedia Web site design.”

Share it with your newsroom. This is a great chance for reporters to learn some of these skills.