Photo A Day- Day 5

#FF Stands For Full (of) Fun

#FF @MichaelZelbel

Michael Zelbel is a fun photographer with lots of interesting tips on his page.

#FF @photojack

Jack Hollingsworth is a very interesting photographer who also posts interesting things on social media.

#FF @jeremycowart

Jeremy Cowart is a super talented celebrity photographer who really gets emotion.

#FF @scottbourne

Scott Bourne is a photo book author, teacher and publisher of Photofocus. He also gives a lot of tips and tricks.

#FF @mostlylisa

Lisa Bettany is a photographer, blogger and TV host who dabbles in much of the same things we’re doing. Worth looking at for sure.

The Black Market: More Recession Proof Than Pornography or The Liquor Store

My story revolves around an a young man who has been directly affected by the economy. He’s lost two jobs in six months and, despite continued effort, hasn’t been able to find another. He doesn’t know where to turn and is feeling all of the negative emotions involved in being out of work. He feels like a failure, a disappointment and like the future is bleak. Due to his situation, he has turned back to what he believes to be the only comfort he can get: substance abuse.

The file size is 2 MB, the length of the story is two minutes and six seconds and you can download right here. 

Photo A Day- Day 3

Photo A Day- Day Two

Here is my photo for day two:

Shot with: Cliq XT- 5 megapixel camera smartphone

Good News Photos

The Good!
Modern Monarch Article about the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Pomp & Circumstance? Article about wedding music hullaballoo for Prince William.

For Prostitutes: An Alternative An article about prostitution in Nashville.

These photos all convey either intense emotion to the reader or use color, lighting and framing to illicit emotion in a more subtle way.

The Not-So-Good
Business That Helps Prostitutes In Recovery A business that hires recovering women to make bath products.

This photo, while being emotional, just seems a bit dry, overdone and even somehow makes you feel left out.

Audio Reporting

A) My story revolves around an a young man who has been directly affected by the economy. He’s lost two jobs in six months and, despite continued effort, hasn’t been able to find another. He doesn’t know where to turn and is feeling all of the negative emotions involved in being out of work. He feels like a failure, a disappointment and like the future is bleak. Due to his situation, he has turned back to what he believes to be the only comfort he can get: substance abuse.

My piece is very emotional and was really hard to do for a multitude of reasons. First, trying to get my first two other options to be interviewed after they realized it was Easter weekend became impossible. Then I had to scrap half of my story because it became too difficult to report on. Then I got incredibly sick. Of course, I am also a hysterical perfectionist so the hours and hours of editing seems like a challenge but is more just par for the course.

B) I believe that my story is coming together. I managed to track down a story that feels like it is worth reporting on and that makes me proud. I’m upset that I had to scrap my entire first twenty hours or so of work but I’m still happy enough with how my second draft is coming along. Considering my time constraints, illness and everything… I think it’ll be pretty solid. If I could do things differently I just would have started probably a month or two sooner. I’ve yet to be able to do a good multimedia story in less than a solid thirty hours so it would have been nice to have some time to come back to it instead of just racing through.

NPR Makes My Day (Most Days) & Audio Storytelling

I was always someone who had a hard time listening to audio. This included not just journalism but books on tape or anything in the vein of audio storytelling. This lack of inclination, however, ended pretty much exactly when I started listening to NPR. Despite the fact that this is coming dangerously close to just being an advertisement for the media outlet, I can’t really help myself. I wasted some time trying to find some stories elsewhere and just ended up back at NPR. In fact, I even found four that all had aspects that just made me excited, impressed or thoughtful. NPR just always inspires me to continue listening and, more than anything else, that is the mark of impressive audio storytelling. NPR also includes a transcript of the audio on the page that these links will go to. I think that enables the user to make sure that they’re even interested in the topic, as well as let them read along. A lot of people I know can’t retain information as well while listening and this really helps them out. NPR manages to give the amazing audio while retaining all of the good aspects of print. Very respectable.

I’ve always had a problem picking up these skills because I felt like the elementary level activities that I had to do to get to the next level were just too boring. I’ve always felt like there is just an overwhelming amount of beautiful and interesting things to record that wasting my precious time on the subject with busy work learning exercises was a waste. NPR really showed me how to use these activities and make them interesting. I learn something new or learn a new way to tackle a task in so many of the pieces that I listen to. I hope you guys can see what I mean and enjoy it as much as I do. I really hope to model my work in their direction and I really, really hope that, later this quarter, I’ll be able to show something that inspires you to keep listening in a similar way. At least a little bit.

All of these stories have great hooks and, past that, they continue to have high quality information that continues to keep you hooked. I suppose I was already interested just from the title so I might have been easier to please than someone else but it is just so often that a news outlet has an amazing headline and then sub-par information. I’m tired of what equates almost literally to trickery and am incredibly impressed by these stories. 

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–‘Portal 2’: A Student Video Game, All Grown Up

The fact that Portal became a critical darling is all the more impressive given its humble beginnings as a student project at DigiPen Institute in Redmond, Wash.”When we got there and started showing off the game, they kept bringing in more and more people, different people we’ve never seen before,” Rickey says. “And by the end of the day, they didn’t just give us advice — they offered us a job.”  

–Repelling Bugs With The Essence Of Grapefruit

That’s why the CDC is pushing hard to develop a completely natural insect repellent made from a chemical called nootkatone, which is found in Alaska yellow cedar trees and citrus fruit.Dolan says nootkatone “is nongreasy, dries very quickly, and it has a very pleasant, citrus-y grapefruit odor to it.”

