Storytelling in an unlimited space: fine-tuning journalism

In an age when many believe newspapers are dying off, Mike Meister gets three papers delivered to his door every day.

Mike is the photo director at the Arizona Republic. First, he flips through two of the papers to see how the Republic compares. He looks for what they do best, and what they could do differently. Then he looks at the Republic.

“I get excited to see the pictures that I helped edit, knowing the stories behind them and how we chose a photographer to go out to shoot them and the stories behind that,” he said.

However, for many news consumers, it seems that the internet is where they like to see their news. As newspaper subscriptions decline, more people turn to the web for free news. It has many advantages: video, sound, slideshows and other multimedia pieces all in a nearly unlimited space.

In Mike’s opinion, journalists should learn to use this unlimited space to make content relevant and interesting again.

Time for Journalism to Re-examine, Fine Tune?

Because the field is so wide and the future so unknown, it’s difficult to say anything concrete about the next platform journalism will expand to. However, Mike was able to offer some short-term insight into what he believes the field should be focusing on.

“I think we’ve advanced so much in the last five years that it’s not so much where we’re going to go next, but how we fine tune where we are,” he said. “We really jumped into the internet, we jumped into video. What I’m hearing now is, ‘What’s working well? What isn’t?’”

I hadn’t looked at things from this point of view before. Could journalism be getting too far ahead of itself? Does it need to learn how to make things “relevant” again, as Meister suggests?

Much the talk I hear around the Cronkite School is that people are apathetic about news because there is so much of it. We have an ‘information overload’ problem. Perhaps by taking the time to really delve into the tools we have now, we can learn to captivate consumers with relevant content again.

As Mike put it, how do we make what we do for the newspaper work so that people still want to pick up the paper, but also want to go online and see an extension of the newspaper that print can’t provide?

This could be the biggest challenge that the field faces. How does it attract new users? New multimedia experiences online could be the answer.

A Photojournalist’s Expanding Skills

I often get the feeling that traditional photojournalism is a dying breed. No longer can photojournalists do only still photography, they must now do videos and slideshows and sound. Which is right for which story, and how do I know when to use each medium?

“Don’t pre-visualize what multimedia it should be,” Mike says. “Go out there and listen, feel what’s going around you and then that decision will come to you.”

Even then, it doesn’t have to be boxed into one medium.

Recently, Brian Storm of MediaStorm visited the Cronkite School to speak to students about multimedia and the amazing stories that his company tells. They use a variety of platforms, with videos that incorporate both still photography with sound as well as actual video footage.

I spotted Mike and a team of Republic photographers on the top balcony at the event, and I wanted to know if they were doing anything with video or multimedia production.

It turns out the photographers at the Republic already produce video content for the website as well as for Channel 12, the news station that recently merged with the paper.

“We’ve done some incredible things that [Channel 12 has been] so receptive to, and it’s opened up their eyes and made them see that they are a TV station but they can use videos with a very photojournalistic feel to them,” Mike said.

To me, this is an indicator that photojournalists with video skills are what newspapers will be looking for in the future. Time for me to pick up a video camera and some audio equipment, and fellow aspiring photojournalists might do well to do the same.

Journalists Love a Good Story

From what I’ve seen, journalists are naturally curious creatures. Many of us choose this profession because we love to find new angles and tell new stories.

However, I get intimidated by the idea of asking someone to open up to me in that way.

Mike said there are several things to keep in mind when looking for a story to tell:

1. Curiosity – this will help guide you to stories. “What tweaks your curiosity, what do you want to know more about? That’s your story.”
2. Trust – the subject must trust you before they open up to you. Be compassionate and human with them.
3. Time – “People’s lives are not in the 30 minutes that you go out there, it’s 24 hours a day.” Be prepared to go on assignment at all times of the day or night, and to go back multiple times.

What drives journalists to tell these stories, day after day?

“Everyday when we go to bed we think about what we’ve done that day and what we can do tomorrow and we wake up excited to do it,” Mike said. “If you take that away from us it’s like cutting off our heads. This is all we know. This is what we do best. We tell stories, and if we can’t tell stories that really goes to the heart. We live our work. It’s part of us, it’s engrained in us.”