How to Improve Your Storytelling Ability

 

 

Audiences with many viewing choices expect certain standards from their favorite information sources. At the very least, they want their stories and storytellers to be interesting and appealing. Even when your intentions are noble but your work suffers, viewers can only judge what you put on the screen. In the end, nothing else matters. “The ability to appeal, whatever the subject matter, separates the successful creator from the artistic failure,” writes filmmaker and author Edward Dmytryk in his book On Film Editing.¹ Survival and professional advancement depend on a commitment to produce stories with a style and substance that are consistently solid, unique, and appealing, even on days when you might willingly trade your job for a dead mouse.

SEEK GRADUAL IMPROVEMENT

As you work to make your stories ever more attractive and compelling, you may notice competitors who seem more capable than you. Perhaps they have more experience and confidence, or their stories just seem more inviting. While it’s useful to study others’ techniques, it’s important to realize that you are in competition primarily with yourself to improve each new story you report.

Implicit in the process of self-improvement is the possibility of failure, a hazard that keeps some people from realizing big achievements in their careers. You can’t fail if you don’t try, after all, but neither can you succeed. “Don’t be afraid to fail,” advises KAKE’s Larry Hatteberg. “You don’t learn unless you fail.”² An occasional failure can be seen as a virtue in the journalist’s professional development, with each new success building on some past failure.

Improvement is a gradual process that creates its own frustrations. The trick, says NBC national correspondent Bob Dotson, is to go for the minor victories. “Don’t try to hit a home run every time out, just get on first base every time at bat,” says Dotson. “You find the right word, or write a phrase that works, or shoot a scene that tells the story.”³

The commitment to slow, steady development can result in significant improvements over time. Dan Rather, long-time news anchor at CBS and now HDNet, suggests that what moves a career along is doing the routine things extraordinarily well time after time.

HAVE A STORY

Often, reporters and photojournalists confuse their accounts of events with stories. Routinely they identify the story subject, but not the story itself: “My story is about consumer spending.” But as you will have discovered, a story focus or commitment is one of the storyteller’s most potent tools. The focus statement provides a way to give the story life and help drive it forward.

Typically, in a team setting, the reporter is left to identify the story, although in reality that job should fall to everyone involved. Because you may see the story differently than the assignment editor or the person who accompanies you into the field, whether that person is the reporter or the photographer, remember to communicate your ideas to one another so that all agree on a single focus.

Even when you work alone in the field, if you can invest just two or three minutes to develop a focus statement, you can have a stronger story and spend less time in the field. Even when the action is moving quickly all around you, and it seems as if you must purely and simply react, force yourself to take time to think. Recognize that you must be flexible enough to change your story commitment if the event changes.

INVOLVE THE CAMERA

Viewers hunger for a sense of involvement in stories. Indeed the promise of a sense of first-person experience is one reason we turn to television and web video even for news.

The involved camera helps create the experiential illusion and thereby provides a way to help differentiate your reporting from the competition. Try to involve the camera more directly in the action—to place the viewer in the very heart of the story (Figure 12.1 a, b). When you involve the camera, you involve the viewer.

Look also for unique camera angles to help tell your story and to make it more visually memorable. Avoid extreme angles that could destroy the viewer’s sense of direct involvement in the story.

SEQUENCES ADVANCE THE STORY

Sequential video produces a continuous, uninterrupted flow of action that tells much of the story, even without narration. A series of shots are edited together to create for viewers the illusion of continuity along a timeline from beginning to end. Pictures, sound bites, and natural sound communicate much of the information.

BOX 12.1    THE ESSENCE OF STORYTELLING

 

 

A commonly used, but much less effective, alternative is called illustrative video. This reporting approach simply uses video that illustrates the script, roughly in the proportion of one scene per sentence of voice-over narration. It is similar to a series of unrelated slides or scenes with little regard for the order or rhythm or even for the meaning of individual shots working together. Illustrative video builds mostly around talk, and rarely tells a story along a timeline.

DON’T TRY TO SHOW ALL OF NEW ZEALAND

A frustration of every video reporter is the lack of airtime available to tell complex stories. “If only I had a couple more minutes,” pleads the reporter. “You can have five more seconds if you’ll give up a week of your summer vacation,” the producer replies. At such times it is useful to remember the strong messages and nuances that can be communicated by a thirty-second or even a fifteen-second commercial. The best commercial messages are simple, yet powerful and memorable.

