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.

The model of the TV standup doesn’t work on the web — I believe that. And the only reason I believe that — essentially I’ms saying it doesn’t work for me. I just don’t go on the Internet [looking for it], and I feel like I’m not the only one. I’ve also had that in the back of my mind as I look at the analytics of some of the stuff we put up on the Internet, and what people really respond to. And from my perspective, and my experience — that really hasn’t worked.

There are some new techniques — some more cinematic, some more humorous, things with a little more personality. Not that it wouldn’t work or it doesn’t work — I think it doesn’t work in the form that we are presenting it, which is another kind of stereotype that I’ve noticed. This kind of voice-of-God, that “we have the answer, and here is the report, and I’m objective.”

And I think that some of the things that are working — this is a bit of heresy to say this at a conference like this. But two of the really wonderful pieces of journalism that I’ve seen recently: One came from Jon Stewart, a guy with tons of personality and a bit of humor, but there’s no question that young people are getting used — and when you watch the show you’re getting news. You are getting some news. And the other was TMZ, they uncovered this Northern Trust Bank, the bank had to give back $1.6 million. These are really Edward R. Murrow level of journalism in terms — but then they’re coming from people and personalities.

So, I know it’s dangerous ground to tread, but ultimately I think that conversation, when I say that what I really mean is — not to beat up on broadcast journalism. It’s a wonderful, wonderful tradition. It can tell stories in an amazing way — and they do what they do really well. I say that often, because 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, that incorporates cinema, of course broadcast, and many different kinds of things. So it’s not so much to say that to beat up on — but every time we tried a standup, a traditional standup, it just never got the attention. And oftentimes I think the power of web journalism is that because the space is vast and you can tell stories in two or three minutes — and often times broadcast is limited. They are trying to get a lot of news across in a short amount of time, the news of the day, and it’s a lot of news. But on the web, you can put a two- or three-minute piece up and you can let the subject speak. You don’t even have to be in there if you don’t want to, and you can just let the cameras roll. So instead of telling you can show.

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.

I love the idea of “astonish me.” Again, the story comes from Richard Avedon. I’m a still photographer, so my background is in still photography. So my first love when I’m reading things, I love to read about still photographers. And the one thing I love about every great still photographer in history, is they all played around with moving images.

But Richard Avedon was asked what [was] the best advice he ever got as a photographer, and he said that — I believe it was an editor at Harper’s once told him, “Just astonish me.” And I have that taped everywhere. You know, it’s really, I think — as a storyteller that’s what you do want to do. The greatest storytellers that inspire me today, people like Ira Glass and filmmakers out there — that’s what they do. They astonish me and they surprise me. And so you know, that’s kind of my — when I put anything together, I really am trying to astonish someone in some way, shape, or form.

To even break it down further, 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. And I think that in storytelling, even in very small ways, you can astonish people with your stories. So that’s kind of something I — It’s kind of my pinnacle. If I can find and create stories that astonish people, then I feel like I’m on the right track.

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.

The idea of technology is something that I hear people talk about, that people ask me about — software, tools, how much we need to learn, do I need to learn this, do I need to learn that. The one thing I always go back to — because I like to look at it in more of a holistic or a whole idea in terms of technology — I go back to the idea, the television show when I was young was Star Trek, and the earpiece in the ear. And the idea that I would look at that, and there was absolutely no way I ever thought that that would come to fruition. And now it’s just a part of what we do — there’s no question.

And just living now — the last few years have seen tremendous change in technology, in software. So the one thing I realize, you know, is that that’s always going to change. And it’s going to change constantly. AniIt’s going to change quicker than ever. And the tools we’re going to have next year, I can’t even dream them up. I can’t even imagine what they are.

So my approach to technology is basically: Just don’t be afraid of it. Try not to get — so if I’m not afraid of it, then however it changes, I’m going to be ready for it. And ultimately what I found in technology and all of the software is that you just have to get in. And on the level that we’re playing in, you can open up a project — you can open up software like Final Cut Pro, which I did, and I was scared. I was so scared. I looked at just the layout on my screen — I’m like, I can’t do this, this is just too much.

But when you go in with the idea: Well, the truth is I’m probably only going to need four or five of these tools — four or five of these little tricks and actions, and I can get my job done. The same with Photoshop — I was a photographer for 15 years. I knew four things in Photoshop. Four! That’s all I needed to know! Thank goodness in journalism that was about it — you really didn’t touch the tool a lot for ethical reasons. But it also set me up for the idea: Well, if I can use Photoshop, this very complicated program, and get the pictures the way they should be using only four tools, I can do the same in Final Cut.

