Audio editing – cut for content, paste for continuity

The multimedia seminar presentations recorded back in June yielded eight packages of audio notes between two to three minutes each – the results of hours and hours of edit time spent listening and cutting and occasionally shuffling parts around for continuity.

I learned how to listen not only for content, but for the connective remarks that gave context to each sound bite. I also learned about the discipline needed to keep cutting and cutting in order to achieve the two- to three-minute standard advocated at the seminar. The cutting process turned out to be the easier aspect of editing. The harder task came with trying to assemble the bits of audio into a coherent, finished piece with an opening, a development and a conclusion – the basic components of any good essay or story.

The set of audio notes I wound up with varied considerably in technical quality, mostly due to my ineptitude at recording.

One object lesson rose quickly above the rest: There is no point in gathering audio of poor technical quality, no matter how good the content.

To listen to the audio notes, click on the boldfaced titles.

• Rich Beckman on the future of newspapers – University of North Carolina professor of multimedia journalism talks about who our future (young) readers are and how we aren’t likely to attract them in our present condition.

• Dirck Halstead on the future of newspapers – founder and editor of digitaljournalist.com makes a case for the imminent death of newsprint and the life hereafter available to those newspapers.

• Tom Kennedy on the future of newspapers – managing editor for online journalism at the Washington Post discusses how newspapers can and must prepare for the future.

• Seth Gitner on getting started in multimedia – chief organizer of the NPPA Multimedia Summit and multimedia editor for The Roanoke Times outlines how individuals can help get their newspaper started in multimedia journalism.

• Rich Beckman on the new tools of journalism – details the importance of learning how to use the various tools available to journalists online.

• Jim Seida on audio gathering techniques – multimedia producer for MSNBC covers some of the basics in audio skill building [ironically, my worst audio technically].

• Rich Beckman on the role of the multimedia producer – lists the duties of the newspaper multimedia producer.

• Dirck Halstead on becoming a multimedia producer – advocates photojournalists becoming video producers at their newspapers, whether large or small.

What I have in mind . . .

Individuals on the newspaper staff, its local management and, indeed, the corporate office, all have their own agendas, and my job at the paper is defined by those agendas.

My agenda here is to learn what I can about the future of community photojournalism and find some form of practical adaptation. I can neither afford the HD digital video equipment and software advocated at last weekend's seminar, nor do I think my small newspaper likely to employ such for the duration of my career. My format will have to be the audio-driven slide show, and I want to learn how to produce these slide show stories using the bare minimum of equipment: a Fujifilm Finepix digital camera and an Olympus WS-320M digital recorder.

Toward the end of the seminar, I mentioned this idea to an intern at the newspaper in Tacoma. She gave me a look of disgust. What she didn't understand is that sometimes you have to employ guerrilla tactics in order to bring about revolution.

Back in the late nineties I shot most of my daily assignments with a Nikon Coolpix for more than a year, simply to demonstrate to my newspaper the sheer efficiency and economy of going to all-digital photography.

The Fujifilm/Olympus gear might demonstrate the viability of the sound-slide format for community journalism and help hasten the development of our website into the inevitable alternative to newsprint.

An introduction of sorts . . .

So here I am, 60 years old, 32 years into a career in community photojournalism – the last 26 years spent covering the same few communities for a twice-a-week newspaper. That's a long, long time to look at people and activities that remain essentially the same from one year to the next, and still retain a sense of mission.

This evening at an awards banquet I ran across an old acquaintance, someone I met the first year I joined my newspaper. He was the staff photographer – only a few years older – for a community newspaper in a nearby town. He told me he was retiring within the year. I replied that I couldn't afford to retire. I probably had another ten years of work ahead of me.

That, however, isn’t the real problem. I don't know whether my newspaper has the same amount of time to survive the rapid changes taking place in community journalism. I've spent the past two days at a seminar listening to one speaker after another forecast the end of traditional newspaper culture in general, and the imminent demise of newsprint in particular. I am convinced that the Internet offers the only future for community journalism.

This humble blog is my personal commitment to understand and embrace the changes taking place in my profession.