One approach in the face of insufficient airtime is to follow the maxim that “less is more.” Photojournalist Larry Hatteberg has crystallized the concept in his advice, “Don’t try to show all of New Zealand.”⁴ Hatteberg forged this conviction while on assignment to portray New Zealand in a four-part series. Confronted with showing the nation’s overwhelming complexity in only four two-minute reports, Hatteberg dramatically narrowed his focus. He chose a sheep rancher, a street magician, a fishing boat captain, and a railroad engineer, and told his stories through them. Still, after viewing the stories, there is a sense that we have seen all of New Zealand after all, because the treatment is both wide-ranging and powerful. Hatteberg’s approach mirrors the sentiments of John Grierson, the British documentary historian and filmmaker, who once observed that while newspapers can tell the story of the entire mail service, you must make a film about one single letter.

PURSUE YOUR INTEREST IN PEOPLE

It’s important to care about the people in your stories. Caring simply means that you are interested in your subject and that you listen hard to what the person has to say (Figure 12.2). This does not mean you should become emotionally or personally involved. The key is to report honestly and with appropriate feeling. “[The story] has to come from the heart if it is going to work well. For in the end, I have to feel the story if I am going to reflect it with feeling,” writes television journalist Tim Fisher.⁵

MOTIVATE VIEWERS TO WATCH

In helping viewers want to watch your stories, it is important to avoid telling them everything they need to know in the voice-over script. Rarely, in the newscast built on words, will you have to watch a story to understand it. Often, you can listen from the next room with little loss in meaning. This kind of television, of course, is radio with pictures and is neither involving nor engaging.

A more powerful reporting method is to help people watch through voice-over that invites the viewer to reengage with the screen constantly. It is a “This” versus “This tea ceremony” approach. If you read the next two sentences aloud, the distinction becomes clear: “Every hiker should carry one of these in his backpack” versus “Every hiker should carry a compass in his backpack.” Only the first sentence invites viewers to watch the screen.

 

DEVELOP VIDEO FLUENCY

In this word-oriented culture, the effort to express the story visually without stating it flatly, in words, is a trick easier said than done. For all its eloquence, the visual image receives short shrift among some journalists, even in the face of generations of filmmakers who have proven the power of visual communication. “Very early … I discovered that viewers are more attentive to silent sequences than they are to dialogue scenes,” writes filmmaker Edward Dmytryk. “When the screen talk[s], so d[oes] the viewer. Silent scenes command attention.”⁶

The same realities persist today. Time magazine noted that after screenings of Ryan’s Daughter, director David Lean was wounded by reviewers “who so often tend to listen to movies more intently than they look at them, thus missing much of [Lean’s] special grace and subtlety.”⁷ Happily, film and television viewers learn more from visual information than critics insensitive to the larger meanings and experiences that visual fluency offers. Repeatedly we learn that the television viewer would rather see it than hear about it.

At one time such advice was sufficient. But today many newsrooms require journalists to report on multiple platforms. Throughout the day the reporter may employ desktop-based editing, create computer graphics, cut voice-over tracks, post a web article, stream video, record a news tease, appear on set for an anchor debrief, create a blog or podcast, even select still photos from video for web-based articles, and broadcast story updates to mobile phones.

Today, “journalists are expected to be multimedia utility players,” says newspaper and magazine columnist Robert J. Samuelson. “Up to a point, this is valuable: finding new ways to engage and inform. But it’s also time consuming.”⁸ Newsroom software helps enable such versatility by letting the reporter write as little as a single story but publish in various formats—as web article, news script, mobile phone broadcast—to several different platforms.⁹

The key is to learn when to use specific tools to best communicate your message in the medium at hand. It is no longer a matter of spoken words and moving images, but rather of graphics, audio only, audio with video, still photography, the spoken word meant to be heard, the written word meant to be read, text messages, and the like.

Excuses

In the face of deadline pressure, budget restraints, and equipment breakdowns, virtually every video story is imperfect in some sense, and some are outright forgettable. As a memo at a television station in Texas reminds news personnel, “We have some decent stories that we are making average.”¹⁰ Inquire at any newsroom why a particular story failed, and you may encounter The Excuse—that tendency to blame anything but ourselves.

Some excuses, of course, are legitimate. They explain something beyond our control that went wrong. Other excuses masquerade for indifference and procrastination. Note that some of the most common excuses are admissions of failure and tell of stories seldom remembered:

 

  ■ “It was a dumb assignment. The producer didn’t know what he wanted.”

