(Mary Nesbitt)

Last week I watched a series of short news videos by graduate journalism students here at Medill. It marked the end of their first quarter at the school, an intense 11-week immersion in the nuts and bolts of the craft.

The students -- most of whom have little or no previous experience -- report and write all quarter, take still photos, make slideshows and, as a final project, create a video and write a companion print piece. With just a little training, the students' videos were, by and large, pretty engaging. (You can see one, about three young educators who created the high-performing Uplift Community High in their North Chicago neighborhood, at www.current.tv/watch/24206666.)

Of course none of them was broadcast quality, and that was the point -- the small screen experience is different, as many commentators have observed.

All the talk in newsrooms and the academy these days is a) how to get the Selectric Typewriter Generation (i.e., mine) comfortable with video technology, b) so that it can be used discriminately, c) to make better journalism, d) that will engage audiences better.

Some newsrooms are providing structured training for reporters and editors. Others are using the provide-the-equipment-and-see-what-happens approach. Whatever works. But one approach I don't recommend is to sit back and wait to see so-called "best practices" emerge. Best practices are determined over time, a luxury we don't have.

Training and experimentation don't have to cost much. Assuming you have the equipment and the motivation, here are four free online training resources:

1. At UC Berkeley's journalism school, follow Five Steps to Multimedia Reporting.
2. www.NewsU.org at the Poynter Institute offers several relevant courses, including Five Steps To Multimedia Storytelling and coming soon, Telling Stories With Sound.
3. While its focus is conventional broadcast quality video, much of the content of this detailed and highly structured free online course by the BBC is applicable. Also good is the course on radio interviews. The BBC plans to make more free instruction available later this year as part of its citizen journalism efforts.
4. Chuck Fadely, a visual journalist at the Miami Herald, offers great tips for shooting video on his blog and links to other sources of advice.

Of course the rush to video isn't a rejection of prose. Nor should every story of necessity be told in three different, or even complementary, ways. It's an exercise in judgment, based on the nature of the story, the characteristics and capability of the medium, and -- always -- audience habits and preferences.

Fadely writes:

Very few people at newspapers have a grasp of how vastly different narrative video is from what they're used to doing. Good video storytelling is emotional and temporal. Newspaper editors try to avoid emotion and seek to capture information at a particular point in time. Newspapers' stock-in-trade is providing facts and figures -- something video is ill-suited to provide.

The web is a great publishing platform because story telling can take almost any form. Words, graphics, tables and charts, videos, stills, and who knows what else. But most newspapers have not yet learned how to choose which format to use with which stories. Video is new and novel for newspapers. But stock market tables, after-the-fact police blotter items, and check-passing banquets shouldn't be covered in video. We shouldn't be focusing on doing the video equivalents of 1/2-column mugshots.

By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.