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The first six workshops will be offered beginning January 3-6 and 7-10, 2009. The schedule is as follows:

Creating Audio Narratives

Faculty: Jim Seida, MSNBC and
Nancy Donaldson, WashingtonPost.com – Nancy is now at the New York Times.
In this class you will learn audio story telling from conception to publication. We will cover story planning, equipment selection and use, interview and natural sound gathering techniques, how to work with photographers in the field, mixing and editing your sound to get to the best possible finished product. We will also discuss professional and ethical considerations as they pertain to gathering and telling stories with audio; and we will talk about using audio with photography. By the time you finish this course you will have produced your own audio story and you will have the skillset to create more audio stories on your own.

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Multimedia Production

Meredith Birkett, MSNBC and
Kim Grinfeder, UM SoC
As more and more newsrooms are asked to produce online content, new questions arise on how to integrate multimedia into our workflows. In this workshop you'll learn how to manage existing resources and technologies available to produce multimedia content, how to plan and budget for these types of projects and how to prepare your content for cross-platform distribution. We will also discuss planning for projects, information architecture and the required skill set for multimedia reporters and producers. Hands on exercises will walk you though the process of assigning, content gathering, designing, producing, evaluating and publishing multimedia content.

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Teaching Multimedia: A Workshop For College Educators

Prof. Rich Beckman, UM SoC and
Prof. Laura Ruel, UNC JOMC
Every journalism educator is being asked to add multimedia storytelling elements to his or her class syllabi. This workshop will help you design multimedia modules, entire classes and even curricula, regardless of your resources, that will properly prepare your students for the current and future media marketplaces. The workshop will discuss skill sets, tools, technology, appropriate assignments, research methodologies, assessment and how to design and sequence lectures, classroom exercises and individual and group projects in order to best prepare students for the ever-changing media marketplace.

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Creating Video Narratives

Faculty: Travis Fox, WashingtonPost.com and
Jim Virga, UM SoC
We will teach Internet Videojournalism, a new way of storytelling that borrows the best aspects of TV journalism and documentary film and combines them with the interactivity of the web. The Internet is becoming more and more video-centric as content spreads from the web to mobile phones, iPods and your 50-inch plasma TV. This Internet style of video will become more prominent as it's combined with the interactive aspects of web 2.0, further propelling web video into the main stream of the American media experience.

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Creating Effective Online Infographics

Alberto Cairo, UNC JOMC and
Xaquin G.V., New York Times
The visualization of data in an animated and interactive format, created to explain complex concepts in an easily digestible form, is an essential aspect of multimedia storytelling. Maps, charts, illustrations, and 2D and 3D animated interactive storytelling elements are a critical aspect of integrated multimedia storytelling across all disciplines of communication. This workshop will teach you how to design and execute daily, spot news and long-term online infographics projects, how to integrate infographics with other multimedia storytelling elements, how to design and develop effective newsroom workflows and how to work effectively within today's multimedia newsroom.

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Multimedia Programming for Journalists

Donny Lofland, UNC JOMC and
Tom Jackson, New York Times
More and more consumers are turning to the Internet for information, news, education and entertainment. For journalists, this is exciting as we now have a platform for developing and sharing compelling content that engages our audience in ways we never could before. At the same time this is a bit scary as we need a new set of skills for producing interactive content. While there are many internet based tools available for authoring and sharing content over the internet, Adobe Flash is particularly well suited as it is easy to learn, cross-platform, widely available and was designed specifically with multimedia content in mind (video, audio, images and support or interactivity). This intensive workshop will teach you the principles and practices of Flash ActionScript programming through guided hands-on activities. Our focus will be on developing skills and code relevant to multimedia journalism/storytelling and by the end, participants will have a solid understanding of how to approach and build interactive multimedia projects. Topics will include: basic programming skills, Object Oriented Programming (OOP), animation and user interface, design practices, XML, PHP, embedding audio/video and finally building interactive multimedia players.

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