Author: EJohnson

Reminders and Upcoming Dates

Scripts for your radio stories will be due on Monday, Oct. 25. On that day, everyone will sign up for an individual editing session with me. You can sign up for a time slot here.

The final, edited radio project will be due on Monday, Nov. 1.

Practice Radio Assignment

There are several steps to producing a radio news story, so we’re going to do a short practice assignment to give you a feel for how it all comes together.

1. RECORD your interviews and other sound.
2. WRITE the script. (You can’t do this until you’ve completed the reporting, because you need to write around the scenes and sound bites you’ve gathered.)
3. TRACK. Once you have finalized your script with the help of your editor (in this case, me) you can move forward with recording, or tracking your narration.
4. MIX. Now that you have all the sound elements you need (sounds bites/acts, narration/track, and natural sound/ambi) you can go ahead and edit the radio story in Audacity and export the finished WAV audio file.
5. PUBLISH. You’ll upload the WAV file to Soundcloud and post a link to the class blog along with a good title and your final script.

Ahead of Monday’s Zoom class, you’ll need to have completed the first three steps (of the practice assignment, not your actual radio story)  and downloaded Audacity to your home computer.

Recording Exercise

Partner up with someone in the class and interview them for 3-5 minutes about a hobby or interest of theirs. This part we will do before we leave today. The other parts you can complete at home if there isn’t enough time.

Script Writing Exercise

Write a very brief practice script with only 2-3 sound bites taken from the classmate interview you did. Post your practice script to the class blog by class time on Monday.

Here’s my example script based on a very short interview I did with another professor back in the spring. Note some of the different elements of script writing:

• Visual/descriptive, paints a picture to add context to the natural sounds
• Sets up sound bites by introducing the person by their full name and often by paraphrasing or hinting at what they’re about to say.
• No long, rambling, complicated sentences.
• Ends with a final line of narration that looks to the future in some way.

HOST INTRO: With CUNY schools transitioning to online learning this week amid the coronavirus outbreak, professors across New York City are getting creative. Emily Johnson spoke to one CUNY adjunct about what it’s like trying to teach during a pandemic.

AMBI: Nat sounds of tea kettle boiling (FADE DOWN AS TRACK BEGINS)

TRACK: I’m here with Anna Ficek in her Brooklyn apartment, watching her make tea while she works from home. She’s a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and when she’s not working on her dissertation she teaches art history at Baruch College and Borough of Manhattan Community College, or BMCC.

ACT: ANNA: When I found out that everything was getting shut down and especially CUNY I felt extremely sad. Because CUNY is such a big part of my life, such a great community that it was hard to feel that kind of dissipating.

TRACK: She says teaching from home has been a real challenge because of the way she runs her classes.

ACT: ANNA: It’s been very difficult to adapt to teaching remotely just because I really value the discussion I have with my students.

TRACK: Still, she’s trying to see this as an opportunity.

ACT: ANNA: What I’m hoping to get out of this is more time to really focus on what’s important both in terms of teaching and my own dissertation and my own research and trying to figure out creative problem solving ways to deal with these new issues that are going to come around like libraries being closed and inaccessibility to archives and how myself as an academic and as a researcher can get around that. So challenges, but also good challenges!

TRACK: CUNY schools will continue with distance learning for at least the remainder of the spring semester. For Baruch College, I’m Emily Johnson.

Recording Narration

Finally, record the narration you wrote in your practice script. You don’t need to submit this to me by Monday; you will use it in a sound editing/mixing exercise that day.

You’ll need to record your narration in a quiet place with sound-absorbing surfaces. Some people use their closet as a makeshift studio; others just throw a blanket over their head. If your room is carpeted, has curtains and lots of plush surfaces, the sound quality should be decent.

It’s best not to drink or eat dairy products right before recording narration; it makes your voice sound thick.

Try not to speak from high up in your throat. Speak from lower in your belly.

Good posture is important.

Some people in the radio world warm up their voices by singing, stretching, and/or doing tongue twisters.

So, to recap:

By the end of class time, you should have finished interviewing a classmate for 3-5 minutes.

And here’s what you need to have done by class time on Monday:

1. Write a short practice script based on your practice interview and post it to the blog.
2. Record the narration you wrote in your practice script.
3. Download Audacity.

Photo Essays Due

Today we’ll be looking at your photo essays together and discussing/critiquing them.

Reminder

Your pitch for your radio project is due on the blog by next class.