  ■ “I don’t have enough time to do a good job. I have to cover six stories a day.”

  ■ “My equipment is no good.”

  ■ “I didn’t have time to set up the camera on a tripod.”

  ■ “They don’t pay me enough that I have to do everything around here.”

  ■ “You can’t shoot sequences in spot news.”

  ■ “It’s the photographer’s job to take the pix. I don’t feel I can suggest shots.”

  ■ “Audiences don’t expect that level of quality.”

  ■ “It’s not my job, that’s up to the reporter.”

 

Professionals leave such excuses to the competition. Ultimately, on every story, the choice comes down to a simple yes or no whenever you ask yourself, “Am I going to do my best job on this story or not?”

KNOW THE COMMUNITY

The smaller a community the more journalists you find who are on their way through town to a better job. At one time market hopping may have helped further careers, but tenure in the marketplace can offer great rewards. Organizations need employees who want to live in the community and are willing to stay long enough to learn something about it. No one who arrives in town and leaves eight months later can discover much about the community, and even two years is little enough time for a video journalist to learn about an area, its politics, and its people. Generally, assuming acceptable pay and working conditions, the longer video journalists can stay in an area the better. Tenure in the marketplace allows journalists to develop more recognition and acceptance among viewers and to report stories about the community with a depth and sensitivity not found in the work of reporters on their way through town.

In a sense you are a historian for the market area you serve. You tell the stories of the soldiers, the boat builders, the archaeologists, the miners, and the musicians of your region. Someday, should you reach the network level, you still will tell similar stories from your travels, but share them with larger audiences.

BOX 12.2    COMMUNITY-ORIENTED JOURNALISM

CURIOSITY PAYS

Curiosity is a prerequisite if video journalists are to understand the market or the field they work in. One broadcast executive tells of a reporter who spent nearly eighteen months in town. A week and a half before she was to leave the state for another reporting job, she came to him to ask directions to the nearby mountains, which she had never visited. After a year and a half on the job, she had yet to explore the streets or to learn in which direction the freeways ran.

Cities and communities reveal themselves to explorers, so soon upon your arrival in town, come to know everything you can about street names, geographical oddities, regional pronunciations, community leaders, and Saturday night dances. Introduce yourself to the municipal court judge and walk along the riverfront. At restaurants, pass up the cheeseburger and sample the regional specialties like alligator tail or huckleberry pie. Attend or visit area churches and synagogues and take in a movie at the local drive-in. In short, immerse yourself in the area’s history, culture, commerce, and religion, and your knowledge will lead you to become a more effective storyteller.

SEE BEYOND THE OBVIOUS

Every day, journalists reaffirm that viewers will never care more about a story than the reporter. If you can find a new way to cover the routine story, even those you have covered repeatedly over the years, then it will be more interesting and memorable for your audience.

“It’s the Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared,’” says Art Donahue, whose awards include National Television News Photographer of the Year. “Make things look a little more interesting; try to think of everyday stories in a different way, not just as a standup and two talking heads on every story.”¹¹ Donahue, a master at showing familiar subjects in a new light, once told the story of freeway traffic jams caused by a bridge under repair using only pictures and off-air sound recorded from truckers’ CB radio chatter.

SHOW AUDIENCES WHAT THEY MISSED

Your obligation as a visual storyteller is to show viewers what they would have missed, even had they been eyewitnesses to the event. Search for unique story angles that other reporters may have overlooked in their rush to cover the story. While the competition is shooting the smoke and flames at the apartment house fire, look around you. Perhaps you will notice an elderly man next door trying to fight back the fire with a garden hose to save his modest home. The observant looking for a better story seem to encounter such “lucky breaks.”

NBC correspondent Bob Dotson notes that after a tornado strikes, reporters seem to gravitate to the governor touring the area to ask how things look. But when Dotson covered the aftermath of a tornado in South Carolina, he found a man even more articulate than the governor. “‘Well, it got my teeth, but it didn’t get me,” the man said. And he reached down in the debris and held up his mud-covered dentures. “This guy crystallized it for me,” says Dotson.¹³

INTERNATIONAL VIDEO JOURNALISM

HELP VIEWERS EXPERIENCE THE STORY AS YOU DID

Our hopes and dreams, our victories, failures, and despair, and our love, our loneliness, and faith, are woven within each of us from life’s complex fabric. We swim in a sea of commonality. A decade into the new millennium, about a billion people worldwide watched¹⁴ as rescuers pulled 33 trapped miners to safety following a mine collapse in Chile. One in every six or seven people on earth watched the unfolding story because we empathized with those miners. Their story addressed what we all feel in common about life, freedom, and wanting to see for ourselves how the story would end.

