The irony of success

One of my primary motivations for starting this blog last June was due to our newspaper’s website not allowing the display of anything but text – regurgitation of stories already published in newsprint. If I wanted an outlet for teaching myself how to produce multimedia stories, it would have to be on a blog of own or on someone elses website, someone who actually wanted to post one of my slide show productions.

The prospect of this symbiotic relationship with someone elses website has been in the back of my mind for each one of my story projects.

My first audio story on a garage band workshop was offered to the city parks & recreation department for use on their website. They loved the production but never posted it. My first audio-driven slide show about an annual chalk art festival was offered to the sponsoring art association for use on their website. Again, the slide show was praised, but the organization never actually got around to posting it. After finally completing a slide show last month on an elementary dual language program, one that I was ASKED to produce for use on the elementary school’s website, it has yet to be approved by the school district administration.

That made three for three of my slide shows that went unpublished outside of my own blog, so the irony was not lost on me that my first successful placement of a slide show was on the news blog at my own newspaper. That sense of success, however, was short-lived.

The blog at my newspaper was started last fall by a staff reporter out of his frustration over corporate restrictions placed on our newspaper’s website. He was instrumental in gaining approval to set up a blog from the newsroom for “breaking news” and bgan doing some interesting things with it that we weren't allowed to do on our own website: using photos, graphs and even short pieces of video – mostly all his stuff. Officially, it was the newsroom’s blog but he was the gatekeeper and practically the blog's sole contributor. My efforts to contribute to what had become essentially "his" blog didn’t get much response from him.

Not until I got assigned to shoot the photos for one of his pet stories and thought of a way to benefit our mutual interests.

His story was a somewhat whimsical outing to the Portland International Raceway in the company station wagon to see whether Oregon’s mandated E10 ethanol gas actually costs drivers only 3% more gas consumption than standard gasoline, as the state claimed. Our newspaper wanted to do an entire page on this “challenge” to the state’s claim. On the way out, I casually asked the reporter if he was interested in my doing a slide show on the challenge for use on the blog. Sure, he said.

I spent the next two hours documenting our excursion in audio and images without planning or preparation. That was on a Monday afternoon. Our next newspaper production day for the issue that would carry the full page on the challenge was Thursday, giving me only three days to complete the slide show production in order to have it ready for timely posting on the news blog – in stark contrast to the three months my last production took.

Production workflow had to be compressed, starting with the story line. The story to be told was simple: A reporter conducts a test to tell whether one type of gas gets significantly better mileage than another. Does it or doesn’t it?

Production workflow was further simplified, inadvertently, due to my under reporting in both images and audio. I should have gotten a wider variety of driver shots instead of shooting only from the back seat. I could have traded places with the second reporter and shot side views of the driver and even grabbed a few shots from immediately in front of the driver. I should have miked the driver and conducted a running interview rather than settling for the casual banter between the two reporters – audio that was mostly unusable due to background engine noise. I should have had more specific coverage – audio and visual – of the test’s methodology and the switch between the two types of gas. As for the post challenge interview, I should have thought through my interview questions instead of letting the reporter do his own stand-up routine.

In short, my lack of planning limited the amount of material available for the production. Nonetheless, I decided to go ahead with what I had on hand and set the priority of expediency over quality, just to see whether I could meet a three-day deadline. Constructing the audio storyline took more than half the time, starting and ending with some of the stand-up monologue from the reporter. The rest was ambient audio of gas being poured into the tank, external engine audio of the car pulling away, audio of the car passing by on a sharp curve, and brief-but-relevant excerpts between the two reporters from inside the car. I had to develop info slides to explain the testing process and to conclude the storyline, due to the fact I that I had neither the audio nor the images to do this efficiently.

At one point, the reporter offered to let me include video he took with his point-and-shoot camera through the windshield from the front passenger seat. I explained to him that the slide show production software I used – Soundslides – couldn’t include video clips. Actually, I knew video clips could be incorporated with video editing software, QuickTime Pro, after converting the Soundslides production to video, but the reporter’s video was pointless and uniformly poor in quality – a shaky, handheld record of lap driving and incidental conversation between the reporter and another reporter assisting him with the driving. I didn't give it another thought.

Three days later, the ethanol slide show [click to view] was complete. It ran just under two minutes long and received rave reviews in the newsroom. That was very satisfying even though I knew it wasn’t my best work. It was a newspaper assignment converted to multimedia and completed on schedule, and I was proud to have my slide show placed on the newspaper’s blog.

Imagine my dismay the next morning to discover that the reporter added a production of his own – more than four and a half minutes of essentially unedited video right next to my slide show.