I’ve been teaching photography in various classes since graduate school in the 1970s. It has changed a lot since then, and it has stayed the same. I’m most interested in the part that has stayed the same.
No matter whether it’s digital or film, no matter whether it’s a point-and-shoot or single-lens reflex, we still have to compose the picture and choose the instant to press the button. When it comes to my new Visual Communication class, it’s this process that I most want to teach, and I believe for beginning photographers it’ll be simpler to eliminate as much of the technical side as possible.
One of my favorite assignments in a grad school photo class was to construct and use a pinhole camera. As I recall, we used a cardboard box and the “lens” was a thin disc of soft metal with a tiny hole punched in it using a needle. We put 4- by 5-inch negative film into place in the back of the box (in a darkroom, of course), sealed the small box shut so it would be light-safe, and covered the pinhole with tape. By trial and error, we learned the proper length of exposure, and we took a lot of interesting pictures. The point of the exercise was that photographic equipment doesn’t have to be complicated. At the same time, we were being encouraged to visualize a shot before we made it, without even having the benefit of a viewfinder.
I don’t intend to make students in my new Visual Communication class make pinhole cameras, but I do want them to concentrate on the outcome, and not the process, as much as possible. So we’ll use the same Kodak Zi8 video cameras that we have bought for learning video. These small devices look like cell phones and can be used to take still photographs. We’ll use Photoshop or Google’s Picassa to learn about pixels and resolution, and we’ll create slideshows to learn about how a group of photographs can work together to tell the story of an event.
We’ll talk about visual variety. By that I mean how it’s the photographer’s job to think about variety in terms of the types of subjects, whether the photo is horizontal or vertical, whether it’s a close-up, medium shot, or an overall shot. Overall shots set the scene. Medium shots tell the story, and close-ups add drama or detail. A series of medium shots tends to be boring, because the subjects’ size and framing are similar. A combination of overall, medium and close-up shots – along with a variety of subjects – will work to tell the bigger story and be more visually interesting.
Since our cameras have only crummy digital zooms, we will zoom with our feet. For overall shots, we’ll have to walk away to a distance that allows us to include as much of the scene as possible. For medium shots, we’ll have to control the distance to emphasize the subject and crop out unnecessary parts of the scene. For close-ups, we’ll have to be a foot or so away. But taking the photo will be as simple as composing on the LCD screen and pressing the big red button while holding the camera still.
When I’ve taught layout and design from a newspaper/magazine standpoint for the past several decades, I’ve always included a unit in photography. Mostly, that involved studying examples of photographs for the qualities that made them successful, and then structuring assignments where students used sets of photographs to do photo layouts. The aim was never to make them photographers. I wanted to teach them how to use photos made by others. The idea was to make them aware of what a photographer goes through to take a picture, and to give them the ability as an editor to be part of the conversation on projects involving a team of photographers, writers, designers, and other editors.
This new class will have to go a step further, to teach them basic skills so that they can be cross-trained at using a camera to capture still photographs to accompany multimedia stories. As they go on to more advanced classes in our curriculum, or work on the student newspaper, they’ll have opportunities to use more sophisticated equipment. Students today need this sort of cross-training to produce content for the web; they often won’t be depending on someone else to press the button.
The other helpful aspect of this unit on photography is that it can be a natural bridge into the more complex process of shooting and editing video. Video adds the problems of motion and sound, but much of the visual aspect is the same as still photography: looking for variety in subjects and using overall, medium and close-up shots, for instance.
If you’re an educator, how do you use still photography in your visual communication classes?
Next blog: Creating slide shows
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Our Video Experiment
We began toying with video several years ago as part of our student newspaper operation. At that time, we were providing no video training in our curriculum, and the idea was to depend on students who were experienced in video to do the work. We already had a successful photo staff, and so we saw video as an extension of that, and we tried to model the video staff along the same lines.
A little explanation will help here: Our student newspaper, The Brown and White, is open to all students in the university. In fact, of the 100 or more staff members each semester, two-thirds are not journalism majors. Many have never taken a journalism class, and the only training they have had is an orientation and “boot camp” to the newspaper staff in the first semester that they participate.
Almost all of our photographers are non-majors, and Lehigh offers very little in the way of photography classes. Nevertheless, we have managed to maintain a good staff over the years, thanks to a stream of students who had an independent interest in photography.
So I was surprised to find that applying this model to video didn’t work.
