May 11, 2006

By BOB STOVER
Florida Today

• Use of video increases at Florida paper

• Tips for newsroom video training

• Florida Today's video and editing equipment

Recently I had the fascinating experience of watching a group of journalists learn a complete new set of skills in one week.

In early March, 17 of our newsroom staff spent five days learning how to shoot and edit video. They started with turning on the camera and progressed to using various types of microphones, strategies for shooting various events, and editing the stories.

The students – ranging in experience from one year to more than 30 – were given several opportunities to practice what they learned. They produced two videos apiece that the instructors critiqued.

Lane Michaelsen and Harvey Mars, vice presidents from Gannett's television division, worked with the group, which included reporters, photographers, editors and online producers.

Some of our online producers had shot and edited before, but most of the trainees had no experience with video. They learned a lot, fast.

"I had never even picked up a camcorder prior to this training, and now I'm very comfortable with it," said Tim Walters, who has been a copy editor in our sports and non-dailies departments.

The week after the training ended, we were posting two or more videos a day and staffers in virtually every department were participating. We've posted as many as five in one day. In addition, we've developed video for some interactive pieces for our Kennedy Space Center page and the local zoo.

We've used it for a wide variety of stories: brushfires, murders and features on baseball spring training, for instance. We've profiled a couple's love story. And in a payback to the print world, we've even been able to capture a few excellent quality stills from the video and use them in some of our weekly newspapers.

Enthusiasm was high even before training started. We asked for volunteers to participate. Three dozen volunteered. We could take only half of them into the training.

Our early experience has shown photographers are generally the better shooters, as you might expect. And reporters and editors appear to be the better storytellers. So, while we do have individuals producing some stories from start to finish, collaboration is needed and encouraged.

Without a doubt, editing is the hardest thing to conquer and is very time consuming, especially for beginners. Though some reporters have become proficient at doing their own editing, we expect we'll have to continue to have a cadre of people on our online staff do a lot of it, especially when it's produced on deadline.

Perhaps most surprising is that we found TV work and print work aren't as different as we thought.

"These folks are absorbing a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time," said Mars, one of the instructors. "What has helped their learning curve is commonality between television and newspaper journalism. We all share the same basic values. When a reporter learns video editing, he or she knows from experience how to put a story together – a story that has the same journalistic integrity as the one they would do on newspaper side. There are a lot more similarities than differences in what we do."

Some of the trainees concurred.

"I think shooting and editing video is more natural to a print journalist," said Caroline Perez, one of our online staffers. "Instead of writing notes down, we're recording it. Instead of writing a story, we're letting the subjects tell and show us their quotes."

"Good storytelling is good storytelling, regardless of which medium is used to convey the story," said Mary Fallon, our multimedia editor. "And all the tenants of accuracy, fact checking and fairness stay constant."

The traffic on video viewing certainly doesn't equal the count on photo gallery pages, but it is growing quickly and we think readers will use it as we get better at it and they come to expect it.

"Video is a natural extension to what we already provide – stories, photos and graphics online," said Terry Eberle, our executive editor. "Video adds interactivity to a site. It allows newspapers to capture the sounds of a news event that they cannot capture in print. It allows people to see the emotion and to hear what happened directly from the person."

It will change newsrooms quickly, he said.

"We will be more nimble, and we will be acting and reacting in minutes instead of hours. We will be spending as much or more time looking over the Web site and the look of the home page as we do the front page."