Notes from NPPA: Multimedia is changing the rules

By Chris Carroll

Vanderbilt University

Like so many other players in the worlds of academic, student and commercial media, professional print photojournalists appear to have split into widely disparate camps. Among those attending the National Press Photographers Association annual summit this past week in Tampa were pioneers, embracing change and optimistic about technological and philosophical advances, and there were traditionalists, determined to resist change and cling to the established rules of a proud profession.

NPPA serves both broadcast and “still” photojournalists, but its summit understandably diverged into separate tracks for each field, with little overlap among the participants – mandatory or voluntary. I attended the still photo track because as a former daily newspaper photojournalist, these are my people, but more importantly, because this track was very clearly focused on new media with its new demands and opportunities for photojournalists.

As is typical with every NPPA event I’ve ever attended, there were countless examples of the type of exemplary, soul-resonating images that tend to stay with you with stunning clarity long after you close your eyes for sleep each night. The privilege to listen to the photographers who produce this work elicits a simultaneous mixture of healthy competitive envy and the compulsion to simply worship at their feet. If nothing else, the experience was universally inspiring and no doubt put a couple of hundred newly energized and highly motivated photojournalists back on the street this week. Notable among the giants who shared their images and stories were Christopher Morris of VII Photo Agency, Ted Jackson from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Scott Strazzante of the Chicago Tribune, and Josh Meltzer of the Roanoke Times.

But, as I mentioned, I attended to learn more about multimedia, and I wasn’t disappointed. NPPA was lucky to have attracted Mindy McAdams, author of the book Flash Journalism who conducted a six-hour seminar on Flash for photojournalists. Mindy has given journalists an invaluable gift by distilling the complexities of this important software down to those functions most essential to our applications. She added a big bow to that gift in Tampa by further refining the lesson to focus on those features photographers would most likely need.

I give credit to the large crowd that jumped laptops first into Mindy’s workshop. These folks recognized that their future is online and that Flash is their gateway to those precious readers who have forsaken print. To the anxiety filled among us, Mindy offered reassurance. First, she said, for those who only want to produce web-based slide shows with an audio track, there’s an easy answer. It’s a program called SoundSlides, created in 2005 by Joe Weiss, an interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. This “ridiculously simple storytelling” application automates the creation of Flash files for the ridiculously low price of $40. The program is written exclusively for the Mac platform, but that’s fine by me.

Inevitably though, photojournalists will want the layers of interactivity and customization that Flash provides. Yes, it’s difficult to learn. At first. But, as Mindy said, so was PhotoShop. For newbies who have had a little taste of non-linear video editing, the basic Flash playhead will look and act familiar. This hurdle is not nearly the mountain it appeared to be, as Mindy so masterfully demonstrated. Competence in Flash has become, as competence in digital capture once was, the new essential skill for photojournalists. So buy the book and start building.

The bellwether moments of the NPPA summit to me all came during presentations by Richard Koci-Hernandez of the San Jose Mercury News. Six months ago, Richard, a 13-year veteran photographer for the News, along with fellow shooter Dai Sugano created MercuryNewsPhoto.com. Recognizing web-based multimedia as the future, these guys approached their Knight-Ridder management with a proposal to “reinvent” the paper’s online approach to visual storytelling. As in all good corporate media fairy tales, they were told, “No way. No resources. Incompatible with current proprietary software. Not a priority.” Instead of retreating to the status quo to join the march toward oblivion, these guys took action. One committed to learning Flash, the other to learning Dreamweaver. They bought the MercuryNewsPhoto.com domain (no kidding) and quietly built the site hosted on a $10 a month private ISP. They devoted time off the clock, weekends and nights, and gambled their passion on the future. What they created is nothing short of remarkable. Look for yourself. Then it was back to the management suits to demonstrate what they had done in a sort of “how do you like me now” moment. Guess who’s in management now?

The message from all this being delivered by Richard, joined by Josh Meltzer and others at this NPPA session was that now is the time when photojournalists have an opportunity to change the rules. And whatever new model for delivery of content evolves, the photojournalists want and need to retain control. If not, as Richard said, the guys in the glass office will impose an industrial-style multimedia template on the staff that could potentially sap the creativity and stifle the storytelling process. And, he said, we should all work together, with photojournalists forming an open source community to develop techniques similarly to what has been done in the software development world.