The students who were interested in video came from a background in high school that was rooted in television-style news and documentary production. They showed up expecting to do that for the web version of our newspaper, and were disappointed that we don’t have a studio and a lot of expensive equipment.
The help we sought within the university from professional staff members who provide video support in various ways was also rooted in the television and film models. These people do not get what video is on the Internet. They’re either trying to use the Internet to do broadband television, or as a venue for movie-style documentaries. They wanted to train our students to use complicated camera equipment, do proper studio lighting, and to edit video in Final Cut Pro. In their model, it would take days to get video on the web.
It seemed to me that we needed a fundamentally different approach to video for the website. A good example of that style happened near here, in Allentown, just the day before yesterday. A natural gas line exploded at about 10:30 p.m., demolishing two houses, killing five people and causing a fire that ultimately destroyed a city block. Within an hour or so of the explosion, our local Tribune-owned newspaper, The Morning Call, had several videos posted from the scene. No standup reporter, no narration, just raw footage showing firemen, police and chaos. Links to the video and story were posted on Twitter. As the story developed the next day, the videos became more sophisticated, but they were still Internet videos, meant to supplement the story in the multimedia world of the web.
So we face a couple of problems in our small journalism program. First, we don’t want to invest a lot of money in expensive equipment and facilities. Second, we need to train all of our students how to tell a visual story using video on the web, not just some subset of our students. In our context, we want to emphasize the storytelling aspect, not the technical aspect. Problem is, the technical side of things can get in the way, because sophisticated cameras and complex editing software have a steep learning curve, and create a significant hurdle that needs to be cleared before getting to the important side: telling the story.
When our newest colleague, Jeremy Littau, joined our department in 2009, the two of us began to strategize about the best way to incorporate video storytelling into our curriculum. Jeremy’s interests are squarely on multimedia and community-building. He introduced an experimental class so that we could try out some teaching ideas and see how they could fit into our curriculum. Jeremy and I put a lot of thought into this problem of how best to teach the video skills, and ultimately tried what might sound like a radical approach. We opted for the simplest possible system.
Lehigh students use both Windows-based computers and Macs, but Lehigh is mostly a Windows environment. We wanted to teach a video system that all of our students could learn and use easily, without a lot of training and at a low cost. All of the Windows operating systems, starting with XP, come with Windows Movie Maker. We tested it and decided that, while it’s not a professional-quality editing program, it offers all the features we need to teach basic storytelling. And it’s free.
We looked at a number of cameras and ultimately bought 20 Kodak Zi8s. These are simple, one-button cameras that capture surprisingly good HD video and audio. They look like cell phones. Anyone can learn to use one in a few minutes. In one three-hour lab period, we can have students taking video, editing it in Movie Maker, and uploading it to YouTube. In another lab, they can learn to do titling and transitions. In a series of assignments, they can learn to shoot A and B rolls and mix them together with narration. Easy, fun, inexpensive – and in the end they’re learning what we want them to learn, which is how to tell a story visually with video.
We’ll build on this foundation later in an optional course that uses more sophisticated equipment, software and techniques, but that will be just for a smaller group of students who want to take it to the next level. Meanwhile, this more basic model is the one that I will incorporate into my Visual Communication class in the fall. Every student will be issued a Zi8, and that camera will be used for both still photography and video. We’ll use Windows Movie Maker as a learning tool, then, if they want, students will be free to use other video editing programs after they’ve mastered storytelling techniques.
I’m wondering if any of you out there have done similar experimentation with basic video training, and whether you have anything to share from that experience that would be useful to me next fall.
Next blog: It’s Still Photography
A little explanation will help here: Our student newspaper, The Brown and White, is open to all students in the university. In fact, of the 100 or more staff members each semester, two-thirds are not journalism majors. Many have never taken a journalism class, and the only training they have had is an orientation and “boot camp” to the newspaper staff in the first semester that they participate.
Almost all of our photographers are non-majors, and Lehigh offers very little in the way of photography classes. Nevertheless, we have managed to maintain a good staff over the years, thanks to a stream of students who had an independent interest in photography.
So I was surprised to find that applying this model to video didn’t work.
The students who were interested in video came from a background in high school that was rooted in television-style news and documentary production. They showed up expecting to do that for the web version of our newspaper, and were disappointed that we don’t have a studio and a lot of expensive equipment.