Caption writing

Just because photojournalism is a visual medium, it doesn’t mean you get to be any less thorough when it comes to names, facts, dates, etc. You need to always make sure you get the names, locations, professions, ages (if relevant) to include in your captions. The Who/What/Where/When/Why.

Washington Post guidelines:

“A caption should briefly and clearly describe in a complete sentence what is happening in the picture, including an active verb (‘someone does something’). This will allow our internal systems to take sections of the sentence and automatically create keywords. In many cases, a single sentence will suffice. A second sentence is acceptable if it adds additional information, follows the required formula and does not editorialize.”

Caption example:

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – JANUARY 11: Actress Kate Winslet holds her award at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. Winslet won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress for her role in “The Reader,” as Hollywood set aside labor strife and a recession to honor the year’s best performances. (Photo by Rich Lipski for The Washington Post)

Notice how the first sentence is in present tense, describing what is literally happening in the photo, and the following sentence is in the past tense, giving background and context. 

In a photo essay, the captions play the additional role of shaping a narrative. So while wire photos and breaking news photos might all include similar captions because most likely they’ll only be used one at a time, your captions in a photo essay will need to follow a somewhat more narrative shape. Meaning, the first one will include a lot of that 5W’s stuff, while the additional captions might fill in the blanks some more.

Reminders and Upcoming Due Dates

Your photo essays will be due a week from today, Monday Oct. 4, by class time. Remember I’m looking for 12-20 photos and thoroughly reported captions and/or text.

This Wednesday’s class will be a production day so please make sure all the photos you have so far are available to you. I will be going around and checking in with everybody about your projects one-on-one.

As previously mentioned, I recommend self-publishing on Medium so that your photos display well and you aren’t limited by the compression/memory issues on our WordPress site.

Your radio pitches will be due on the class blog by class time next Wednesday, October 6. That will also be the day you sign out your audio recorders, so please don’t miss class; the following class will involve an asynchronous assignment that requires you to have one.

Intro to Radio Reporting

For your radio stories, you’ll be creating something called a wrap: a scripted feature with narration, natural sounds, and sound bites all woven together.

Sample wrap.

Sample radio script:  script_bhutanmentalhealth_1.

Here are some basics you’ll want to keep in mind as you set out to collect sound:

Choose your environment wisely. Be aware of your surroundings. If you interview someone under a subway track, your recording will be impossible to understand. Pick a relatively quiet space. A little background noise is fine and adds atmosphere – except for music. Music makes editing difficult, so avoid it if possible.

Cell phones off or on airplane mode. Yours and theirs. If you’re using your phone to record, make sure it’s set to silent.

Don’t forget your nats. Natural sound is a crucial element of any audio piece. Think about what sounds will most effectively place your listener in the scene. Footsteps, dishes clinking, phones ringing. Don’t be afraid to get in there and get close. Music is fine to use as a nat sound, but not as background to an interview. It will mess up your ability to edit.

Don’t forget your ambi. “Ambi” refers to ambient sound, also known as room tone. Basically, this is the background noise from wherever you happen to conduct your interviews. Even if you record in a very quiet place, nothing still usually sounds like something because of how the acoustics vary in different rooms. Before or after every interview, always record 90 seconds to two minutes of ambi. This will go under your narration to make the story feel seamless.

Ask open-ended questions. Yes or no questions won’t give you good long responses filled with usable quotes.

Get close, but not too close. Putting a mic right up against someone’s mouth can result in popping and crackling sounds on the recording. Make sure to test your equipment so you know roughly where to hold your recorder for optimal sound quality.

Ask your question, then shut up. Active listening is a fantastic skill for a journalist to have, but if you keep murmuring “Uh-huh,” “Yeah,” and “Sure,” while they’re answering your questions, you won’t be able to use the material. Stick with smiling and nodding.

Keep control of the mic. Always monitor your sound with headphones while recording, if possible. (This is not possible with the Voice Memos app, unfortunately.) Hold the mic 1-2 feet from the interviewee’s mouth. Never let the person you’re interviewing hold it. Try to keep handling noise to a minimum.

If recording an interview remotely, try to do a tape sync. A tape sync means recording both ends of a phone interview in person and then editing them together. This will allow the sound quality for both voices to be high-quality and clear. Typically, radio hosts hire freelancers who live in the same city as their interviewee to go out and record the tape syncs, but in the pandemic it’s become more common to ask the interviewee to do it themselves and then send it to you.

A couple more radio stories:

Example of a clever host intro:

Need to release stress? Scream into Iceland’s abyss.

