Text? Sound? Multimedia? Broadcast TV? Which is the best medium to tell a story? In the last days two major US media outlets chose to feature a story about an obscure 82 year old jazz pianists from Buffalo, NY. Not exactly the usual subject for a national media feeding frenzy but interesting to compare the stories. Which worked well? What did each version leave out? How did each version start and finish?
Here’s the line up:
The story in print from the NYTimes
The story in multimedia, also from the NYTimes
The story on the radio from National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition
and finally, the same story on local Buffalo TV News.
For the first few minutes, this story looks more like super slick Nike commercia about a mixed martial arts fighter.
But right around 2 minutes the story takes a sharp left turn and ends up in “wow” territory.
Great example of how all good stories need a conflict.
Wow!!!
Wonderful to see people stretching the mold of what broadcast television storytelling is all about. Hats off to ESPN’s Outside the Lines!
Talk all you want about how words are important but you are never, ever going to string together a sentence that can capture what this video shows at the 30 second mark. Then keep watching…
However, murmuration, the word that describes this phenomenon, is very cool.
(Here’s another video on the same phenom.)
I’ve long been a fan of Ira Glass.
Also hate to admit that I feel like I suck more times than not. Good to know I’m not alone…
and I need to be producing more work.
Here’s a nice short story about an Indian barber shop told without any words but driven by a lively song.
Tom Pietrasik, who made the short, provides some insight into his tools and also gives an interesting description of what it was like to obtain the rights to the music. I’m constantly talking about not stealing music nd so it was great to see that Tom did it legally.
I found this at the Virgin Media Shorts Festival.
The folks at Cisco think video will make up 90% of the traffic on the web within the next 3 years. David Hsieh, VP of marketing, Video and Emerging Technologies at Cisco, says that video already makes up more than 51% of the traffic on the web. Cisco is a California based company that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology.
(thanks to Sandeep Junnarker for spotting this story.)
For years I’ve been trying to remember the name of a particular short film that I saw in a high school english class that so stunned me that it made me fall in love with storytelling.
Yesterday, I found a small item in the Wall Street Journal about how modern movies reference Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
And there was the name of the movie!
“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a 1962 short directed by Robert Enrico based on an Ambrose Bierce short story.
I found the film online and watched it today. It’s as incredible now as the first time I saw it, and I still remember the shock I had at the ending.
Maybe this is where I learned that the job of the storyteller is to show the people the world in a different and surprising way.
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(And the Journal snapshot suggests that M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense was based on the film and another site also suggested that this film was the only episode of the Twilight Zone that was not written and produced by Rod Serling.
To survive as journalists, we need to be capable of telling a story across multiple platforms. And that’s the way I approach my work.
Recently, Seth Gitner, an assistant professor at Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, talked with Scott Anger and myself about the three films we created as part of the Soros Foundation’s Stop Torture in Healthcare initiative. We worked in the Ukraine, Cambodia and Namibia.
Here’s a pdf of the story, reproduced with th permission of Seth and of the gracious folks at the National Press Photographer’s Association News Photographer Magazine.
Last week I was listening to the raw interviews that photographer Matt Slaby recorded for a multimedia story about a Massachusetts Vets group called We Soldier On, a story he shot and I edited for AARP magazine’s website.
Matt really nailed it so I asked him how he found the characters for his story:
Matt Slaby spent the entire first day looking for the right characters……..photo by Matt Slaby/LUCEO.
Matt Slaby: “There wasn’t any action happening in the time that I was there so I knew I needed to find someone with a story that was interesting enough for a Seinfeld episode, that is, an interesting narrative that could work without too much corresponding action.”
“I started on the first day by interviewing anyone who would let me talk with them, beginning with an addiction counselor. He helped find subjects who would speak to me. I went from one person to the next. With some I spent 10 minutes chatting, with others I talked with them for 2-3 hours. I chatted seriously with about 15 people.”
“I met Lenny (one of the two subjects of the final piece) near the end of this process. I found that he was a character who was straight-forward, not evasive and had the ability to be self-reflective. Lenny is a recovering heroin addict who was at a place in his recovery that made his story compelling.” (BTW, Matt is working on a long term project about heroin addicts.)
Lenny Costa had a story with a narrative arc. .......photo by Matt Slaby/LUCEO.
Matt continued, “I spent a long time chatting with Lenny before I recorded anything. I wanted Lenny to know that I wasn’t going to push him around and key-hole him as an addict. I was just going to listen to him as a human being. By doing this before the tape was rolling I could also share parts of myself that showed that I was willing to be vulnerable too.”
Jack Downing spoke about the issues in a personal and compelling way that had universal appeal........photo by Matt Slaby/LUCEO.