The help we sought within the university from professional staff members who provide video support in various ways was also rooted in the television and film models. These people do not get what video is on the Internet. They’re either trying to use the Internet to do broadband television, or as a venue for movie-style documentaries. They wanted to train our students to use complicated camera equipment, do proper studio lighting, and to edit video in Final Cut Pro. In their model, it would take days to get video on the web.
It seemed to me that we needed a fundamentally different approach to video for the website. A good example of that style happened near here, in Allentown, just the day before yesterday. A natural gas line exploded at about 10:30 p.m., demolishing two houses, killing five people and causing a fire that ultimately destroyed a city block. Within an hour or so of the explosion, our local Tribune-owned newspaper, The Morning Call, had several videos posted from the scene. No standup reporter, no narration, just raw footage showing firemen, police and chaos. Links to the video and story were posted on Twitter. As the story developed the next day, the videos became more sophisticated, but they were still Internet videos, meant to supplement the story in the multimedia world of the web.
So we face a couple of problems in our small journalism program. First, we don’t want to invest a lot of money in expensive equipment and facilities. Second, we need to train all of our students how to tell a visual story using video on the web, not just some subset of our students. In our context, we want to emphasize the storytelling aspect, not the technical aspect. Problem is, the technical side of things can get in the way, because sophisticated cameras and complex editing software have a steep learning curve, and create a significant hurdle that needs to be cleared before getting to the important side: telling the story.
When our newest colleague, Jeremy Littau, joined our department in 2009, the two of us began to strategize about the best way to incorporate video storytelling into our curriculum. Jeremy’s interests are squarely on multimedia and community-building. He introduced an experimental class so that we could try out some teaching ideas and see how they could fit into our curriculum. Jeremy and I put a lot of thought into this problem of how best to teach the video skills, and ultimately tried what might sound like a radical approach. We opted for the simplest possible system.
Lehigh students use both Windows-based computers and Macs, but Lehigh is mostly a Windows environment. We wanted to teach a video system that all of our students could learn and use easily, without a lot of training and at a low cost. All of the Windows operating systems, starting with XP, come with Windows Movie Maker. We tested it and decided that, while it’s not a professional-quality editing program, it offers all the features we need to teach basic storytelling. And it’s free.
We looked at a number of cameras and ultimately bought 20 Kodak Zi8s. These are simple, one-button cameras that capture surprisingly good HD video and audio. They look like cell phones. Anyone can learn to use one in a few minutes. In one three-hour lab period, we can have students taking video, editing it in Movie Maker, and uploading it to YouTube. In another lab, they can learn to do titling and transitions. In a series of assignments, they can learn to shoot A and B rolls and mix them together with narration. Easy, fun, inexpensive – and in the end they’re learning what we want them to learn, which is how to tell a story visually with video.
We’ll build on this foundation later in an optional course that uses more sophisticated equipment, software and techniques, but that will be just for a smaller group of students who want to take it to the next level. Meanwhile, this more basic model is the one that I will incorporate into my Visual Communication class in the fall. Every student will be issued a Zi8, and that camera will be used for both still photography and video. We’ll use Windows Movie Maker as a learning tool, then, if they want, students will be free to use other video editing programs after they’ve mastered storytelling techniques.
I’m wondering if any of you out there have done similar experimentation with basic video training, and whether you have anything to share from that experience that would be useful to me next fall.
Next blog: It’s Still Photography
Friday, February 4, 2011
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
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
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Some Basic Choices
Planning to incorporate new media elements into a visual communication course begins with deciding how this new class will fit in our overall curriculum, and that decision must take into account the nature of our program here at Lehigh. Some background will help:
Lehigh University’s journalism program began in 1927. We’ve had a student newspaper since 1894, and it was the newspaper that provided the momentum to offer a journalism degree before the Great Depression. Until I gave it to our library archivist recently, I had the 130-page manual from that era that spelled out the new system for how the student newspaper, called The Brown and White, would be run. The creative force behind this new system and the advent of a more formal journalism program was a young professor named Curtis D. MacDougall, who later went on to teach at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1942 to 1971 and wrote one of the great journalism texts of all time. He was working on the ninth edition of “Interpretive Reporting” when he died in 1985. I digress, but the point is that we have some deep and interesting roots.
