Creating Audio Narratives
Since joining MSNBC in 1996, Jim Seida has specialized in advancing the use of audio combined with still and moving images for an Internet audience. He loves nothing more than listening (through a pair of headphones) to someone tell his or her story.
In addition to his responsibilities at MSNBC, Seida also teaches audio reporting to photojournalists. Seida attended the photojournalism programs at University of Alaska, Fairbanks and University of Missouri, Columbia.
Nancy Donaldson is a Multimedia Journalist for New York Times, who produces video, audio, photos, panoramas and extensive multimedia packages. She received a Journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She continues her involvement with the school and has worked as a producer, director of photography and video coach for several of their award-winning interactive documentary projects. Her work for washingtonpost.com has contributed to two Pulitzer Prizes, a Peabody, two Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Awards, a Casey Medal of Honor for Meritorious Journalism and several POYi, SND and NPPA awards. She has been nominated for a local Emmy and recently was nominated for a national Emmy.
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Multimedia Production
Meredith Birkett is a senior multimedia editor for special projects at MSNBC.com, a general news web site seen by more than 37 million unique users each month. Birkett has worked at MSNBC.com for eight years.
In this role, Birkett works as a liaison with freelancers, picture agencies, staff multimedia journalists and wire services to create multimedia projects across all sections of MSNBC.com.
Birkett also produces popular multimedia features such as The Week in Pictures and the Year in Pictures.
During her eight years at MSNBC.com, Birkett's projects have earned recognition from organizations such as the Online News Association, Pictures of the Year International and the National Press Photographers Association.
Kim Grinfeder is an assistant professor in the Visual Journalism program at the University of Miami School of Communication. He joined the faculty in 2003 and holds a master's degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a bachelor of arts in History from the University of Miami. His research interests include interaction design and multimedia storytelling. His professional background includes positions in design, programming, and new media consulting
His awards include NPPA Best of Photojournalism (best of the web & 1st and 2nd place best multimedia package - 2006), Flash in the Can (2006), Pictures of the Year International (2006), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Best of Web Award (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), he has received three honorable mentions in the Knight Batten Awards (2006, 2008), a Gold Award Winner in the Horizon Interactive Awards, was nominated for a Webby Award and was a finalist at the Flash Forward Film Festival. His students have also won numerous awards for their projects under his guidance, including two Society of Professional Journalists National Mark of Excellence Awards and a Webby Award Nomination.
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Teaching Multimedia: A Workshop For College Educators
Rich Beckman is the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
From January 1978 to June 2008 he was the Director of Visual Communication at the University of North Carolina. During that time he served two terms on the Faculty Council; won the Tanner and David Brinkley Awards, both in recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching; was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in South Africa, Chile and Spain; a charter member of the UNC-CH Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars and Carolina Speakers and served as the Julian Sheer Term Professor of Journalism and the James L. Knight Distinguished Professor of Journalism, awards given for overall excellence in teaching, research and service. He twice chaired divisions within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and was the founder and director of the Multimedia Bootcamp Workshops held at UNC-CH for the past eight years.
His current area of teaching and writing is in the genre of multimedia design and production, although he began his career as a photojournalist and taught in that area for 20 years. As an online producer, he has led teams that have won many of the most prestigious multimedia prizes in the world including the Pirelli INTERNETional Award for Educational Media and multimedia storytelling awards from the Online News Association, the National Press Photographers Association, The Broadcast Education Association, Horizon Interactive Awards, The Society for News Design and the Pictures of the Year International competitions.
He has judged the photography and multimedia categories of the White House Press Photographers Associations annual competition, the SNDies and Malofiej and the photography categories of the Robert F. Kennedy Awards, which honor outstanding reporting of the lives and strife of disadvantaged people throughout the world. He has spoken about and taught multimedia storytelling at NPPA national conferences, the News Photographers Association of Canada, the Eddie Adams Workshop and The Poynter Institute, and consulted in newsrooms around the world.
This year he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for Academic Excellence by the Southern Short Course in News Photography, the longest continuous running photojournalism seminar in the U.S. and the J. Winton Lemen Award by the National Press Photographers Association for outstanding service and technical innovation in the interest of photojournalism.
Laura Ruel teaches visual communication and multimedia journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. Before coming to UNC in 2004, she was inaugural director of the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She coordinates the Society for News Design's Best of Multimedia Design competition. She was project leader for the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack III research and is co-founder of DiSEL, the Digital Storytelling Effects Lab. Before joining the academic world she worked for more than 15 years at a number of publications including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Omaha World-Herald and the Rocky Mountain News.