But I think ultimately what I am trying to say is: Whatever it is, don’t be afraid of it. Don’t get attached to it, because it’s going to change. And when it changes, just don’t be afraid of it. Know you are going to have to learn something.

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 — and I don’t think it has anything to do with age at all. I think that it takes that energy that I know I had, that I can relate to when I was in college — staying up until two in the morning in the dark room, processing black and white — you know that energy. Even during the conference, you know, I made sure I brought books so that I can learn something while I was here. Last night or this morning, I got up and I looked over my After Effects tutorials. You know, I’m trading particular points in my life, where I may have turned the TV on and sipped my coffee and watched CNN and done things — to now, you know, CNN might be on in the background, but right on my laptop is a Final Cut tutorial. So I’m taking every little opportunity to learn.

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.

I don’t think that you can really force someone into this, what I think of as kind of this new journalism. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. The approach that I take now is to tell people — I know one thing. One thing I know in my life: I’m going to be a journalist until they put me in the ground. I know that. I’m going to tell stories. I’m a storyteller, and whatever new brush that technology throws in my little jar to paint with, I’m going to use it. I love it. I’m going to leverage every — and I’m not going to be afraid of the new ones.

But there is fear. There are a lot of us — there’s absolutely no question out there. And I tried to convince people, “Come on! This is fantastic!” And people are like, “No, this is not what I want to do. I didn’t sign up to be a videographer, a photographer. I want to be a writer.” Or vice versa! Listen — “I’m a photographer and I don’t want to shoot video.”

Finally I just decided, you know, that wasn’t really working. So what about the tack of: if nothing else, think about the people you’re going to be competing against. The people who do buy into this. So whether you believe it or not, you want to be a part of it or not, is somewhat irrelevant if you look at the students that I’m teaching — if you look at someone like me, for example, who knows they want to tell stories, who isn’t afraid of it.

And if you’re sitting there going, “Gosh! I want to tell stories too!” then you’re going to be competing with me. You’re going to be competing with these superhuman — I don’t even know if they’re human, these students that are coming in that have this in their DNA to produce stories on this multiple level, this kind of multi-tasking level. And that’s what I tell people now. I say: “You know, if you even have the slightest notion that you want to do this, 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 tell people, you know — maybe appeal to that kind of sense of urgency that they need to start thinking about these things.

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.

“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.]

[Clip from "The Giant Pool of Money" on This American Life]

Alex Blumberg: So I guess the first thing we have to do is talk about the global pool of money, right?

Adam Davidson: Right, the global pool of money, that’s where our story begins.

[End of clip]

Davidson: In this crisis in particular, its so confusing. There’s just this blizzard of information coming out everyday, and it’s all about terms and phrases that you’ve never heard of before, and its very, very hard to understand. I mean, some strange financial instruments that no one’s ever heard of had problems in institutions that no one understands, and suddenly I’m going to lose my job or my cousin just got laid off or we might go into a depression. So the stakes couldn’t be higher, but there couldn’t be less clarity, less of an ability to understand.

[Radio clip]

Davidson: Right, I mean in all the coverage of this we haven’t heard any of this from people all along the chain. We wanted to know, what were they thinking when they were doing all this? And why did they think it would work? And simply, how did it all work?

[End of clip]

Davidson: I mean, I’ve done a fair amount of daily coverage where something explodes. I mean, I have done war coverage, but I’m talking about financial things explode. You know, suddenly there’s some company you never heard of just collapsed this morning, and the whole world is a danger apparently. And it is very, very hard in typical journalistic constraints of time — just how long you have to report the story, and the amount of time or the amount of space you get to explain the story.

I mean, take mortgage-backed securities, which are probably the simplest of the complicated financial products. You know, I feel like I need at least a minute just to explain what they are. And so, if im going to report on mortgage back securities and I have three minutes, and there’s some development, something happened, do I take one of my three minutes just to do the basic explainer every time? I probably won’t. I mean, maybe I should, but I probably won’t. And as a result, I do a story that the average person who hasn’t quite understood what a mortgage-backed security is is left a little like, “Wait, what just happened? I don’t quite get what just happened.”

[Radio clip]

Alex Blumberg: To all the investment managers in the global pool of money who bought them, AAA meant safe as government bonds. AAA was called a cash equivalent, money in the bank. It’s as if the global pool of money put trillions of dollars in a savings account, came back one year later, and found out that half the money was gone.