Any time you work on a news report, a reality program, or even an on-camera interview, try to stuff human experience into your work—a reconstruction of what it was like to be there. You can conduct interviews while your subjects remain focused on a familiar task in a familiar environment, perhaps talking to a tow truck driver about to repossess another luxury car in a down economy. At every turn, the key is to look for meaningful detail and capture it in images and sound that help illuminate the story subject’s life, situation, passions, and struggles.

Even adding storytelling elements to straight news reports can make facts more interesting and compelling to watch and build loyalty toward those that offer such content. Those little extra details can elevate viewer experience and help viewers better understand, remember, and relate to story content.

Gary Reaves (Figure 12.5), as senior reporter at WFAA-TV, Dallas, told the story of a woman whose 13-year-old daughter died in a ski accident. The victim’s mother hoped someday to meet the person who received her daughter’s heart. One day on the Internet she located the woman, a 40-year-old nurse whose heart began to fail after her second child’s birth.

 

When the teen’s mother and the heart recipient finally met and hugged one another, photojournalist Chris Mathis was recording video while reporter Gary Reaves stayed out of sight in an adjoining room. Later, back at WFAA, Reaves finished his script and handed it off to video editor Robert Hall, who created a visual and auditory narrative from that most human language of tears, hugs, and silences. On home screens, those moments conveyed a tangible sense of what each woman must be experiencing—grief and joy mingling in shared understanding for how one lost life could enable life in another. An equally poignant moment followed when the heart recipient, a nurse, handed the mother a stethoscope. Holding the scope to her ears, the mother listened to her late daughter’s heart beating strong and steady in the nurse’s chest.¹⁵

“On a story like that, I know from the beginning that the big payoff will come at the end. I’m trying from the first word to get viewers to the point that they feel like they are in the room with two people they care about,” says Reaves. “At that point, I want to get out of the way, and let them experience it the same way I did. (Well, actually, I was in the next room peeking around the corner trying to stay out of the shot … but you get the point.)”¹⁶

ABC World News rebroadcast Reaves’ report nationally to offer insights about organ donation from the viewpoints of the donor family and recipient.¹⁷ Imagine the power of the medium whenever viewers, too, can hear that healthy heart beating away in a stranger’s chest, or any other legitimate sound that helps viewers “see with their ears.”

BOX 12.3    A CONVERSATION WITH GARY REAVES

ADAPT YOUR REPORTING TO STORY DEMANDS

Unthinking enslavement to pictures can be just as devastating as an unreasonable loyalty to words. Strong storytelling demands that the most effective communication methods be used from moment to moment. If pictures and natural sound can best tell the story, then use them. If the story can more effectively be told through a reporter, with graphics, or through silence, then shape the story accordingly.

REPORTING THE NONVISUAL STORY

Many of the stories you are assigned will be static and nonvisual, unless you can find a way to make them move. Into this category fall city council meetings, public hearings, empty fields to be used as major building sites, and vacant buildings that have just been designated as historical landmarks. To lend essential movement and interest to such reports, several approaches can help:

 

  ■ Look for preshot video, file film, and old newsreels, which show the subject in action.

  ■ Look for life and for things that move in the scene, be they rippling flags, flying birds, or people riding by on bicycles.

  ■ Research the story so that you have a more complete idea of the story’s visual potential.

  ■ Try to humanize the story by focusing on people, people-related subjects, or symbols of people and how they live. (In the aftermath of a house fire, perhaps the close-up of a charred photo album can remind us that fire touched people like ourselves.)

  ■ Find a hook for the nonvisual story. Try to relate this event to a larger event or to an existing interest or issue.

  ■ Shoot and use sequences in your report: To see is to believe, but to see sequentially is to experience.

  ■ Use art, models, or, if ethically warranted, recreations.

  ■ Pick out the main issue and do a story on that.