–Want To Live To 100? Try To Bounce Back From Stress

What is this lady’s fountain of youth? A thousand calories a day and an hour of yoga? No, Helen Reichert likes chocolate truffles. Her favorite beverage is Budweiser. And she once announced to me that she was thinking about smoking again. When I protested, she reminded me that she has outlived several other physicians and told me to mind my own business.

–Breathing Life Into Bland, Blunt Birth Certificates 

Birth certificates nowadays serve a strictly bureaucratic purpose; but if we learn anything valuable from scrutinizing the president’s certificate, it ought to be that its brevity, its lack of detail, its sheer boringness, represents a lost opportunity to know more about what life was like at the very moment that this man was born.

These folks make me All A Twitter

In the traditional of the FF, I’m going to highlight these seven awesome people this week. All of them are definitely worth reading and are doing some either very fun or very innovative stuff. The first six are all journalists that are pretty amazing for completely different reasons. The last group, Put This On The Map, is an organization I’m doing PR work for that just amazes me everyday and I felt they deserved a FF if anybody does.

@ProEat Justin Hurst
The professional Eater is Justin Hurst. I love to eat, to discover the wonder of beautiful food, and to share it with you.
-Justin is a good friend of mine who writes about amazing food. I think he does a great job as a food critic because he hasn’t lost his inner child and everyone knows that children are always much more fun around food.

@markraganCEO Mark Ragan
Publisher of PR Daily and PR Daily Europe; Ragan.com; and Healthcare Marketing and Communication News. Conference provider to comms/social media world
-The PR Daily is really the go to daily information source for PR pros. Mark Ragan’s site does an incredible job of keeping those interested consistently in possession of some great information.

@danamlewis Dana Lewis
lover of life, social media, diet soda, travel, gf cupcakes, & staying busy! #hcsm moderator | health & digital | Thoughts/tweets = my own, but I work @Swedish
-Dana Lewis might be a PR person instead of a journalist but she is such an innovative PR person that I felt she was relevant. She created the most used healthcare conversation on twitter before even graduating college and continues to keep impressing a lot of people. I think she’s not only a great person for anybody to follow but our class especially can really use her for some inspiration.

@mashable Pete Cashmore
Breaking social media, tech and digital news and analysis from Mashable.com, the top resource and guide for all things web. Updates from @mashable staff.
-Mashable is an incredible place to find all sorts of information and tips. Something of a necessity for those new to digital media.

@maggiekb1 Maggie Koerth-Baker
Science journalist. Science editor at Boingboing.net. Writing a book about the future of energy in America (plus jokes).
-Maggie Koerth-Baker’s twitter feed is consistently interesting and a good one to follow if you want a good time waster.

@waltmossberg Walt Mossberg
Tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of allthingsd.com, and co-executive producer of the D: All Things Digital conferences.
-A priceless source for technological information and someone I just really enjoy reading.

@putthisonthemap {Put This On The Map}
PUT THIS ON THE {MAP} is reteaching gender and sexuality to professionals, such as school administrators, social workers, health care providers and juvenile probation staff.
-I work on PR materials for this nonprofit and cannot be more excited to work there. They are completely revamping the ideas behind, “It gets better” and pointing out that if we solve the actual problem… it won’t ever have to get better. You can check out their feed for chances to see their film and hear their speakers and I can’t help but urge you to do so.

The Multimedia Story… Sort-of

Multimedia Stories That Really Get It!

–Help Us Build A Nirvana Timeline

–The Science of the Spill

-1 in 8 million

All of these three stories really exemplify what multimedia stories are meant to accomplish in the first place. They either do one thing very well or tell a story that would have been much less effective without the multimedia. The Nirvana Timeline pushes for an interactive user-based creation that really helps readers feel like they’re part of the process. The Science of the Spill takes all of the stories we’ve all read so many times and adds some beautiful visuals that really help explain things better and make them more felt than read. 1 in 8 million is an incredible project that manages to accomplish the interactive aspects of the Nirvana Timeline while telling a story a new way like the Science video. It is a beautiful culmination of what I believe to be all of the solid principles involving multimedia.

Multimedia Stories That Aren’t Quite Getting It

–Plugging Your TV Into The Web

–Climate Change In Your Coffee Cup

–12 Funerals

All of these stories are on the right track. They show that the people involved wanted to add something to their stories and some of them even did add something. Plugging Your TV Into The Web allowed for user interaction and was actually pretty good. However, the article itself lacked much helpful information and seemed to be skewed towards certain providers. It is important to realize that multimedia is not an outlet where you can be less discerning than in print journalism. The Climate Change video sounded like it would be very interesting but the first minute was just a woman talking about the issues. With coffee there is a huge world of imagery and they completely wasted the opportunity. And, finally, the 12 Funerals article was interesting and the multimedia did add to the story but it just came off as such a second thought that it seemed unnecessary. Digital media affords you the opportunity to be provocative and do things that have never been done before. Not taking advantage of these possibilities seems even more disappointing than never having tried at all.

All of these pieces had something interesting to offer and it was difficult to call anything “bad.” Even just last year finding horrible digital media would have been much easier. Journalism is starting to understand these tools and it is a beautiful turn. I’m very glad to be living in a time with so many options for a journalist.