Last weekend, the Nieman Foundation hosted its annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which was great fun for all involved. In the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you a taste of the conference — more accurately, the parts most aligned with our topic here at the Lab, figuring out the future of journalism.

We’ll start with a quick video interview I did with my friend Marci Alboher, who was one of our speakers at the conference. You probably know her best from her work for The New York Times, where she writes regularly about modern work and career issues.

I wanted to get Marci’s thoughts on how journalists might be rethinking their careers — both those worried about their jobs and those considering a voluntary reinvention. We discuss:

— The special dangers of having a side job as a journalist;
— The kind of skills assessment necessary to thinking about new options; and
— Why laid-off staff writers have more experience pitching stories than they may think.

As always, there’s a full transcript below for those who like reading over listening. And I apologize to you, dear viewer, for the fact that I’m looming and swaying on the right side of the screen throughout the entire video — I could have sworn I was off-camera. Keep reading »

Setting up my interview with Amy O’Leary, a multimedia producer at The New York Times, was a little intimidating because her specialty is audio, and I hardly know a lavalier from a capacitor. The sound turned out fine, though, with the exception of my questions, which I didn’t think to properly record. If only I’d watched this video first!

In our chat, O’Leary offers a ton of great tips, recommends a few pieces of equipment, shows us where to point the microphone, and takes us through the Times’ interview with President Obama on Air Force One.

A full transcript is after the jump. Keep reading »

If you check out the videos and slideshows at most major newspaper websites, you’ll find fascinating stories, probing interviews, and even reporters who don’t sound half-bad narrating an audio script. What you won’t find much of is music.

Whether for ethical concerns or a lack of experience in the medium, newspapers have generally shied away from setting their stories to a beat. In the video above, Amy O’Leary, a multimedia producer at The New York Times, discusses how the newspaper got past those issues to use music in two recent projects.

O’Leary, who was previously a producer at This American Life, offered audio tips in a video we posted last week. Be sure to stick around until the end of this one for her excellent suggestion about collaborating with independent artists.

A full transcript is after the jump. Keep reading »

“I feel like the voice of business journalism is sort of, it’s an authoritative voice of God,” says Adam Davidson, international business and economics correspondent for National Public Radio, toward the end of our interview in the video above. “But there is no authority. It’s a process.”

We were talking about “The Giant Pool of Money,” the masterful and widely acclaimed explanation of the housing crisis that Davidson produced with Alex Blumberg for This American Life. If you haven’t heard it — or any of their subsequent work for the Planet Money podcast — then consider carving out an hour of your life to rectify that problem.

“The Giant Pool of Money” was such a success because it upended the traditional news model, in which coverage of incremental developments is supposed to lend greater understanding of the broader issue at hand. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, put it best when he wrote, “There are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part.”

As you’ll see in the video, Davidson thinks that journalists are too reluctant to acknowledge their own ignorance when approaching complex stories. “The Giant Pool of Money,” on the other hand, felt like a learning process for Davidson and Blumberg as much as their listeners. (Rosen wrote, “The journalists doing the explaining started with zero distance between themselves and the users; they were clueless!”)

I recorded this interview with Davidson at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, where he was a speaker. On one panel, Davidson pointed to the first time he broke the mold and tried this explanatory model of business journalism. It was a four-minute segment in 2006 for All Things Considered on a deadly boring speech by Hank Paulson, then the Treasury secretary. Give that a listen, and consider it an artifact in the evolution of journalism. (It’s also an artifact in the sense that Paulson was complaining about “excessive regulation,” a not-yet entirely derided notion.)

A full transcript of the video is after the jump. [A quick correction, reflected below: The first voice on the video is of Blumberg, not Ira Glass.] Keep reading »

Jennifer Crandall of the Washington Post has been assembling a sum of many parts, the highly-regarded onBeing series that runs weekly on washingtonpost.com. (It’s been on hiatus for a while and is supposed to relaunch sometime soon.)

The series, which features interesting people saying interesting things in a spare white environment that strips away context and puts full attention on the words, is reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s oral histories — sharing the notion that ordinary people have extraordinary points of view. Crandall conducts the interviews in a small studio, shooting with a single Sony HDV camera then editing with many jump cuts and focal lengths. But what matters is the people she finds, and she spoke at the recent Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference about the work that goes into finding the
right people to interview.

Between sessions, we also got a chance to ask her for some advice on creating and working on sustained and innovative projects such as onBeing.

We’re finishing up posting the videos we shot with speakers at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll be posting excerpts from our session with Richard Koci Hernandez — ex-newspaper photographer, multimedia maven, and now a fellow at UC Berkeley. He was one of the big hits of the conference, and he spoke to us directly about the adjustments journalists have to make when they are confronted with work online.

Here he talks about how he tries to convince recalcitrant journalists to invest time into learning the online medium:

And that’s what I tell people now. I say: “You know, if you even have the slightest notion that you want to [tell stories], then in some sense you need to get with the program and do something in this new medium that you love. Because you’re going to be competing with me.” In two years, when [my time at] Berkeley is up, I’m back out there. And so you know, I try and…appeal to that kind of sense of urgency, that they need to start thinking about these things.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Here’s the second excerpt from our interview with Richard Koci Hernandez. Here he talks about overcoming his natural fear of technology:

This is not a time for wusses! Those that survive and continue to tell stories in the future are going to have to get their hands dirty more than they ever did. I’m not ever saying that our job was ever easy. It’s not easy to be a reporter, it’s not easy to be a photographer, it’s not easy to be a storyteller in general. But I don’t think that, with the tools, with the technology, with the way everything is going, is that we have — we can’t just sit back any more. There’s going to be a lot of hard work for everyone, no matter.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Here’s a third quick excerpt from our Richard Koci Hernandez interview. In this clip he talks about the power of astonishment in creating great work online:

…we’re really competing for viewers. We’re competing for eyeballs. We’re competing with everything, you know? I even said, you know like — somebody asked, “Well, who’s your competition when you were at the [San Jose Mercury News] or just in the storytelling business?” Everybody’s our competition! LOLcats, you know? Pretty pictures of cats and funny pictures of dogs. That’s my competition.

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »

Here’s our fourth and final excerpt from our interview with Richard Koci Hernandez. He’s talking about how the traditional grammar of news video — the TV style best summed up by the standup — works online. Or, more accurately, how it doesn’t work:

…what I’m trying to get people to think about is the idea that the web is different and the audience for the web is different. And that we have an opportunity as writers, as still photographers, as people coming into this medium with a clean slate. So essentially what I’m saying is: Don’t adopt something; try something new. I really think that we do have an opportunity to create a new form of what we might call web journalism, or storytelling for the web…

Full transcript after the jump. Keep reading »