  ■ Use digital video effects (DVE), as CBS once used in the story of a man’s death after a police dispatcher had refused to send an ambulance. Through the use of a squeeze zoom, a freeze frame of the victim’s house was shown on one side of the screen; a still shot of the dispatcher was shown to the other side of the frame. A graphic artist connected the two images with renderings of transmitted signals as viewers listened to a recording of the fateful interchange.

  ■ Work a reporter standup into the story, preferably as a sequence.

  ■ Create imagery in the mind’s eye through sound.

  ■ Write to create imagery.

  ■ Touch feelings through little surprises and moments of real-life drama.

  ■ Use innovative lighting that helps define the story’s mood and environment.

  ■ Pitch reporting opportunities to people in the news—let them define and describe their environment, the event, and the moment.

  ■ Shoot pictures that share experience.

  ■ Challenge yourself. Improve your attitude. Remember that your audience will never care more about the story than you do.

 

PERSONAL APPEARANCE AND CONDUCT

Whenever you are in public, you not only represent the organization for which you work, in many ways you are the organization. How you conduct yourself and how you dress can influence not only how the community thinks of your station, but even the quality of your stories. “You can gain access to stories or be denied access, based on how you dress,” says Rich Clarkson, former photographic director of National Geographic.¹⁹

Some TV stations and corporate or community organizations provide reporters and anchors with a wardrobe allowance because they believe personal appearance and station image matter. But aside from the typical jackets, caps, and golf shirts that display the company logo, photojournalists rarely receive such benefits. If the photographer ruins clothes covering a story, stations may pay the cleaning bills or replacement costs. If the station refuses to pay the cost, consider paying it yourself to maintain your own standards of appearance.

ETIQUETTE

Reporters around the country have made a name for themselves as pushy, rude, and aggressive. Deservedly or not, the public sometimes thinks of journalists as uncaring and unsympathetic. Competition and deadline pressures are partly to blame, but sometimes the problem can be a simple lack of sensitivity.

At funerals, or in similar stories that involve death or illness, first seek the family’s permission before you shoot any video or conduct interviews. As you cover the story, conduct yourself according to the considerations you would expect from a reporter or photographer if this were your family. Dress appropriately for the occasion and try to shoot the story with a longer lens to remain as far away and inconspicuous as you can.

SHOOTING AND REPORTING SPOT NEWS

Covering spot-news or other events beyond your control is almost an art form in itself. The following discussion offers guidelines that can help you transform chaos into good storytelling.

Seconds Count

Timing can be everything when you cover spot news. Those first on the scene usually get the best video and the most awards for spot-news coverage. Early on, people are still excited (and exciting) and events are still happening.

Learn to Shoot by Instinct

Equipment familiarity is essential if you are to develop an instinct for shooting fast-moving events. The equipment should become such a natural extension of yourself that your reactions are automatic; you don’t have to stop and think about it. Practice makes perfect. During lulls in the news day, practice rack-focusing from one object to another. Imagine shots. Think about how to cover stories, even when you’re at home sitting in the easy chair. And learn to listen when the interviewee speaks so you’ll know whether to move in for a close shot or pull back for a shot of the speaker’s husband.

Be Ready

The Scout motto “Be prepared” is the first rule in shooting and reporting uncontrolled events. That means having batteries that are charged and connected to the camera, recording media loaded and cued, camera white-balanced, and the mind switched to “think.” One photojournalist is said to have photographed five planes crashing, over the course of his career, because he’s always ready.

Avoid “Sticks”

When you shoot spot news, tripods are impractical. Get off the tripod and shoot handheld, but remember the rules that affect handholding: Don’t handhold on tele-photo; to minimize shakiness, consider leaving the lens on wide angle; determine the near plane of focus for the lens you are using and don’t go closer to your subjects than that distance.

Anticipate

Covering spot news means working ahead in your mind and asking what you will need to shoot next. Although no rehearsals are possible when you shoot spot news, you can try to understand in advance what is likely to happen or to imagine what may happen. “If you see something you like you’ve probably missed it,” says freelance photographer Darrell Barton. “Don’t think with the camera on, think before you turn it on.”²⁰

Shoot the Essentials First

Shoot the essentials first when you cover spot news; you can’t go back and ask for retakes. As you shoot, edit in your head. Previsualize and shoot what you know you’ll need. Think of three shots at a time: the shot you’re taking, the shot you just took, and the shot you’ll take next. Remember to shoot reactions. Pick up cutaways and other shots after the event.