Great example of a local NYC story:

At this Brooklyn restaurant, you can get Korean food with a side of Russian history

A radio wrap story reported by a Baruch multimedia student last year:

Guidelines for radio stories

Assignment #2 will be a 3- or 4-minute news radio feature (a “wrap”). A wrap is a scripted radio piece that weaves together natural sounds, interview clips (known as “actualities”), and reporter narration to tell a story.

These are the components you are required to submit for the final draft:

1. A good headline/title.
2. Your final 3-4  minute edited audio file, posted to Soundcloud and embedded on the blog.
3. At least one photo.
4. The final draft of your script.

Once again, your radio pitches will be due on the class blog by class time next Wednesday, October 6. 

Reminders and Upcoming Due Dates

A reminder that your photo essays are due on Monday, October 4. Remember that I’m looking for 12-20 photos along with thoroughly reported captions and/or text.

Class on Wednesday next week will be a production/editing day devoted to working on assembling your photo essays, writing the captions and/or text, or simply checking in about your project if you still have reporting and shooting to do. Please bring in all the photos you have so far (or make sure they’re available in the cloud). This is an opportunity to get feedback from me BEFORE you file your finished product, and mimics the real-world process of working with an editor. Please take full advantage of it!

I recommend self-publishing on Medium so that your photos display well and you aren’t limited by the compression/memory issues on our WordPress site.

Discussion: Photo editing in Lightroom

We’ll look at your “scavenger hunt” photos together, answer any questions you have about Lightroom, and talk a bit about best practices and the ethics of photo editing in photojournalism.

Assignment: Attend one of these online Photoville sessions OR visit one of these open-air Photoville exhibitions scattered around the five boroughs and write a short (200-300 words) blog post about the experience. Please include a photo or a screenshot to show me you were there. The last of the online sessions takes place on Thursday, October 21, so this assignment can be completed and submitted at any time before the following class on Monday, October 25.

DSLR Camera Workshop

First, everyone will check out a camera for the semester. You will use this for the photo essay assignment and then again toward the end of the semester for your video assignment. There are enough for each person to keep one out for the whole semester. Please make sure to take good care of it! Any lost or broken pieces will need to be replaced by you.

We’ll take about ten minutes to play with the settings and get the hang of where all the controls on the camera are located.

In-Class Practice Assignment: Photo Scavenger Hunt

Go out and take 8-10 thoughtfully-composed images that capture some of the following elements of composition. Some of these will inevitably contain multiple elements, and that’s fine. Remember that you want to end up with a final edit of 8-10 images, which means you will need to take  more photos than that and then decide which are your strongest.

Contrasting colors
Monochromatic colors
Symmetry
Pattern
Rule of thirds
Close-up detail shot
Shallow depth of field
Portrait
Dramatic/beautiful/interesting use of light
Slow shutter speed
Internal framing
Movement
Decisive moment
Layers telling a story
Dramatic perspective (shooting from high up or from low to the ground)

You don’t need to send these to me yet: you will use these in a practice editing exercise after we return from our week off next week. Just hold onto them and await further instructions.

Photo Essays: An Introduction

A photo essay is a thoroughly reported story, told in well-composed and curated images and captions. Ideally, there should be a mix of images so that the eye is always looking at something new as the viewer clicks or scrolls through: close-up shots, wide shots, portraits, colorful shots, bright shots, dark shots, action shots, etc. Intimacy is a powerful tool in these sorts of projects.

https://time.com/3809851/dancehall-queens-of-brooklyn/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/20/they-call-us-bewitched-the-drc-performers-turning-trash-into-art-photo-essay

https://reemadoleh.exposure.co/gentrification-in-brooklyn

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/multimediareportingfall2020/?author=39159

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/multimediareportingfall2020/?author=37122

Upcoming Deadlines:

Remember that your photo essay pitches are to be posted on the blog by class time next Monday, 9/13. Our Zoom class that day will be a pitch workshop.

We will look at your photos from the scavenger hunt together on Wednesday, 9/15, but please don’t send them to me yet! Just hang onto them for now. (And feel free to keep shooting more images between now and then if you like.)

Discussion: Deconstructing an Image

Let’s apply some of what we learned last class and analyze some photos. What compositional elements are you seeing here? What was the photojournalist aiming to convey?

2020 in Photos

Intro to Camera Settings

The first time you pick up a DSLR camera, the sheer number of settings and dials can be a little overwhelming. You may be tempted to stick with Auto when you start out — and that’s totally fine while you’re getting the hang of it.

