NEW TO THIS EDITION

Every year, audiences for traditional newspapers and television news decline, even as alternative media employ print and television’s unique strengths to attract and hold today’s fickle, impatient audiences. What are those strengths? The very ones Television Field Production and Reporting: A Guide to Visual Storytelling emphasizes in the sixth edition, as it has throughout its more than twenty-five years on the market: the use of images, silences, sounds, actions, and behaviors to show people to people, and to capture and communicate a sense of experience. The perspective widens in this edition to reflect, through practitioners’ eyes, how to achieve those same goals while working in the field alone, as a self-contained visual reporter and storyteller.

This is the newest edition of a book that addresses what you need to know and master to become a visual storyteller, even when you must do it all alone — report, shoot, write, and edit. It has served as the harbinger and interpreter of how best to communicate with video for a quarter century, with each successive edition highlighting the best, most up-to-date practices and new technologies—not only for the medium at hand, but also for the audiences that coalesce around that medium. Some of the features of the sixth edition include:

  ■ An all-new chapter, “Video Journalism: Storytelling On Your Own,” by network correspondent and producer John Larson, offers insights on “backpack” journalism. He reports and produces stories for PBS Need to Know, and is a former Dateline NBC correspondent. Larson also has become an international “backpack” or Video Journalist (VJ) since he joined this book’s previous edition as a co-author. In his latest chapter, he offers new, experience-based insights that will help visual storytellers— beginners and professionals alike—improve how they shoot, write, edit, deliver, and reshape visual stories for digital media.

  ■ Far-reaching revisions throughout, including significant contributions by coauthor John DeTarsio, network freelance photojournalist, who explains how one person can use the camera, microphone, video editing, and lighting as storytelling instruments to create compelling and memorable stories. He also describes how he works with story subjects to capture their most telling insights, actions, and behaviors.

  ■ Important updates regarding “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act” (Chapter 14), which affect anyone who records and/or disseminates digital media content, whether in private, on television, the web, via social networking sites, or in commercial venues.

  ■ This sixth edition features all color photographs and adds many new photographs that portray the Video Journalist and reporting teams at work. All photos reflect and illuminate contemporary storytelling practices and dissemination technologies.

  ■ A revised chapter on shooting in the field (Chapter 4) that includes new tips on pre-planning, composition, camera movements, and effective use of the zoom.

  ■ A revised chapter on improving your storytelling ability (Chapter 12) teaches you how to involve the camera in your reporting and emphasizes the importance of letting your audience experience a story as you did.

Television Field Production and Reporting: A Guide to Visual Storytelling is more than a book; it is three lifetimes of insights and approaches that the authors will share with you herein. Together, they have invested more than a century to learn what you can absorb in just a few weeks. Even better, you can learn from this book for years to come by using it as a professional reference. Simply knowing or being aware of something differs from deeply understanding, renewing, and applying that knowledge as circumstances change.

You will learn from this book proven ways to achieve excellence in your own reporting and storytelling, even as technology changes. You will discover how to become more innovative and creative, and how to take that extra moment to think and plan stories no one else sees, even while covering the same events and topics. That’s a formidable head start on your competitors, who may someday compete against you for the same jobs you want, but without the knowledge or commitment to make themselves or their work unique. The authors will help you begin your journey toward that goal in the pages to come.

Finally, you are buying a work that will help you navigate the evolving world of solo or “backpack” journalism, in which the visual reporter and storyteller does it all – reporting, shooting, writing, editing.

This book is dedicated to helping you become one of a kind—a visual storyteller rather than simply a photographer or reporter. Anyone with a camera is a photographer; anyone with a microphone can be a reporter. Today it may seem as if everyone has a video camera, and everyone’s shooting video and reporting stories. Relatively few among those multitudes, however, will ever become accomplished visual storytellers.

You will need additional skills and digital “languages” if you intend to make visual storytelling and reporting your professional career. At its simplest level, you will have to master two ways of communicating: one is with pictures, and the other is with sound, including the spoken word. Although it may sound easy, it’s not.

Your images must sparkle with articulate meaning; your lighting must mimic the Renaissance mastery of light and shadow on a digital canvas; storytelling sound must become the other half of the image, because we “see” with our ears; your writing must incorporate not only the spoken word, deftly told, but all the tools of visual media. Storytelling is a learned art in a world where only excellence, originality, and interesting, relevant content will attract and hold the attention of viewers who patronize tomorrow’s digital screens.

Your mastery of the visual languages in digital media and a commitment to excellence will help ensure a long, profitable, and rewarding career.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following individuals and institutions deserve recognition for their contributions to this undertaking:

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) for its sponsorship of the annual Television News-Video Workshop at the University of Oklahoma. This workshop is internationally recognized for its achievements in illuminating the art of effective visual storytelling. The distinguished professionals who serve as faculty and give this workshop its direction initiated many concepts that appear in this book.

NBC News national correspondent Bob Dotson is a close friend of the authors. His reporting has long been a hallmark on NBC Today and the NBC Nightly News. Chapter 1 of this book, “Telling the Visual Story,” reflects a close study of Dotson’s work and reporting philosophies and is a product of interviews and correspondence conducted with him for more than two decades.

Grateful recognition also is extended to photojournalists Ernie Leyba, and the late Bob Brandon, both of Denver; KUSA-TV: Patti Dennis, news director, Eric Kehe, director of photography, and photojournalist Manny Sotello; KCNC-TV: chief photographer Bob Burke, and the station’s former helicopter reporter Luan Akin; and to all KUSA and KCNC staff and private citizens who appear in photographs throughout the book.

Other contributors include the following reviewers:

Kenneth Fischer, University of Oklahoma

Peggy Elliot, University of South Carolina Aiken

Joe Sampson, Miami University Ohio

Jeffrey Guterman, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford

Peter Galameau, West Virginia Wesleyan College

To these individuals and to those whose contributions are recognized elsewhere, the authors extend most grateful appreciation.