Shoot Sequences

Shoot sequences, especially on spot news, or you’ll wind up with a slide show. You can’t always shoot spot news sequentially, but you can create the illusion of sequences by shooting one firefighter’s face, another firefighter’s hands, and yet another firefighter’s feet. Or you can photograph a basketball player shooting the ball, then cut to a CU of a basketball photographed at another time during the game as it goes through the hoop. You also can “snap zoom” while you’re shooting, as discussed in Chapter 2 (a long shot, for example, followed by an instant zoom to a medium shot or a close-up). During editing, the few frames of the snap zoom can be eliminated from the scene to create the illusion of a three-or four-shot sequence.

Tell a Story through People

Impose a theme on your story. Good spot-news coverage is partly a product of the journalist’s ability to show the human effects of an event. And although you don’t control the event, you can shoot the essential scenes and sounds that reflect the event in meaningful symbols. Look for shots that tell us how the event affected people: the charred luggage at a plane crash, improperly installed electrical wiring at a mobile home fire, or perhaps the photograph of a child now the subject of a mountain search and rescue.

Be Considerate of Authorities at the Scene

It’s the old saying that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If an official won’t let you into the scene of a spot-news event, try to talk your way in. Sometimes you can begin to shoot without permission—and continue to shoot—with a statement to the police/fire/military authorities as simple as, “Let me know if I get in your way.” Such a statement implies you’re willing to cooperate with those in charge, and sometimes that’s all they need to hear. A word of warning: Don’t be intimidated; don’t be shooed away from the event too easily. Many of the best scenes may occur soon after you have been told to go home.

Be Considerate of People in Spot-News Events

Spot-news subjects, be they mine rescue workers or helicopter pilots, are under intense pressure and stress. They may be experiencing grief; they may be in physical shock. Learn to “read” the physical and psychological signs of stress and fatigue to know when it’s best to stop pushing.

People in spot-news events are less aware of the camera than they would be in slower-moving stories. Often, the reporting crew is the last thing on the minds of victims caught up in tragedy or in emotional, stressful events. Sometimes they will remain unaware of your presence, until someone tells them days or months later that you covered the story. Still, to avoid upsetting people, don’t crowd or otherwise violate their personal space, but do work to get good close-ups, and remember to treat people—and their privacy, dignity, and emotions—the way you would want to be treated in similar circumstances.

Play It Safe

You face risks each time you cover spot news. You may encounter downed power lines, smoke, dioxin, asbestos, PCBs, bare electrical wires, high water, toxic spills and chemicals, heat, fire, cold, high winds, explosions, falling walls, ice, and people with knives, guns, and explosives. And if those don’t get you, you can even be run over by a parade float while you’re shooting a cutaway of the onlookers.

Carry everything you will need to cover the story, because you may be unable to return to the vehicle or helicopter for spare recording media, a first aid kit, protective clothing, a change of clothes, food, or adequate lights for night shooting. Be prepared, and remember: No story is worth your life.

Don’t Try to Be an Emotional Superperson

Some spot-news and similar events are so gruesome and unimaginable they can affect you more than you might realize or admit. Such conditions are no different than soldiers returning from the battlefield with posttraumatic stress disorder. So be conscious of your feelings, and if necessary, talk them out with somebody who understands what you’ve gone through. Otherwise, those experiences and memories could build up and someday overwhelm you.

Remember Good Taste

When you report spot news, show what is appropriate and nothing more. You may decide to show only a recent photo of a drowning victim rather than the covered body or a very long shot of a resuscitation effort rather than close shots. Some shots, such as a sequence of someone putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger, should never make air. How does one know whether to record such footage? Some journalists make the shot, regardless of content, then decide later whether it should be aired, or else leave the decision to the producer, anchor, managing editor, or news director. Although the practice of “shoot now, decide later,” often is valid, it can lead to charges of invasion of privacy and other legal entanglements (see Chapter 14, Law and the Video Journalist). Often, the best response in such situations is to follow the adage, “If you don’t want it on air, don’t shoot it.” The competition may air shots you consciously chose not to make, but remember propriety and its role in helping you protect your credibility and the community’s respect.