Prof. MacDougall went on to teach in a much larger program, where students had many choices, or “tracks” that were designed to fill a traditional job market: photojournalism, magazine editing and writing, radio and television, newspapering, advertising. At Lehigh, he left behind a program rooted in the liberal arts. Our philosophy is that every student should get a strong and broad liberal arts education, and that we can provide it through the lens of journalism and media studies. For the more than three decades I’ve been at Lehigh, we’ve graduated about 30 students each year. In our major, they complete basic courses in news writing, editing and reporting. They all have internships in the senior year and capstone senior seminar courses. They have media ethics and law, and they can choose from a menu of other courses to suit their interest. Most of them have second majors or minors in subjects like political science, English or sociology.
When the Internet came along, we began a web version of the student newspaper, hired a journalist with a background in website work in newspapers, and incorporated training in most of our courses. Seems like a long time ago.
These days, few of our students take jobs in the “traditional” media. They more often are hired by social networking startups, or by organizations that are trying to increase their social media footprint. These graduates need a broader set of skills, along with a fresh understanding of media and society, to take into the workplace. The choices we’ve made about incorporating these elements into our curriculum are dictated by being a small department with a focus on liberal arts.
While we lack the breadth of larger programs, it’s probably simpler to retool at Lehigh than at schools where entrenched field-of-study specialties have made training more specific. Since all of our students are cross-trained because of the nature of our program, incorporating new media and community journalism concepts into our curriculum boils down to deciding how to revamp existing basic courses, and how to add new courses that emphasize these skills at a higher level.
So we’ve made some of these choices, and this new course I’m developing in visual communication is an important part of the change. It will be taken by freshmen and sophomores who, by the time they take this class, will have a foundational course called Media and Society, and our entry-level Writing for the Media class, which includes blogging and use of Twitter.
Next blog: The Other Pieces of the Puzzle
Lehigh University’s journalism program began in 1927. We’ve had a student newspaper since 1894, and it was the newspaper that provided the momentum to offer a journalism degree before the Great Depression. Until I gave it to our library archivist recently, I had the 130-page manual from that era that spelled out the new system for how the student newspaper, called The Brown and White, would be run. The creative force behind this new system and the advent of a more formal journalism program was a young professor named Curtis D. MacDougall, who later went on to teach at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1942 to 1971 and wrote one of the great journalism texts of all time. He was working on the ninth edition of “Interpretive Reporting” when he died in 1985. I digress, but the point is that we have some deep and interesting roots.
Prof. MacDougall went on to teach in a much larger program, where students had many choices, or “tracks” that were designed to fill a traditional job market: photojournalism, magazine editing and writing, radio and television, newspapering, advertising. At Lehigh, he left behind a program rooted in the liberal arts. Our philosophy is that every student should get a strong and broad liberal arts education, and that we can provide it through the lens of journalism and media studies. For the more than three decades I’ve been at Lehigh, we’ve graduated about 30 students each year. In our major, they complete basic courses in news writing, editing and reporting. They all have internships in the senior year and capstone senior seminar courses. They have media ethics and law, and they can choose from a menu of other courses to suit their interest. Most of them have second majors or minors in subjects like political science, English or sociology.
When the Internet came along, we began a web version of the student newspaper, hired a journalist with a background in website work in newspapers, and incorporated training in most of our courses. Seems like a long time ago.
These days, few of our students take jobs in the “traditional” media. They more often are hired by social networking startups, or by organizations that are trying to increase their social media footprint. These graduates need a broader set of skills, along with a fresh understanding of media and society, to take into the workplace. The choices we’ve made about incorporating these elements into our curriculum are dictated by being a small department with a focus on liberal arts.
While we lack the breadth of larger programs, it’s probably simpler to retool at Lehigh than at schools where entrenched field-of-study specialties have made training more specific. Since all of our students are cross-trained because of the nature of our program, incorporating new media and community journalism concepts into our curriculum boils down to deciding how to revamp existing basic courses, and how to add new courses that emphasize these skills at a higher level.
So we’ve made some of these choices, and this new course I’m developing in visual communication is an important part of the change. It will be taken by freshmen and sophomores who, by the time they take this class, will have a foundational course called Media and Society, and our entry-level Writing for the Media class, which includes blogging and use of Twitter.
Next blog: The Other Pieces of the Puzzle
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Old Dog
I often tell my students that one of the nicest things about design is that it’s not an exact science. For any given design problem, there are many elegant solutions. For those of us who always had trouble coming up with the right solutions in calculus, it’s a comforting concept.