[End of clip]

Davidson: I think we did do a good job of explaining the crisis, you know, the information was solid. But if that’s all we did, I don’t think it would’ve been as strong. I think we gave people kind of a way to sit with the information, likke a perspective. Not saying you have to do it the way we do it, but we kind of showed this is how we do it. You know, we’re kind of shocked or sometimes angry. We’re often confused, but we can figure it out. We can understand it. And we can have a reasonable conversation about the crisis.

[Radio clip]

Alan Greenspan: The FOMC stands prepared to maintain a highly accomadative stance of policy for as long as needed to promote satisfactory economic performance.

Davidson: Alright, you might not believe me. But that little statement? That is central banker speak for “Hey, global pool of money. Screw you.”

[End of clip]

Davidson: I’d say there’s two things that were really satifying. I have never had any response like this. It was unbelievable, and that certainly was thrilling. But the two things that really stand out was one, was the number of people who said, “I just stopped reading the stories. I couldn’t, I just didn’t know what was going on. It made me mad, but I didnt understand where to focus my anger. And I just stopped reading the stories. And since I heard your story, not only do I read the front-page stories, I read the business page stories.” And that to me was really satifying. That made me feel like we were really providing — ’cause that’s, it’s not just that — we were empowering our audience, our listeners, to engage this issue in an ongoing way. And that made me very happy.

The other thing that surprised me: I was really targeting the finance and business illiterate, but the number of people, very sophisticated people, who said they got a lot out of the story because, one thing this crisis teaches you is the financial world is made up of people who know one thin slice of the financial world. And you might spend your entire career as a trader or an analyst or whatever, knowing everything there is to know about government bonds, but you don’t know anything about mortgage-backed securities. Or if you do know about mortgage-backed securities, you don’t know about the central banks of Thailand and their investment goals. So nobody knows the whole crisis. Nobody knows the whole chain of causation. And so a lot of people who knew their thin slice said they really enjoyed seeing how their thin slice fits into the whole picture.

[Radio clip]

Davidson: Wait, Alex, I wanna step in here ’cause this is a very important piece of tape. A big part of this whole story, the whole crisis, is that a lot of really smart people, people who knew better, fooled themselves with this data. It was the triumph of data over common sense.

[End of clip]

Davidson: I mean, I’ve been thinking, I wanna do like a story or something. I feel like the voice of business journalism, in particular, needs to change. I mean, probably the voice of all journalism, maybe. ‘Cause it’s very similar — I was in Iraq for a long time, and it was very similar there, where the more certain someone was, the more you knew they were wrong. My wife used to joke — she was in Iraq with me — and she used to joke that you can tell how long someone has been in Iraq, a reporter, by how certain they are about things. The more certain they are, the less time they’ve been in Iraq. And the same with this financial crisis. Nobody saw it coming. Even the people who saw bits and pieces of it, did not see the whole thing. And nobody, I don’t think a single person, had the background to understand all the financial instruments, all the interconnections. The world just doesn’t work that way. These were, you know, very specialized areas of finance that suddenly became linked by this global chain.

So, the voice — I feel like the voice of business journalism is sort of, it’s an authoritative voice of God. “Today, the stock market rose 3.8% on news of unemployment rising and anticipation of the Fed cutting its interest rates.” And, you know, I know before I was a business journalist, as a consumer, I didn’t know much about business, and there’s a guy in a suit, who seems like he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s saying things with a very strong, authoritative voice, and what this crisis taught us is all those people were missing the most fundamental things. Those people — Like, it’s almost absurd! Like you could do like a skit about how silly it was. And there is no voice anymore. There is no authority. I mean, there are better ideas and worse ideas; there are people who are closer to the truth and further away from the truth. But there is — I don’t wanna say it’s all up in the air, everyone believe whatever you want. I think people can believe some dangerous and stupid things. But there is no authority. It’s a process. It’s a constant process. I change my mind hourly on this crisis, and I fundamentally revise my thinking all of the time. And everybody does. I mean, the smart academics I talk to, the smart business people I talk to — everyone is trying to figure this out, to begin with. And I would like to find a way — I think we’re starting to find a way to represent that.

I mean, I think it’s a more trustworthy journalism if the journalist reveals their process of discovery. I don’t think it weakens our authority. I think it strengthens our authority ’cause it’s closer to the actual truth, and it’s closer to the world that our audience experiences on a day-to-day basis. They know we don’t, we’re not experts in that sense, and frankly, the expert we quote isn’t an expert in that sense — that he’s definitely right, or he can speak with objective truth about things.