One important lesson in all this for college media is how Richard and Dai pulled it off. They knew it had to be cheap and it had to be easy or their fellow photographers would likely never embrace creating multimedia projects. Among the first hurdles was collecting audio – both ambient sound and subject interviews – a challenge both technically and as a new skill for photographers. The technical demands were initially met by making use of a device most of the staff already owned: iPods. The iPods were connected to inexpensive iTalk microphones. The audio capture skills were developed over time, just the same as photo skills are honed, with practice. They also listened and learned from the masters of audio storytelling, the reporters with NPR.

The MercuryPhotoNews crew’s early answer to audio editing software? GarageBand. How to edit slides, transitions, titles and two-track audio to file for easy importation to Flash? iMovie. Almost everything necessary to create professional quality, multimedia packages comes bundled standard in iLife on every new Macintosh. The programs are intuitive, easy-to-learn and typically languish unused on Macs in newsrooms across the country.

Of course there’s been much evolution in the six-month multimedia experiment at the Mercury News. Photographers now capture audio for sound slide presentations on much higher quality digital recorders like the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 that utilizes common CF cards, common to digital photographers. Another recommended audio recorder was the Edirol R-09 by Roland that has the advantage of using AA batteries instead of an internal rechargeable cell.

The most dramatic evolution that represented a seismic shift in the NPPA culture was when newspaper photojournalist Koci-Hernandez announced that he no longer uses a still camera. When on assignment, Richard now captures video, audio and stills using exclusively a Sony HVR-Z1U high definition, prosumer camcorder. With the results, he produces multimedia for the web and stills for the paper. Yes, stills for the paper. Since the camera shoots in high definition, it is possible to easily capture a single frame with a 6 MB image that can be reproduced six columns wide for the paper with no significant difference in quality when compared to an image captured in a digital still camera. He mentioned that the staff also uses other, less expensive high def camcorders such as the “Sony HDR-FX1 and Sony HDR-HC3.

First, there was the mouth agape reaction by some in the room who repeatedly asked, “What about the paper?”

Richard’s immediate and candid answer: “I don’t even look at the paper anymore. I could care less. I now have more to offer the reader – I have a deeper experience to share with the reader,” he said. “We as photographers used to focus our passion for the holy grail of page 1 of the paper. Now that passion has moved online.”

I listened with interest as veteran photojournalists called “foul.” It was unfamiliar, unseemly, unnatural, they said, for a video camera to be in a print photographer’s arsenal, and inherently unfair competition. For example, one photographer said, “for me to capture the decisive moment of the football landing in Jerry Rice’s fingertips with a still camera is very different and more difficult than you shooting video of him running down the field, then scrolling frame by frame in editing and extracting the same perfect microsecond of the event.”

I immediately understood his angst, and I think it is illustrative of the psychological trauma currently rippling through all levels of journalism. I vividly remember the days working as a photojournalist shooting SEC football on film with an unforgiving manual focus 300mm 2.8 lens. It took practice, experience and skill to master follow-focus on a semi-pro running back. We sports photographers considered ourselves members of a rarified, private club. Then high-end autofocus came on the scene. And we resented it (especially those of us who couldn’t initially afford to buy it). It was unfair. Anybody could do it. Then, of course, we all began to use autofocus, and never looked back. Why do long division with a pencil when you have a calculator at your fingers?

But here we are again, now with the still vs. video divide. It’s a natural human reaction for photojournalists to take enormous pride in having attained a “one shot, one kill” peak precision skill. It’s how we define ourselves. It’s part of what separates us from the amateur snap shooters. There’s an element of reluctance and grief that comes with being forced to abandon hard-earned expertise. This exact phenomenon resounds through traditional media where cloistered members of the journalism priesthood are resistant to allowing lay people – citizen journalists – to participate in the conversation.

Richard provided the answer, at least as it relates to photojournalists. Remember that the camera is just a tool. The decisive moment is still the decisive moment, it either has the capacity to evoke human emotion or it doesn’t, regardless of what technology captures it. And that’s what’s important. It’s about the story and telling it well. And doing that in a compelling way is what will always define and separate us as journalists, no matter the technology nor the medium.

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