But to make sure you are taking the best possible pictures, it helps to have control over a few key settings: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, which collectively make up the three pillars of photography. Tweaking these settings will allow you to take different types of pictures, and all of them essentially come down to one thing: light.

The Bucket

It may be helpful to keep this analogy in mind.

Imagine you are using a garden hose to fill a bucket to the top. Next, imagine that our end goal — a bucket filled exactly to the brim, but without spilling — equals a perfectly exposed photograph .

A few things control how much water goes in the bucket and how long it takes to reach the brim: the width of the hose, the water pressure, and how long you let the water run. You can achieve your goal using endless combinations of these factors. A very narrow pipe running at a steady pressure for a long time will fill your bucket as surely as a very wide pipe running for only a few moments.

A camera works the same way to let in the correct amount of light. Imagine that the width of the hose is the aperture, the amount of time you run the tap is the shutter speed, and the water pressure is the ISO.

ISO

Basically, ISO refers to how sensitive your camera’s sensor is to light. The lower the number, the less sensitive it is and vice versa. The ISO range in the DSLR cameras we’ll be using usually goes from 100 to 6400, doubling as it goes (100 to 200 to 400 and so on until it gets up to 3200 and 6400).

It follows, then, that you will need to adjust the ISO for the available lighting conditions.

In broad daylight, there is plenty of light to work with, so a low ISO will be all you need. If you let in too much light, the image will be overexposed.

If you are shooting indoors in artificial light, you will need a much higher ISO — but be aware that you sacrifice image quality as you get up to the highest ISO settings, where you will start to notice a grainy quality. So before you reach for the dial to crank the ISO up to 3200, try letting a bit more light into the camera using a wider (lower) aperture or slower shutter speed.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is probably the simplest setting to understand. It refers to how long the camera’s shutter stays open. The longer the shutter is open, the more light is able to come in, and vice versa.

Shutter speed typically ranges from about 1/1000th of a second (very fast) to a few seconds (very slow). Slow shutter speed allow for a longer exposure time, which allows the camera to capture more movement. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the image you want to make.

A faster shutter speed would have captured the teal-colored glove crisply. Using a slower shutter speed can create a sense of motion. Credit: Lindsay Armstrong

A long exposure can allow you to capture objects in motion in an artistically blurred fashion — or it can capture unwanted camera shake if you’re shooting without a tripod.

Slow Shutter Speed

Sports photographers trying to capture crisp images, for example, are likely to rely on a fast shutter speed because their subjects are moving so quickly.

Aperture

Aperture refers to the opening in the lens. The wider it is, the more light it lets in. Somewhat confusingly, smaller numbers equate to wider aperture. Aperture is measured in “f-stops” and lenses can have different ranges. The wide-angle lenses that come with the journalism department’s DSLR cameras typically range from about f/3.5 (the widest) to f/22 (letting in the least amount of light).

A low aperture, in addition to helping you shoot in low-light conditions, allows you to capture a shallow depth of field. This refers to the effect where an object in the foreground is in focus but the background is blurred (or vice versa).

This also allows you to play with the bokeh effect, as we discussed a little earlier.

A high aperture, on the other hand, allows to retain detail at every layer of the image, which can be vital in terms of storytelling. If there are protest signs in the background, for instance, and your camera lens is focused on a police officer in the foreground, a shallow depth of field means we may not be able to tell what the signs say. In such a situation, you might want a flatter image, with a deeper depth of field.

Hello, JRN 3510 students! This blog is where you’ll pitch stories, submit drafts, publish your edited stories, and workshop each other’s projects and ideas. I will also post my lectures here so that you can refer back to them.

Welcome and introductions.

I essentially run my classes like a small newsroom. So for the duration of this course, you will be the reporters and I will be your editor. If you have any questions or run into any problems on your assignments and need a quick response, the best way to reach me is just to text me; my number is in the syllabus. For anything less time-sensitive, email is fine.

Syllabus: Multimedia-Reporting-Syllabus-Fall-2021

What does “multimedia” journalism mean and how is it changing?

The old forms of traditional media still exist, but they have adapted to new methods of delivery and consumption.

Radio stories on the air –> downloadable/streamable podcasts and web versions of stories with photos

TV news –> online video (compositional framing changes, video length changes, formatting optimized for mobile)—and the bar for web video is getting higher and higher

Newspaper-style photography and landscape orientation –> Instagram and the rise of medium format (square) and portrait orientation (contains more information)

Traditional forms like writing, radio and broadcast have moved online and can complement each other when it comes to telling a complete, dynamic story.