[Radio clip]

Blumberg: Anyone under, say, 45 probably doesn’t remember that 1970s malaise too well. Anyone under 30 has barely known a U.S. economy that wasn’t growing. Now, there’s a decent chance we’ll all get to see what life felt like in the 70s. Which isn’t great. It’s pretty bad, actually. Unless you’re comparing it to the 1930′s.

[End of clip]

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.

[Clip from video]

Kit Seelye: From the very beginning, this election inspired voters to turn out in record numbers.

[End of clip]

Amy O’Leary: We put together this roughly 15-minute video called “Choosing a President,” and it was released in two stages. The first stage was on Election Day, where we tried to recap the whole campaign season, which was a two-year process. And then we released a second part that showed the outcome, which came out on November 5th.

That video was really — to me, it broke new ground, in terms of being able to bring together all the elements of New York Times reporting into one package. It was a full overview of the photography the Times had done. We had Katherine Q. Seelye did — she sort of mastered the narration and walked us through the election from her perspective. And it was also a multimedia treatment. We were bringing lots of different sources that we’d worked through all on the campaign. So in a way, you could say that that video took two years to make.

[Clip from video]

Voter: I’ve never seen this much interest in the caucuses.

Voter: I care about this country. I love my issues.

Voter: I vote today because I’m interested in the future.

[End of clip]

O’Leary: We used music in that video, and there wasn’t a lot of push back to use music in general. But they wanted to make sure the music was really right. We do have access to the stock library of music that we use in many of our videos, and everybody who uses it complains that it’s a little cheesy, it’s a little outdated, it’s hard to find something that’s really fresh. And because we poured so much energy into this video, we really wanted every aspect to be customized and special and elevated. And so for that, the editor on the project asked me to do custom scoring for it.

So using Apple Loops and GarageBand and Soundtrack Pro, I would develop a baseline score — so sort of a feel for a couple of the chapters. There were slightly different feels for the intro and the middle chapter and the later chapters. And then, after the piece was fully done, at the last minute, I would go back in and tweak the score. So I would make sure that a certain, you know, a cello hit would happen right when the photo was appearing and really adjust the score so that every moment was weighted, and that it was pulling out at the right moments and coming in at moments that were interesting. And trying to really — you know, it’s the difference between an off-the-rack suit and a custom tailored suit. It fits much better when you give it that level of detail and attention.

[Clip from video]

Voter: I’m supporting Obama. I don’t see any change with McCain, and Sarah Palin is just flat out scary.

[End of clip]

O’Leary: Everything I learned about using music in a piece, I learned from working at This American Life, where they have a really — for more than ten years, they’ve used music in a lot of innovative ways. And they definitely have a specific style that works really well for that show. At the Times, music is a little bit of a more complicated issue because I think there is so much concern that, you know — whereas This American Life is all about personal voice, and there’s a lot of writing in the first person, and sort of point-of-view — you know, the Times has long traditions and long standards that they’re trying to figure out how to apply to the new media landscape.

And music is one of those tricky areas where some people are a little uncomfortable with the thought of, OK, if we put really sad music under these photos of environmental destruction, does that mean the Times has a point of view about environmental destruction? So at the Times, these decisions are weighed much more carefully, and nd we have a policy about music where, anytime we use it, we make sure that multiple editors listen to it and sort of sign off that it’s not heavy handed.

[Clip from video]

Seelye: In the debates, he kept his head down, and he took the opportunity to learn from a pro.

Barack Obama: You know, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.

[End of clip]

O’Leary: One of my favorite thoughts about music in film and documentary comes from the great film editor Walter Murch, who in a book called The Conversation[s], writes that music is a little bit like steroids. In the short run, it makes you go faster and better, but in the long run, it can be unhealthy for the organism. And he really believes that music shouldn’t produce emotion itself. You shouldn’t use it as a shortcut to make people feel sad. The music should channel the emotion that’s already there.

[Clip from audio slideshow]

O’Leary: There was a series called “Choking on Growth, and we had these amazing photographs from Chang Lee. I mean, they were the most beautiful pictures of environmental damage I think you could imagine. And they wanted to find a way to present them that was special. And so they asked me to find some music that would work to sort of, to play underneath the images.

And I looked for a long time. And what I wanted to do is find an independent artist, musician whose work was sort of spare. I’m usually looking for music that has kind of got a relatively neutral feel. But we knew this was a very serious subject, so we were also looking for very serious tone.

I had the good fortune to stumble along — and I found — I thought a cello seemed right. And a lot of times that’s where I will start. I feel like I’ll hear, kind of, what instrument might be appropriate. You know, if it’s light percussion, or in this case, I thought strings were appropriate and cello.