When I asked Matt where he learned to interview so well, he told me he had spent 6 years working on an ambulance, a job that helped him learn how to quickly read people. ” In that setting, you learn how to communicate with people in a way that allows them to feel comfortable sharing critical information with you under less-than-ideal circumstances. Good, active listening skills help you be effective at painting a picture for caregivers further down the line. It’s a skill that certainly translates to journalism.”
That certainly puts it in perspective.
You can see the final story on the AARP Bulletin website.
It was produced for AARP by Michael Wichita and Miranda Harple
Camera and Sound by Matt Slaby | LUCEO
Edited by Bob Sacha
Music by Tyler Strickland
I love Robert Krulwich, the NPR Science correspondent and co-host of the brilliant RadioLab because he has the ability to turn a story ion it’s head, tell it in the most intereting way and make me stop and listen.
Others love him too because a few days ago he gave the commencement speech to the Berkeley School of Journalism class of 2011. You can read all of it and you should becuase it’s very entertaining.
But I swiped the last quarter of his speech and it’s worth a read:
Jad Abumrad (l) and Robert Krulwich, hosts of Radio lab. photo by Andy Battaglia
What do you do next? Well, the obvious option is to go to Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, MTV. They’re there. You can go in and pour coffee for the person who sharpens the pencil for the person who writes the copy and work your way all the way to the top. That’s what Charles Kuralt did. And in his day, with his talent, he did it very fast.
But here’s another way.
It’s not easy. It’s not for everybody. Just something to think about.
Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.
Now I understand that if you’re married, or have a kid, you can’t not make money. And I know that it is not fun, it’s the opposite of fun, to juggle rent payments with car payments, to fudge medical bills, to play roulette with your credit cards, to have bills that must be paid month after month after month, that don’t go down, and I know about friends and siblings who didn’t go crazy, who didn’t try to become professional storytellers, who became normal things, like sales people, and doctors and teachers and are now moving into homes, buying real furniture and making you feel like you are slipping backwards in the world for the sin of following a dream. I know about that.
But let me tell you what I’ve also seen.
I’ve also seen, in my most recent area, science journalism, I’ve seen people do just what I’ve proposed. I’ve seen people, literally, go home, write a blog about dinosaurs (in one case), neuroscience, biology. Nobody asked them. They just did. On their own. By themselves.
After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!
How they managed, I don’t know. Some of them worked by day and wrote by night.
Some lived with their parents. Some must have struck deals with spouses or with friends.
But I notice, because I talk to them, and now I often work with them… I notice that they get courage from each other. They’ve got a kind of community. At first it was virtual; they wrote each other. Then they met each other. Now they support each other. Watch out for each other. One day, I imagine, they will get and give each other jobs. And they share a sensibility, a generational sense, that this is how “we” do it.
News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It’s a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still. When you grow up in different decades, you laugh at different jokes, hear different machines, (typewriters versus computers, pinball machines versus Mario Brothers), you hear different ads, jingles, songs, sounds.
When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it’s going to come out differently and it will speak in beats of their own generation.
The people in charge, of course, don’t want to change. They like the music they’ve got. To the newcomers, they say, “Wait your turn”.
But in a world like this… rampant with new technologies, and new ways to do things, the newcomers… that means you… you here today, you have to trust your music… It’s how you talk to people your age, your generation. This is how we change.
After all, when it began in the 1930’s, Time, the weekly news magazine, was a radical idea created by young Henry Luce and his college friends. The New Yorker got its beats from young James Thurber and his buddy E.B. White, and their boss Harold Ross, I was at Rolling Stone when Jann Wenner put together his amazing gang of writers, designers, critics, photographers. Then Ira Glass did it again with Gen Xers. Each of these groups have a shared feel; they are expressing something that belongs to their age, their time.
So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.
Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.
And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.
And maybe that’s your way into Troy.
There you are, on the beach, with the other newbies, looking up. Maybe somebody inside will throw you a key and let you in… But more likely, most of you will have to find your own Trojan Horse.
And maybe, for your generation, the Trojan Horse is what you’ve got, your talent, backed by a legion of friends. Not friends in high places. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.
If you choose to go this way, you won’t have Charles Kuralt’s instant success. It will take time. It will probably be very lonely. A living room is not a news room. It doesn’t feel like one. You know you’re alone. And on the way, you might get scarily close to not being able to afford a living room.
But what I’ve noticed is that people who fall in love with journalism, who stay at it, who stay stubborn, very often win. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen it happen over and over.
So, here, for what it’s worth, ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2011, is my graduation advice. Some of you will say, “This is a fantasy. Pay this man no attention,” but hey, you invited me, so here’s what I’ve got:
If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it – is something new in the world.
And don’t stop. Just hold on… and keep loving what you love… and you’ll see. In the end, they’ll let you stay.
Thank you.
