Old Reporter, New Multimedia Tricks

I've been teaching students to research, report, shoot and edit their own video stories since 1991, but I've always had a technical assistant to teach the part about operating the camera and editing equipment. Now I'm ready to take on the world as a one-woman band. The Poynter Institute's hands-on workshop at RTNDA in Las Vegas was intended to teach old dogs, like me, a few new media tricks. However, I was the only seasoned reporter in attendance. The rest of the participants were fresh-faced college students, eager to show off the skills they had already learned! All of the participants were female, until three journalists from Ghana joined the group and two of them were men.

My assignment was to put together a story on RTNDA efforts to push for the release of journalist Roxana Saberi, wrongly condemned by an Iranian court to 8 years in prison on espionage charges, with no public trial. More on that in another post.

I felt confident of my ability to seek out interesting interviews and video, but the problem was HOW to do it. I fumbled with the multiple cables and the unwieldy tripod, accidently kept hitting the Canon camera's on-off button, and had trouble ingesting my footage into the Final Cut Pro editing system because of video frame drops. It's probably unrealistic to expect even the most technical geek to learn an editing program in an hour or so, but I got it almost all done by the time I had to leave the session to catch my plance home. Many thanks to my longtime colleague, CBS photog Les Rose, and new friend Lynn French from KPNX for guiding me through it.

With a little more practice, I'm confident I'd become an expert. I think back to my early days on the streets with an ENG crew of up to four people: a camera man, audio box operator, truck operator and me as the reporter and mother hen. I used to long for my newspaper reporting days of covering a story with just a pen and a notebook. Now, armed with some new skills, I'm even more prepared to coach my students and clients to take on the multimedia world!