And I found this a great artist, Zoe Keating, who does a lot work with — she composes and then loops her own cello work on top of each other, so there’s a lot of sort of themes and motifs that recur, which is great for scoring, because you can build. And then there’s kind of a narrative in the music itself, where you start out with an idea that builds to a motif, and it develops over time and then goes to a resolution.  Zoe was incredibly generous and let us use any of her work, basically, with the exchange that we provide a link to her website.  And as an independent musician, this turned out, she said, to be great for her because it exposed a lot of people to her music who then went to her site and bought her CD.

So even though we didn’t pay Zoe for it, or we didn’t have the budget to do that, she was able to really get new business, which I think is a great model for independent musicians and multimedia journalists who want to collaborate. If you can give people that exposure, it makes sense for them as a business to give you their permission, which worked out really nicely.

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.

[Chatter as microphone is set up]

Zach: I guess the first question I should ask is whether I’ve setup the audio for our interview correctly or what tips you’d have for someone doing it themselves?

Amy: Sure. Well, generally, a reporter’s first instinct when they’re recording audio is to put the recorder in the same place they put their microcassette recorder.  So, they’ll put it on the table during the interview and they will just it leave it running and try to ignore it and hope that the interview subject will ignore it, too.

Really, there are three tips for a good, clean recording that we try and focus on for reporters who are new to this. And one is, to get the mic close enough.  If you have a microphone, you don’t want to have it on the table, you usually want to have the microphone about five inches away from the chin underneath it. You don’t want to do the “American Idol,” like singing into the microphone, because you’ll get some noises and sounds you don’t want.  If you have it under the chin, there is also this advantage of it’s not in the line of sight of the interviewee, so they will forget about it more, if you have it sort of under the chin pointed at the kind of Adam’s apple area. That’s a sweet spot. So that’s the first thing, getting the mic close enough.

The second thing would be to wear headphones. A lot of reporters are a little skittish about wearing big headphones in an interview situation, but for me there’s a Murphy’s Law. If you’re not wearing headphones anything can go wrong and you won’t know.  It’s like trying to take a picture without a viewfinder. You don’t even know what you are getting. And all kinds of things can happen, like cellphone interference or maybe the air-conditioning system doesn’t seem that loud to you, but the microphone’s really picking it up.  So you can’t know what you’re getting unless you are wearing headphones. That can solve a lot of problems right there.

And then the third thing is just to make sure that — and this is different for every device — but that the volume you’re recording at, the recording levels, are not too high. And there are a lot of things we can fix.  If a recording is too quiet, we can fix that in the computer later.  If there’s background noise, sometimes we can remove or reduce that. But the one thing you cannot fix in recording, the one thing that can really ruin it, is if you’ve recorded it at too high a volume. The equivalent in photography is if you shoot an image that’s overexposed, that data’s just not there, and you can’t fix the photo in the darkroom or in Photoshop afterwards.  And so if you record at too high a volume, you have just lost that data, and it is going to sound bad no matter what you do. [...]

I don’t really have a preference about the recorder as long as it’s a broadcast quality digital recorder.  At The New York Times, we use this Edirol R-09 Recorder, but the piece of equipment that I really love that I would recommend to anybody to buy is a shotgun microphone. They’re a longer microphone. I use the Audio Technica 835b, which is a great microphone. And what I like about it is most microphones work, you think of them like a light bulb. The light shines everywhere, and that’s the pickup pattern.  So the mic is equally getting sound from behind you and in front of you and to the sides.

With a shotgun microphone, it works like a flashlight, you can point it at what you want and it is going to get the sound to the side or behind you.  And so you don’t have to stand as close.  I can be in a room and stand in the middle of a room with a bunch of different people talking and just by pointing my microphone in different directions, I’m getting very clean sound. And so that one tool, it extends your reach.  It’s like if you’re a photographer, getting a zoom lens. You suddenly can view many more places at once. And so I would recommend anybody getting involved to invest in a good shotgun microphone. [...]

Zach: You give correspondents these recorders, and you talked yesterday about encouraging them to record themselves, not just their subjects. Why?

Amy: Well, I think, you know, again, a lot of print reporters are a little skittish about being on tape or performing in any way, but one of the things about audio is that you can’t hide. You’re there.  I mean some of the most revealing moments in an interview is not what someone says but the length of pause before they answer the question.  And unless you have the question there in the tape, you don’t get that interchange and the full richness of the interview.

But in another way, I mean if you’re a foreign correspondent, sometimes what you’re witnessing is really unique.  I mean one of the more powerful pieces that we have done at the Times recently, it was a phone interview with the photographer who shot the images of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, John Moore from Getty Images.