But just because there’s more than one acceptable answer doesn’t mean all answers are good. Some solutions are better than others. Some are just plain bad. And it’s often difficult to pin down what separates the elegant from the awful. We study rules and conventions. Typography. Grid systems. Graphics. Color. Similarity. Proximity. Contrast. Repetition. Hierarchy. We try to apply the rules, and we learn how to break the rules effectively. We can talk about what succeeds and what doesn't, but to a large extent, whether we like the result is subjective.
After 32 years of teaching “Publication Design” in our journalism program, in the fall I’ll be introducing a new course, titled “Visual Communication.” What’s the difference, you ask. Nothing. And everything.
Our former course taught the sort of design one needs to create posters, newspapers and magazines. I have always been surprised to learn that many journalism students don't think a lot about visual communication. They're focused on writing. Part of my job has always been to explain why they need to know about typography and graphics. Today's students have an even greater obligation to learn about telling a story visually: They need to be able to shoot and edit video, to create a slide show, design and maintain an attractive blog site.
In our small journalism and communication program, our goal will be to teach these things throughout the curriculum and to all of our students, but my new course will be an important conceptual and skills foundation.
Talk about an old dog and new tricks.
So this blog will help me explore some of the challenges and opportunities as I develop a plan for this new class in the coming months. I hope along the way to engage some of my colleagues at other institutions and in the profession in a discussion that will help me find the way. As with design itself, the beauty is that there are a lot of solutions out there to the problems of teaching visual communication.
I’m building on a fairly good foundation, I believe. I’ve been a newspaper editor, doing production that included layout and design as a part-time job for more than three decades. My college training at the graduate level was in photography and cinematography, and I’ve continued to have an interest in those. So I’m not new to visual storytelling. But I’ve been doing these things intuitively all my life. Teaching others to do them is much harder. I learned this when I first began teaching news writing and reporting. I had been a reporter, but teaching other people to be reporters took a lot of thought. I also learned a lot in the process. In the end, it made me a better writer, a better editor.
So I’ll be trying to get a fresh blog out a couple of times a week. I’ll post the topics out there in Twitterland and see if anyone’s interested in having this conversation. I know there are many of you who have been teaching this sort of class for some time ... probably others who are just starting, like me.
Let’s share.
Next blog: Some Basic Choices
But just because there’s more than one acceptable answer doesn’t mean all answers are good. Some solutions are better than others. Some are just plain bad. And it’s often difficult to pin down what separates the elegant from the awful. We study rules and conventions. Typography. Grid systems. Graphics. Color. Similarity. Proximity. Contrast. Repetition. Hierarchy. We try to apply the rules, and we learn how to break the rules effectively. We can talk about what succeeds and what doesn't, but to a large extent, whether we like the result is subjective.
After 32 years of teaching “Publication Design” in our journalism program, in the fall I’ll be introducing a new course, titled “Visual Communication.” What’s the difference, you ask. Nothing. And everything.
Our former course taught the sort of design one needs to create posters, newspapers and magazines. I have always been surprised to learn that many journalism students don't think a lot about visual communication. They're focused on writing. Part of my job has always been to explain why they need to know about typography and graphics. Today's students have an even greater obligation to learn about telling a story visually: They need to be able to shoot and edit video, to create a slide show, design and maintain an attractive blog site.
In our small journalism and communication program, our goal will be to teach these things throughout the curriculum and to all of our students, but my new course will be an important conceptual and skills foundation.
Talk about an old dog and new tricks.
So this blog will help me explore some of the challenges and opportunities as I develop a plan for this new class in the coming months. I hope along the way to engage some of my colleagues at other institutions and in the profession in a discussion that will help me find the way. As with design itself, the beauty is that there are a lot of solutions out there to the problems of teaching visual communication.
I’m building on a fairly good foundation, I believe. I’ve been a newspaper editor, doing production that included layout and design as a part-time job for more than three decades. My college training at the graduate level was in photography and cinematography, and I’ve continued to have an interest in those. So I’m not new to visual storytelling. But I’ve been doing these things intuitively all my life. Teaching others to do them is much harder. I learned this when I first began teaching news writing and reporting. I had been a reporter, but teaching other people to be reporters took a lot of thought. I also learned a lot in the process. In the end, it made me a better writer, a better editor.
So I’ll be trying to get a fresh blog out a couple of times a week. I’ll post the topics out there in Twitterland and see if anyone’s interested in having this conversation. I know there are many of you who have been teaching this sort of class for some time ... probably others who are just starting, like me.
Let’s share.
Next blog: Some Basic Choices
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