Pieces of the Puzzle

All of our Lehigh journalism majors will learn visual storytelling skills in a new class, Visual Communication, but what should that mean?

In its purest sense, it could mean conveying information without words. But, to a journalist, it more often means supplementing the story visually. The idea is to tell it better, to make it more compelling, more complete.

Journalists whose primary job was to write and edit have been thinking visually for a long time: Reporters were often teamed with photographers, for instance, and were asked to suggest graphics to run with their stories. The visual training we have been giving our students up to this point at Lehigh has been aimed at giving them a literacy that they needed to work with other people, including designers, editors and photographers, to be part of the conversation in story planning. So we’ve taught basic typography and page design, and we’ve talked about what makes a good photograph, and how photos could be used to tell or supplement a story in a newspaper or magazine.

Cutbacks in newsrooms and a web-first mentality today increasingly mean that our students need to learn to take their own photographs, shoot and edit their own video, even create their own Google maps and other graphics. New kinds of jobs with Internet-based news providers further blur the distinction between who does these tasks.

So maybe the best way to think about what this class will include is to set a goal for its outcome: At the end of this 16-week course, all of our students will have created a website that they can use to build their professional portfolio. It will include information about them, and examples of their writing, photos, video, and blogs.

The class should start with the same design principles, typography and use of graphics and grids for newspapers, magazines and websites that we’ve always taught. Added to that will be photography training, where students learn to take and edit digital photographs and create slide shows; and video training where they learn to take video, edit it and post it on the Internet. Along the way, they’ll blog about what they’re doing.

Many questions remain, and that’s where your advice can help. In future blogs, I’ll be posing ideas about things like equipment and software, and the sorts of assignments that can be used with this course. Do we need high-end video cameras and Final Cut Pro, for instance? Or can we do it with Flip-style cameras and Windows Movie Maker?

I’m hoping to hear from some of you who are teaching these skills at other colleges and universities, to find out what you tried, what worked, what didn’t. As the course plan develops, I’ll share with you how we’ve decided to proceed. As I teach it for the first time next fall, I’ll show you the results and blog about what we’ve learned along the way.

Next blog: Our video experiment