[Clip from audio slideshow]

John Moore: I saw, through the corner of my eye, her through the sunroof waving, and a couple of shots were fired and she went down. She fell down through the sunroof into the car.

[End of clip]

Amy: He was there, and his eyewitness account was so powerful, I don’t think it was any less valuable. I mean, in a way it was more valuable because he had a perspective that was somewhat objective than if he just interviewed people in the crowd.  And I think a lot of times journalists discount that their own eyewitness account is of tremendous value and that kind of record is really important.

Zach: For someone like myself who has worked in print and certainly recorded interviews, but never had to face the horror of someone else hearing them and asks questions by like stuttering for quite a while and just saying, having some thoughts and then stopping and hoping that someone answers. And maybe that works as an interview technique but sounds terrible in audio — or at least, you know, seems to sound… Do you have tips for that person, for me, on what to do there, to feel more comfortable in one’s own voice, I guess?

Amy: It’s a great question. I think, you know, a lot of print reporters are, again, a little skittish about being on tape. And what I think the problem is, is not that print reporters are asking questions in a sloppy way. I think they’re just uncomfortable with themselves. I think it’s great to hear a reporter try three different approaches to the question. And I think that can really work, when you hear a smart, lively interchange with an interview subject. And if the reporter is being honest and thoughtful and smart about the interview, I don’t think there is anything to hide. There’s nothing wrong with ums or ahs or stopping and taking something again. I mean, we all talk like that in real life.

And so, first to get comfortable, I would just say that a reporter should not put too much pressure on themselves. But second, and this is a more practical tip, I think it does help if reporters can be a little more succinct sometimes. A lot of times I hear reporters and their questions, they’re sorting it out for themselves as they’re saying it. And that’s fine. But I would just encourage: Okay, do that, have your longwinded question, but right before you’re done, say it again — just shorter. So if I’m rambling on about, “So, you know, about health care, what do you think about this, you know, the health care proposal that was in Michigan, and how does that compare, or maybe the one in California, actually?” Get through all that and then say, “What’s your position on health care?” Sum it up in a way that is shorter at the end of your question because then you can lop off and edit off your rambly intro and you have this nice, succinct piece to run with. [...]

Zach: When the Times had its first interview with President Obama, audio clips from the interview were made available along with the transcript and, of course, the article about it. How’d that come about?

Amy: So when the Times was given an exclusive interview with President Obama on Air Force One, we knew that we wanted to record it and have the full recording available along with the transcript. To do that, our reporters in the DC bureau and one of our web editors, they were smart, they called us, they said, the multimedia team, well, how do we do this right? I consulted a bunch of friends of mine in the radio world and had a set of recommendations. One was to have — they had a group of reporters, and I said have one reporter really focus on getting the audio. Make sure they’re wearing headphones. Make sure they’ve got the shotgun mic, which is gonna help them get good sound, and that they’re sitting really close to Obama and putting the mic in the right place. You know, five inches away from the mouth, underneath the chin. And then I also said, once the sound came back, we would try some things in-house to reduce the noise and just clean it up a little bit. So the interview happened, and we get the sound back, and the sound was pretty good.

[Clip from Obama interview]

President Obama: I’m absolutely committed to making sure that our financial, our financial system is stable.

[End of clip}

Amy: And so I was pleased that they’d done what they could to make the sound quality work. I was extra pleased when I saw that NBC had not just played the quotes from the interview on the screen, but they actually played our audio clips. And I thought, wow, you know The New York Times is like a true multimedia organization, and other broadcast organizations recognized that we can do broadcast-quality work. I was thrilled.

And that day, when the story came out in the paper, I was even more elated ’cause I saw this photo, this great photo shot by Stephen Crowley on Air Force One. Obama sitting there, there’s two reporters, their backs are to the camera, and just on the right of the photo, there’s this like shotgun mic jutting in.

And I thought, great, they did everything right. They were brave. Who is that brave reporter with their hand in the microphone? And I was so excited, and I write an editor to ask, “Who was it that did that?” I wanted to send them a thank you note, that they put down their pen and paper and sort of bravely took on multimedia in this high-preasure environment.

I found out that that was not a Times reporter. None of the reporters wanted to do that, and so they instead hooked Obama with a lav mic, like I’m wearing right now. And the shotgun mic was actually a White House person who was recording it for the White House’s own records. And I still think it’s a great image and a great example of, you know, Obama’s comfortable with it. He’s used to being recorded like that all the time. And if the White House can record like that, we as journalists shouldn’t be intimidated or feel like that’a not something we shouldn’t be doing. So i still keep the picture up in my cubicle to show reporters that’s the correct technique. We should be doing it in the future.