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Creating Video Narratives
Travis Fox is an Emmy Award-winning video producer for washingtonpost.com, where he covers international and domestic stories. Past assignments have taken him to the war in Iraq and across the Middle East, Europe and Asia. His distinctive web video and panoramic photos are considered innovative in the field of Internet journalism. In 2006, he received an Emmy Award for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The White House News Photographers Association has named him Editor of the Year three times, most recently in 2006. In 2002, he was also named Camera Person of the Year. In addition to washingtonpost.com, Fox's videos are regularly featured on television and in film festivals. He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism and lives in New York.
Jim Virga has been a professional visual storyteller for more than 20 years. He has worked as a still photojournalist, cinematographer, director and has taught photojournalism at three universities. He is currently teaching in the Visual Journalism department at The University of Miami.
After completing his undergraduate degree at The University of Florida, Virga worked as a staff photographer for The Leesburg Commercial, The Orlando Sentinel and then at The Sun-Sentinel for ten years (1989-1999).
In 2001 Virga was awarded an MA in Visual Arts and Communications from the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University. While at Newhouse, he studied digital filmmaking, and received a $50,000 grant to direct "Dancing on Mother Earth," a documentary for Native American Public Television about a year in the life of singer/activist Joanne Shenandoah. The film was broadcast on PBS, and played at several film festivals. In 2006, Virga's short documentary "El Charango" was an official selection at the SILVERDOCS AFI/DISCOVERY Documentary Film Festival.
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Creating Effective Online Infographics
Alberto Cairo teaches information graphics, 3D Design, and multimedia at the School of Journalism of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Between 2000 and 2005 he was the head of the online infographics department at El Mundo, in Spain. His department won more international awards than any other in the world in that period. Cairo has consulted and organized training and workshops for top publications and universities in the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Spain, France, Switzerland, Ukraine, South Korea, and Singapore. He is author of "Infografia 2.0: Visualización Interactiva de Información en Prensa", published in Spain in September 2008, and is currently working on a textbook titled "Information Visualization in the News: Print and Multimedia Infographics Storytelling", to be published in 2009. He regularly writes for his website, www.albertocairo.com. He is founder of Visualopolis (www.visualopolis.com) a company specializing in providing training on information graphics and freelancing services.
Xaquin G.V. graduated in Journalism with a specialization in Online Media, from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (Spain). He began his career as an infographics journalist at La Voz de Galicia in 2000 and moved to elmundo.es two years later where he was responsible for health graphics and in 2005 was named Head of Interactive Graphics.
In March 2007 he moved to New York, where he worked as Assistant Art Director at Newsweek, responsible for the Interactive Graphics of the magazine. His work has been recognized at the SND.ies-including the first gold medal ever given to a breaking news infographic for the coverage of the March 11 Bombings in Madrid-and Malofiej Awards.
He has published several research articles on ethics pertaining to infographics and multimedia storytelling. Last year he lectured at ONA, the Symposium in Computation and Journalism and judged and spoke at the Malofiej Awards and Infographics Summit in Pamplona, Spain. Since August 2008, he works as a Graphics Editor at The New York Times.
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Multimedia Programming for Journalists
Donny Lofland is a freelance Internet Consultant currently specializing in interactive multimedia and application development. He has spent the past 19 years managing servers, IT infrastructure, and building a wide range of internet-based applications and education tools. In 2005, he served as Multimedia Producer and Senior Programmer for the Pirelli /Internet/ional Award winning Genomics Mediabook. For the last several years he has taught Advanced Programming and Production at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Recently, he architected the webcasting infrastructure for the 2007 Special Olympics World Games held in Shanghai, China. This included coordinating all vendors, systems, servers, backend software and programming to process upwards of 10,000 videos shot during the 10-day event. His clients have included Special Olympics International, UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, MSNBC and DKNY, to name a few. While versed in many Internet technologies, Donny is particularly proficient with ActionScript, PHP and AJAX development. He enjoys projects in the areas of education and social networking. Donny has a BS in Genetics from Texas A&M University and currently lives in Chapel Hill, NC with his wife, two children, two dogs, three gerbils and multiple fish.
Tom Jackson is a Senior Multimedia Producer for the New York Times. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in Multimedia Journalism in 2004 and a master's degree in Information Science in 2006. During his time at UNC, he studied both computer science and journalism and played a significant role in several award-winning multimedia documentaries.
During the past two years he has been involved in numerous and varied projects for nytimes.com. He is proficient in Flash and Actionscript, and has several years of experience using both client- and server-side programming languages as a means of digital storytelling. He has won several publisher's awards while at the Times, both for individual projects and for his overall contributions to the site.
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