Snow Fall was revolutionary in 2012; now this type of interactive multimedia-heavy layout is fairly common. The NYT Magazine also used this kind of scrolling presentation to great effect with The 1619 Project.

Intro to Photojournalism

Here are some basic rules and guidelines of photo composition to keep in mind as you start developing your eye:

1. The Rule of Thirds.

If you pay attention to only one element of composition, the rule of thirds should be it. If you start shooting with this “rule” in mind, your pictures will begin to look a lot better immediately.

The general idea is to imagine breaking an image down into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. If you place the main points of interest in your photo where the lines intersect, or along the lines themselves, your image will be far more visually interesting than if you just put the subject smack in the middle. Studies have shown that composing photos this way draws the human eye far more effectively.

2. Use color.

Black and white photography is a beautiful art form, but in photojournalism, most of the time you’ll be shooting in color. It helps to know what combinations of color to look for if you want your images to really pop.

You probably recognize this photo. Known as Afghan Girl, it is one of National Geographic’s most iconic images and was taken by color master Steve McCurry. One of the reasons this relatively simple picture is so stunning and so well-known is the colors: red and green, which fall on opposite sides of the color wheel.

Opposite colors, paired together, can make each other look more vibrant. Notice how the green of the girl’s eyes is picked up by the wall behind her and set off by the rusty red of her scarf.

Images with variations on the same color, known as monochromatic images, can also be quite striking:

3. Capture the decisive moment.

“The decisive moment” is a term that was coined by renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. It refers to that fleeting instant that photographers love to capture: When someone leans in for a kiss, when a soccer player connects with with the ball, or when a protester throws a rock. If you aren’t ready with your finger on the shutter, you’ll miss the moment. If Bresson had taken this photo a split second earlier or later, it would have been a much more ordinary photo of a man splashing through a puddle. These moments don’t need to be that dramatic; for your assignments, it may be as simple as capturing the moment when the food truck owner you’re profiling flips some meat on the grill or hands the food to her customer. Action shots vs static shots tell more of a story.

4. Leading lines.

Leading lines are lines that move the eye from one part of the image to another part, or sometimes out of the image. They add a sense of drama and perspective, so it’s always good to be on the lookout for roads, bridges, fences, shorelines and the like.

5. Symmetry and patterns.

Symmetry and patterns exist everywhere, both in nature and man-made sights. Looking for repetitions and symmetries, while staying alert to things that then break those very patterns (especially on the thirds!) is a sure way to make an arresting image.

6. Layers.

Another great way to make sure your images are visually interesting is to keep an eye out for what’s happening up close, in the middle distance, and far away. Think in layers. If you can frame your shots so that interesting things are happening in the background as well as at your focal point five feet away, you’re onto something.

Layers will be one of your greatest tools as a photojournalist, because layers add context. They tell a story.

This is a famous photograph by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this image, which showed the effects of the 1993 famine in Sudan.

“Photojournalism” means you’re telling a story, not just taking a picture.

Layers are also a great chance to play around with something called depth of field. This refers to the difference in focus between things that are in the foreground vs. the background—if there isn’t much difference, like in the Kevin Carter photo above, then you’re using greater depth of field. When that difference is dramatic, like when your phone is in Portrait Mode, it’s called shallow depth of field.

Shallow depth of field also gives you something called bokeh, which turns background lights into warm globes.

Depth of field is affected by a few things: the focal length of your lens, your distance from the thing in focus, and aperture. We’ll talk more about that when we get into camera settings.

7. Light.

Light impacts everything we do as photographers. How much are we working with? Is it natural or artificial? What is the temperature of the light? What direction is it coming from? Is it harsh or diffuse? What time of day is it? Are you using a flash? Many photojournalists prefer to shoot with natural light as much as possible. Portrait photographers and fashion/fine art photographers often use studio lighting to create interesting lighting environments.

Different kinds of light will affect how different people look in photographs depending on their skin tone.

8. Get close. Then, get even closer.

Photographer Robert Capa famously said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Proximity with your subjects makes for more powerful and intimate photos. Don’t be afraid to get right in someone’s face with your camera. It may feel intrusive and strange at first, but a huge part of being a reporter is engaging with people and making them feel comfortable.

What’s that process like? How do you go about shoving a camera in someone’s face?

For analysis: The Year in Pictures