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.

Josh: We are here with Marci Alboher and you are the author of — what’s the name of your book again?

Marci: One Person/Multiple Careers.

Josh: And describe that for me — give me the thirty-second precis of that book.

Marci: It’s that more of us need a slash to describe what we do in the world. So, I’m an author/journalist/writing coach/speaker — and I think more of us are going to be living this way, including journalists, who weren’t knows for their slashing traditionally.

Josh: You could just have the nice perch at The Washington Post or wherever.

Marci: Yeah, and journalism is tricky — because it is a field in which having another vocation can be complicated. It can present conflicts. So, I think of journalism as one of the fields in which you have to think quite carefully about how you are going to set up slashes — if you are going to do more than one thing in addition to being a journalist.

Josh: I know when people ask me about doing something on the side, that ethical question always comes up. What advice do you give someone who has that question and is trying to figure out, “Will my bosses at newspaper X get upset if I do something on the side?”

Marci: Sure. First of all, if you have a boss, you always have to factor in what’s appropriate and what’s allowable under the contract that you signed with your employer.

But we had actually the opposite question in the panel I was just sitting on, which is really interesting. This man in the audience worked for internal communications for an academic hospital. And he found that when he left his newspaper and took that job, he now has all this free time to write. And he wants to pitch stories, but a lot of the stories he is coming up with relate to what he learned though his job. And we all agreed on the panel that the answer for someone like that is to write on different subject matter. So he can write long-form narrative now, he has time. He can freelance. We all suggested, why doesn’t he write about sports or travel or music or some other thing that he is interested in and passionate about.

And I think that’s one of the best ways to do it — is to kind of think about subject area and make sure there’s not going to be any appearance of conflict or conflict in what you do.

Josh: But it’s so unfortunate that the gaining of expertise means that you can’t write about it. I mean, he certainly knows more now about hospital life now than he did when he was a reporter. And it’s still kind of verboten.

Marci: Right. We also pointed out that he also knows a lot about research. And maybe he can write about research — but not the research that is being done by his own hospital. Or maybe not even in the same niche. Because if you are going to do serious journalism — now obviously you can do writing for publications that don’t care. But we here at Nieman are focused on writing for the New Yorkers of the world and The New York Times, and those institutions do care.*

Josh: For people who — there are lot of journalists, thousands of journalists who have either recently been laid off or in the process and might be laid off very soon. A lot of them are rethinking: “Okay, what kind of careers are open to me if the journalism job that I’ve had for the last 20 years isn’t going to work anymore? What are the other possibilities?” If you were advising someone who was in that position, what are the questions would you want them to ask themselves to see what other options might make sense?

Marci: I would say there’s two paths they should go down. First, I think you need to look at your skill set. What are you known for? Are you a great investigator? Are you a great interviewer? Are you a great studier of character? What are the things, as a writer and as a reporter, that are your gifts, and that you have always been told you were good at, over time? Because then we can think about, and you can think about, how to apply those things to something new.

But the other thing I always — and I’m really practical, Josh, so one thing I always think about is you should alway be doing like a two-part analysis. If you need to make money immediately, you have to start thinking about, “What can I do to make money right now?” Can I get a corporate communication job, or can I get a job in a organization that I really care about, but where I can get a salary right away? There is always this short-term/long-term issue. Short term, you are going to have to figure out how to support yourself, while longer term you may be working on a more serious reinvention. So, I always encourage people people to go through both processes.

I mean, if you have a severance package, maybe you have a little luxury to think about that. And I’ve been walking around, talking to a lot of people at this conference who are like, “Oh, severance package is the new book advance.” Now is the time to kind of think about: Maybe you can write that book youv’e wanted to write.

Josh: You mention this transition. One thing that for people who have been in the world for not having to sell their stories and not having to be aggressive and market themselves — as a freelancer has always had to be — that can be kind of a jarring transition. It leads to questions of: Does it make sense to for me to be writing things for free, say, on a blog that might be a marketing tool for me? For someone who hasn’t had to market themselves and brand themselves, what are the steps that you recommend they do to think about — “hey, I used to write for a living, should I just be writing for self-promotion now?”

Marci: I think when it comes to writing for self-promotion as the way to get work, I don’t want to overplay that too much. Because I think that it takes a lot to write enough that you’re going to get noticed in the blogosphere. If you’ve never blogged before, as we know, like there is a learning curve to making sure that — so I’m not sure that’s the best and quickest way. But one thing, if you’ve been out there for a while, you probably have editorial connections. And I would say start talking to the editors you know. because they will be hiring freelancers. They have holes to fill, so figure out what they need and if you can be helpful.

