no, F*#@ you!!

This past week I talked with two amazing journalists who are out of a job because their newspapers folded. And there are more to come.

So, how are J-Schools teaching bright eyed students to prepare for jobs in the brave new world of journalism, whatever that might be? According to a sharp item on New York Magazine’s website, here’s how one of the “greatest” journalism schools sees the future: Columbia J-School’s Existential Crisis

Note to self: check out more stuff at the Learning Annex before having a tenured professor try to teach me how to do things they’ve never done before.

deep water

I love teaching and I love learning too. So I was in good company as a coach at the NPPA MultiMedia Immersion session in Louisville, KY. The students were photographers (one a Pulitzer Prize winner) picture editors, newspaper directors of photography and even other teachers; photojournalism professors from the top three PJ universities in America. It was great because I learned a ton. You can see all the student stories online.

How I spent my summer vacation

I’ve had a great summer travelling and teaching. I wanted to share a bit of what the workshop experience is like for me. This workshop, The Spirit of People, was held at the Tuscany Photo Workshops in August 2007.

You can see this video here at my new website.

Leaping into Digital

August means another installment of the Leaping into Digital class at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine. Designed for people who want to jump from silver based film to digital media. The class worked hard and this week I’m slowly learning how to covert those files into a flash movie using FCP and a very cool free flash player from Jeroen Wijering.

One thing that’s cool about this player is that it scales the movie up to the size of the player. Here I scaled it 2x. I know this needs work but it’s fun to deliver it as such a big movie with a custom designed interface.

Curious to know what you think about the quality vs. size.

Visual Story Telling with Audio class

Last month I spent a week at the SantaFe (New Mexico) Photo Workshops, teaching a new class: Visual Storytelling with Audio.

The nine students ranged from professional photographers to fine artists to teachers to advanced amateurs. It was a great group and they worked long hours using the Zoom H4 recorder and AudioTechnica mics, Audacity, IView Media Pro and Soundslides Plus in addition to their digital still cameras.

In a single day, they each recorded, photographed, edited, mixed and output a multimedia show. Then they did a new piece the next day. Then for the third time, another new piece in a single day. Their heads must have been spinning but each piece got better and better.

Here’s a QuickTime movie of our final presentation and a cool frame from that movie..

And here are two of my favorite pieces from the final presentation:
Rick Scibelli’s Final Spring and Julie Skarratt’s In This Moment.

(Thanks to Joe Weiss for letting us use SoundSlides Plus, his new supercharged –and very cool– version of the classic media production tool that makes slide shows simple and now creates work that looks more and more like you’ve slaved away in Final Cut Pro )

Soul of Athens

When I decided to come to Ohio University as the Knight Fellow last year, I generally received one of two reactions: envy or head scratching.

Why did I do it? Well, to create work like The Soul Of Athens which launched today. I produced the content for the creativity section.

I shot and edited The Art of Coal Country about how Nelsonville, Ohio was saved by art. It’s my vision of how a typical newspaper feature story can look on the web.

Soul of Athens is our attempt to look at where “merlot meets moonshine,” an multimedia examination of Athens County and our small University town in the foot hills of Appalachia.

This is a class project, totally created by students but the brainchild of the amazing Zach Wise , the 29-year-old visiting professional who has guided it, kept us on track and constantly tweaked and prodded us into the best we could do in 8 weeks.

Zach pretty much allowed us to generate and create and build every bit, from concept to design to code to content to text to viral marketing. Another web guru, Brian Storm flew in from NYC to be our second guiding light.

What was most interesting for me was to be involved as a producer and generate pieces that I did not shoot myself (though I did edit them all.)

For Harmony in Two Parts , a story on the creative process between 2 musicians, I generated the idea and worked with M.K.Smith, who photographed and recorded the piece. I made the edit

For PassionWorks a story about an eye-opening art studio for developmentally disadvantaged adults, and The Carver of Coolville Ridge, a story about David Hostetler, an internationally recognized sculptor who lives nearby, I found work already in progress and matched it to ideas I generated. So I have now also learned the fine art of begging and pleading for rights and cooperation. I re-edited the pieces for the web.

And it’s pretty much what I came here to learn. I couldn’t be happier. Love to hear what you think.

SWPC

The Seeing With Photography Collective is a New York based group of photographers that I’m following for my Ohio University Master’s Project. I worked on this flash website prototype with fellow class members Chad Stevens and Tiffany Richter.