TOWARD A NEWS PHILOSOPHY

In the past, video reporters and storytellers have commonly defined their job as information gathering and delivery. “We deliver the information; it’s up to the audience to understand,” the reasoning went. Journalists could practice such elitism in the days when viewing options were limited. But today, audiences have gained control of the medium. Viewers with computers, smartphones, tablets, mobile satellite dishes, cable-and wireless-streaming TV and digital video recorders even control the program schedule. They decide whom they will watch, when, where, for how long, and on what platforms. When stories are powerful, compelling, and engaging, viewers may stick around to watch. They seldom watch dull, routine, or predictable stories. As always, the heart of captivating video remains the story, with true celebrity achieved only by mastering the visual communications process.

SUMMARY

The most successful journalists produce reports and stories that appeal to audiences, regardless of the story’s subject matter. Improving storytelling ability is a gradual process of learning to do the routine things extraordinarily well time after time. Whereas some journalists seek perfection in their work, a more feasible alternative is to seek excellence.

Because storytellers need stories, a good approach is to summarize the story to be told in a simple, declarative sentence, which photojournalists call their commitment or focus statement. Once the focus or commitment is defined, the storyteller, even in journalism, must look for elements of opposition or conflict. Active conflict, such as a person’s drive to overcome a handicap or fight illiteracy, helps illuminate the essence of individuals and even communities. Not every story contains conflict; some stories are merely accounts or announcements of events and fall outside this discussion.

As a photojournalist, avoid excuses. Audiences can judge your work only by what you put on the screen. Some excuses are legitimate, but they can too easily become alibis. Strong storytellers try to show familiar subjects in a new light. Some even succeed in showing viewers familiar with a subject what they have overlooked. In such endeavors, the more the camera is involved in the action, the more realistic the story will be.

Other devices to strengthen the storytelling effort include telling the story through people, the use of matched-action sequences, and narrowing story focus to a manageable level. As John Grierson, the British documentarian, observed, while newspapers can tell the story of the entire mail service, moving images are often at their best when they tell the story of a single letter.

Although words are crucial to the storytelling process, too many words can overwhelm a report. Use words, pictures, sounds, and silences sometimes by themselves, sometimes together—in whatever combinations best tell the story. Through such dedication, even so-called nonvisual stories can be made compelling and interesting.

Many of the same considerations apply to spot-news reporting, with the important proviso that reporters and photographers must anticipate fast-developing action and be extraordinarily conscious of personal safety. In the course of all conduct, television journalists are public figures. Their actions reflect not only on themselves, but also on their employers and their profession.

KEY TERMS

assignment editor 199

commitment 199

focus 199

illustrative video 200

sequential video 199

spot news 210

 

DISCUSSION

  1. Discuss steps the photojournalist can take to make the style and substance of news stories more appealing while still preserving the story’s fundamental accuracy and integrity.

  2. What is the difference between excellence and perfection in the reporting process? Which of these options is the wiser pursuit?

  3. Explain why it is important to identify the story you’re reporting and to state it aloud, or at least sum up the story in your mind, before the reporting process begins.

  4. Why is communication between the reporter and photographer so vital throughout the reporting process?

  5. Discuss the role of conflict in storytelling and how the concept applies to television news stories.

  6. When excuses become a habit, a way of life almost, they can erode the photojournalist’s ability to produce work of consistent excellence. Identify the attitudes and personal practices that can help you avoid making excuses about your work.

  7. Identify a half-dozen or more activities that can help you learn more about your community. Explain why those activities are important to help make you a better reporter, photographer, or storyteller.

  8. What steps can you, as a photojournalist, take to show viewers what they might have missed, even had they been eyewitnesses to the story you’re reporting?

  9. Why is it important for the photojournalist to capture and transmit a sense of experience about the story being reported?

10. Discuss the approaches you can follow when you must tell complex stories briefly, yet with power.

11. Why is it important for you to care about the people in your stories, or at least to be interested in them? If you care too much about the people in your reports, can you remain detached and objective when reporting their stories?

12. Describe a good reporting method that can help make viewers watch stories by frequently inviting them to reengage with the television screen.

13. Discuss ways you can make so-called nonvisual stories more visually appealing and informative.

14. Photographers have to work in all manner of environments and weather extremes, so to what extent should they have to maintain a well-groomed, well-dressed appearance in public? As part of your answer, describe the proper attire that you believe a photographer or video journalist normally should wear on field assignment.