And also I think — I’ve had a regular newspaper gig even though it is as a freelancer, but you always have to pitch. You always have to persuade your editor that there is a story there. So I think people are reluctant to think of themselves as knowing how to pitch, but any time you’ve persuaded an editor that you’ve got the story, I think you have been pitching — even if you’ve been doing it outside of an employment relationship.

Josh: Right, even if you’ve been on staff and you still had to get your way on page one — that sort of process. For journalists who have been making this transition who you’ve been talking to and interviewing for your stories, what are the career paths that you are seeing as some of the most common? What are the directions that people are heading?

Marci: So people are using their writing skills as corporate communications — both external and internal, at places that have to do sometimes with their subject-matter expertise. Like nonprofits, businesses that relate to the area that they use to cover. academic institutions of any kind, foundations like the Nieman Foundation. So that’s like a really common one.

I see people going into education — teaching, coaching, working on helping other people communicate, perhaps even as a speaking coach, not necessarily just in writing. Speechwriting is a big one also.

But I do think it’s important to think outside of all of these kind of expected ones. And if you are an investigator, are there ways to take those investigative skills and go in another direction with them? If you were really interested in uncovering the wrongs of business, is there some role in the new social business movement where you would find a lot of passion and a lot of ways to achieve the same things?

I think one thing that’s hardest for journalists — and I saw it so much going around here — is that people can be journalism as a career because they’re mission focused. They really want to uncover the truth, do something that they feel really personally good about and connected about.

And I think it’s really important to make sure that where you go next meets those goals, even if it takes a while to figure that out. And you might have some stops along the way. I said on this panel: A career is an evolution, it’s not a destination. And understand that you might have to have some stops before you get to the place that’s exactly right.

Josh: Let me ask you one last question. Obviously folks who’ve been laid off were in one position. But there are also lot of 22-year-olds, fresh out of college who worked on their college newspaper, had a dream of getting that newspaper job — maybe that dream isn’t as available as it used to be. Are the questions different for someone who is fresh out, who doesn’t have experiences good or bad to push him or her in one direction, who is sort of starting anew?

Marci: Well, one thing that always comes up is young people’s facility with technology. And if you are young and if you fall into that camp, you have to make that work to your benefit. I talked to a bunch of former journalists who are not right out of school, but who are here, working for Yahoo, where I’m going to be blogging soon. And they have really interesting jobs at Yahoo that use exactly the same journalism skills that they were using as journalists. But they’re doing it in a technology company — in a search company which is also a content company now.

And we have all these blurry lines of what is going to be, I think, the new kind of journalistic entities, the new content providers. So, I would say like think expansively about that, about what entities really fall in the definition of content creators, even though that sounds really like jargony. That’s where you’re going to have the right skills.

Josh: Yeah, it’s really hard for people who do have the mission-based goals to then turnaround and say “I’m just filling space on a site, I’m not going to dig up any dirt at this job.”

Marci: Right. And I think there are watchdog organizations, there are criminal justice organizations — like if that’s where you are your bent is, go there. I had a young writer in my class who really really is passionate about books and publishing, and he knows technology. Ended up working for Google, and he is one of the people who founded the Authors@Google program in his 20 percent — Google has this 80/20 time where you get to pursue your dream project for 20 percent of your time — and he was one of the people who built Authors@Google. Under 25. Because he followed his passion and he found an organization that let him nurture that.

Josh: Where can we find your work on the Internet?

Marci: Well, always go to heymarci.com, that’s Marci with an I. And starting next week I will be writing a blog on Yahoo! Shine. I write a lot for The New York Times and a bunch of other publications.

Josh: And what’s the blog for Yahoo going to be focused on?

Marci: It’s called “Working the New Economy,” and that’s what it’s going to be about. I’m focusing on bright spots — smart moves that people are making today and how the rest of us can replicate them.

Josh: All right. Thank you very kindly.

* As much as I love Marci, I’d push back against this on a couple fronts. First, our interests extend quite a ways beyond the Times and The New Yorker, fine institutions that those are. And second, there are any number of people who work for both institutions who would qualify as “slashes.” In The New Yorker, for example, the medical reporting is done primarily by Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman — both physicians/writers. If you extend into the opinion world, Paul Krugman is the very definition of a slash. Personally, I think news organizations are going to have to get a lot less strict about the division between doers and writers — precisely because that holy divide keeps a lot of talent out of their pages. —Josh