A semester of hard work is coming to a close as I uploaded the video portion of my project covering Jeff McAvoy. To celebrate my victory in the AP Style Bowl I spent several hours putting the finishing touches on this video that took a few months of planning.
A major challenge of this project was finding a way to show my Trinity fellow’s work. This was difficult because his job as marketing and communications manager has him behind a desk a lot of the time. A few ideas were thrown around in conversations with Professor Lowe and Carole Ferrara. One of my favorite ideas was to show the work that the Urban Ecology Center does with children. The issue with this was that I was in class at the times that the kids were visiting the agency. It would have been simple enough to cover an event McAvoy was working at and film him interacting at a gathering that he was in charge of publicizing. The issue with this idea is that it would not have made for an interesting video. The search was on to find an idea that had a little drama. When Professor Lowe asked me how the organization started it got me thinking. McAvoy mentioned that a neighborhood in trouble banded together to clean up their park and that mission eventually became the Urban Ecology Center. My last meeting with him was great as he explained in much greater detail the dramatic story about how the area changed through the agency. A neighborhood in crisis needed to find a way to clean up a park that had witnessed drug deals and even a murder. One main idea behind this project is that heinous crime is less likely to happen where children are. As the clean up of the park began kids began to make appearances. Over time the crime moved on out and the presence of children continued and grew. McAvoy make this story easy to tell as he was able to tie the current mission to the original goals in his interview. In order to learn more about McAvoy, the Urban Ecology Center and the Trinity Fellows Program check in next week when all of our projects will be displayed online.
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Wednesday afternoon #loweclass was treated to a visit from the senior features editor for CNN digital, Mira Lowe. This visit was part of something I call the Herb Lowe advantage.
Mira Lowe showed us new tools that she uses everyday. Chartbeat is a real-time analytics tool that allows you to see what people are clicking on your site that very minute. Another tool she showed us was called News Whip. This is a tool that identifies trends on social media and scores links based on their “social velocity” which tells you how quickly a story is being shared. These tools help her answer the question she works to answer each day, “What should we be focusing on?” These tools can be helpful in learning what stories she wants to be sharing but Mira Lowe explained that they do not replace news reporting. In addition to sharing her tools with us, Mira also gave advice on how to get people reading our content. “Your story doesn’t end when it’s published.” She urged us to share our work on social media. Of course, sharing it is not enough on its own. In order to really push our content we have to make people want to read it when we share, rather than simply saying “look at my work.” After we talked about how to share our work we took a look at some high quality content. The night before Mira’s visit I explored a story that she recommended. The story was a feature on CNN.com called The poor kids of Silicon Valley. The story featured six videos and pictures with each piece of text. We discussed how the author, John Sutter, was creative with his storytelling method. He uses first person narration and beautiful visuals to deliver the story. It was great to have someone who influences content in the professional world stop by our classroom to share with us. After class all my classmates had positive things to say about our double-Lowe-day. Not every journalism class has access to a professional like Mira. Perhaps two Lowes are better than one.
A month ago I explored a New York Times’ documentary series titled Op-Docs. One of my favorite pieces was A Conversation With My Black Son. The piece was simple but effective in delivering its message. In the end that specific Op-Doc was the example for my project.
It took a while for me to land on a project due to time constraints and the availability of important interview subjects. In the end I picked the timely topic of fraternity life. The brothers who spoke with me were eager to have their voices heard. They explained that they feel misrepresented in the media. This type of project was a perfect way to hear their side of so many recent stories. We covered topics that you rarely hear about in the news like what fraternities do for the common good, what it's like to be behind the doors of a frat house and how the brothers feel about all the recent media coverage. It was interesting to get inside an organization under fire and see how people interpret the world around them. It's always interesting to find out how the judged judge. The interview process was smooth but the harder part came in editing. What was the best way to tell this story? How could I allow their voices to be heard while also presenting the problem in a clear and concise way? Getting my nearly 60 minutes of interviews down to just a five minute video was challenging. It was a difficult decision but in the end I did not use any supplemental footage. This required me to be more deliberate with my cuts and trimming in the editing process. In order to keep the video interesting with such simple visuals I had to make quick cuts and keep the quotes moving along. One difficulty in this process was that many of the quotes I used started with “um” or “and” which was not ideal. It took precise editing to fix the problem. It was challenging to find a flow for this story because there were so many talking points but each quote had to be shorter than eight or so seconds. My goal was to keep each quote around five seconds or less but some were too poignant to cut short. In the end the story came together nicely and I'm pleased with the way the final product looks. This is a story that I will continue to work on in my time here at Marquette. The end goal is to have a member of every fraternity on campus in the video. Check back for that sometime this summer.
Throughout this semester #loweclass has been working to create our final project. The final project will focus on the Trinity Fellows Program at Marquette University. Each member of our class has been assigned a fellow to do a feature on and my fellow is Jeff McAvoy.
For this project we will be using multiple forms of visual storytelling. Last week we were introduced to StoryMap. This new mode of storytelling allows you to map out a subject and take the reader on a virtual tour of the story. Each stop along the way only requires a sentence or two of description. This mode of storytelling works especially well for my story about Jeff because one of the main components of this story is how he has travelled across the country. StoryMap will allow you to see how he has moved and how far exactly each move is. StoryMap can be a bit clunky at times but I am not a software engineer who can properly critique the mechanics of the tool. What I can say is that as you get used to using it, StoryMap can create a beautiful final product that will be interesting for your reader to look at. This got me thinking about what else you could create with StoryMap. I love what my classmate Jack Goods did for his Marquette Lacrosse season preview with StoryMap. Many NBA teams have ridiculous travel schedules due to the alignment of the conferences and divisions. Writers across the league have proposed a variety of solutions and I imagine they could use StoryMap to really spice up |
AboutOn this page you can find blog posts about my adventures in journalism, ponderings about projects, experiences with storytelling tools and updates on what I'm working on. Archives
February 2017
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