15. Describe effective reporting practices and considerations for personal safety when covering spot-news stories.

16. When all is said and done, what is the journalist’s most important obligation in reporting the news?

 

EXERCISES

  1. To help improve your ability to develop focus or commitment statements, choose a very simple object or phenomenon, such as a pumpkin, a Christmas tree ornament, or a spring breeze, and identify a focus statement that will help you generate a visual story about the subject. Example: “The spring breeze is a trash collector.” Next, identify two or three main points you want to communicate about the subject and find visual proof for those main points. In a story centered on a car wash, for example, a main point might be, “Every time you clean something, you make something else dirty.”

  2. Find an ordinary subject and strive to make it more appealing through your lighting, audio, photography, or reporting.

  3. Construct a television story that uses only pictures and sounds, but no voice-over narration, to tell a visual story complete with beginning, middle, and ending.

  4. Study books, films, and compelling stories for the presence of conflict. Analyze the role of conflict in storytelling.

  5. Take a fresh look at the community in which you live. Learn more about the area’s history, culture, commerce, and religions. If you can do so safely, jog or take walks through areas of the community that are unfamiliar to you. Find a story to photograph and report based on your new awareness of some aspect of the community and its people.

  6. Take a complex subject such as the issues that surround no-smoking ordinances and shoot two or three simple reports that illustrate the principle that “you can write an article about the mail service, but you must make a film about a single letter.”

  7. Write a script to accompany a story you have photographed and/or reported that constantly reengages viewers with the screen. Use phrases such as, “Be sure to include one of these in your backpack,” rather than “Be sure to take a compass.”

  8. Choose a “nonvisual” story subject, such as a historic cabin or other building in your community that is open for public tours. Strive to make your photography and reporting about the subject powerful, compelling, and engaging.

  9. Study spot-news stories for evidence of the video journalist’s or reporting team’s ability to tell such events through people. Note how often sequences are present in the spot-news stories you view. If sequences were absent, would they have been possible to photograph?

10. Interview police, fire, or sheriff’s authorities and inquire about their greatest frustrations when working with video reporters and photographers.

11. Visit a federal, state, or local environmental safety official and learn more about toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards you can expect to encounter during spot-news coverage.

 

NOTES

  1. Edward Dmytryk, On Film Editing (Stoneham, MA: Focal Press, 1984), 78.

  2. Remarks at the NPPA TV News-Video Workshop, Norman, OK, March 17, 2003.

  3. Interview with the author, Fort Collins, CO, April 26, 1981.

  4. Larry Hatteberg, “People-Oriented photojournalism,” a presentation at the NPPA TV News-Video Workshop, Norman, OK, March 18, 1986.

  5. Tim Fisher, “Television Is a Trust,” News Photographer (November 1984), 21.

  6. Dmytryk, On Film Editing, 79.

  7. Richard Schickel, “A Superb Passage to India,” Time (December 31, 1984), 55.

  8. Robert J. Samuelson, “Long Live the News Business,” Newsweek (May 28, 2007), 40.

  9. Glen Dickson, “Newsrooms Go Multiplatform,” Broadcasting & Cable, March 26, 2007, www.broadcastingcable.com/.

10. A newsroom memo from Jim Prather, then news director, KRIS-TV, Corpus Christi, TX, January 1986.

11. Art Donahue, “Utilizing a Creative Eye for Everyday Assignments,” a presentation at the NPPA TV News-Video Workshop, Norman, OK, March 21, 1986.

12. Mark Carlson, in e-mail comments and bio to the lead author, January 11, 2011.

13. Bob Dotson, 2003

14. MSNBC, cited by Joanne Ostrow, “Uplifting TV moment for viewers worldwide,” Denver Post, October 14, 2010, http://www.denverpost.corn/television/ci_16324297 (Downloaded October 14, 2010).

15. Gary Reaves, “Heartbeat brings joy to parents of Coppell donor,” http://www.wfaa.com/news/taylors-gift-103409364.html (downloaded Oct 5, 2010).

16. Gary Reaves, written comments in an e-mail to the author, October 6, 2010.

17. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/american-heart-mothers-heartbeat-transplant-donor-organ-diane-sawyer-gary-reeves-11714682 (downloaded October 5, 2010. Aired on ABC World News September 23, 2010. Video runs 2:24.).

18. Excerpts from a telephone conversation with the primary author, October 12, 2010.

19. Rich Clarkson, “TV News Photographers as Professionals—Some Believe You Have a Long Way to Go,” a presentation at the NPPA TV News-Video Workshop, Norman, OK, March 21, 1986.

20. Darrell Barton, “Connects to Journalism Students at the University of Oklahoma,” November 5, 2002.