Let me just say that I’m not one of those people who laments changes to sites like Facebook or Twitter; most of that is us needing to get used to something new, which is always a little scary. But I am going to admit something — I hate the new iMovie. Which isn’t exactly new, I’m talking about the major overhaul Apple did to iMovie with its ’08 version; we are now on iMovie ’11 — same overhauled program, with some updates.

This comes to mind because of a major problem my students and I encountered last month with exporting from iMovie, and because Apple recently announced another overhaul, this time for Final Cut Pro. My experience with Final Cut is not extensive — it’s obviously a great program if filmmakers are using it for major films, but for the purpose of teaching high school journalism students how to tell stories through different means, iMovie takes minimal time to get going so we can focus on storytelling through video and not the program itself. It’s also free with Macs. And free is good.

But as my students were putting together 10-minute documentaries for a state contest, we noticed that although the audio was working fine in the iMovie project, once we exported it (in any format — we tried everything), the audio would disappear from some clips and not sync in others. This only occurred in projects where they had adjusted audio levels, but the clips that were having problems weren’t necessarily those that had been adjusted.

After much googling and consulting with the media tech teacher, who works with Final Cut and said this had never happened in that program, I found a few message boards that mentioned this problem.

Two suggestions from users:

1. Change all audio levels to a round number like 75 percent or 50 percent, not a random 17 or 361 percent. We tried this, and even increased or decreased all audio to 100 percent, in hopes of tweaking the audio after export in Final Cut. This fix didn’t work though.

2. Extract all of the audio from the video clips. What a pain — why is this necessary, Apple? But it worked, and we were down to the deadline and had already lost one film due to a computer crash and not having backed it up on the server, so there was no time for questioning.

The students ended up winning third and fifth place, pretty darn good for first-year students with only a week or two of video training. (Here’s the first and second place.)

If anyone knows why this happens in iMovie and if there are fixes ahead, please let me know. I never encountered this with the pre-overhaul version, which thanks to some new computers, we no longer had to use. I’d like to embrace this newer version — after all, it’s been through a few versions by this point — but this is a flaw that seems to detract from the purpose of making it better. Hopefully the overhauled Final Cut fares better.

In between chapters of summer reading (currently Oryx and Crake by Twitter extraordinaire Margaret Atwood), I’m putting together the web building/online journalism training for the ILPC Summer Workshop at UT this weekend.

Whenever there’s time to lose myself in good storytelling like Atwood’s, I get to thinking of the workshop of all workshops I attended a couple of years back on multiplatform journalism at the Poynter Institute. We started the high-tech training with a focus not on the latest web technology or multimedia fad in newsrooms, but on our favorite storytellers, a process led by Chip Scanlan.

At the time, numbed by deadlines and the day-to-day grind of daily deadline writing of articles — not stories — it took me a while to remember the last time I was truly engaged with a piece of journalism. Finally I did come up with one, a Texas journalist who engages me with his stories more than any other: Skip Hollandsworth. I still think about this story and re-read it with students from time to time.

What makes a good story?

Many things, but at its core, I believe a good story needs to be relevant to our lives and the world around us. It should tell the story of a human experience that anyone can relate to through emotion, need or drive. And a good story gives me a reason to read to the end. How many times do we pick up a book or magazine or click on a link, only to be disengaged within a few paragraphs, pages or chapters?

The inverted pyramid is great for web updates, to find out the latest and most important facts by skimming, but it defeats the entire purpose of storytelling by guaranteeing the audience that the information they are getting will only get less important if they continue reading. But a good story keeps the audience around, whether through means of suspense, the sheer importance and draw of the information provided or because it’s just a good ride.

So what does this have to do with online journalism? Everything. What I took away from that training, and what I hope to impart to my students is that storytelling is just as important with a flip cam or audio recorder as it is with words. An online interactive package should still at its essence include good storytelling. The technology is just the means to the end, not the end itself. So we can teach students to edit video, put together slideshows or an interactive graphic, but they need to embrace that they are storytellers above all.

After my first year as a high school journalism adviser, I have to say, it was fun, challenging, frustrating, exhilarating — and I’m glad it’s over.

A year or two ago, I left a “cushy” night cops position at a daily metro to pursue teaching journalism. Much thought went into the change, and the opportunity to work with students to explore new frontiers in online journalism was appealing, as were summers and holidays off to spend with my growing family.

Do I miss reporting? How can you not? Being a journalist is one of the best jobs out there, no matter the frustrations we’re all too familiar with today. You get to call people like the mayor at home, ask inappropriate and nosy questions, argue with the copy desk about commas, eat pizza on election night, calm angry callers with a diatribe on the fundamental purpose of journalism as my mentor former reporter Bob Banta could famously do, hole up in the newsroom opening “gifts” – boxes of open records requests, get paid to go to hot sauce festivals and chili cookoffs, see your name in print everyday (and not because you sent a bunch of bad photos over Twitter and have a funny name.)

As a journalism adviser, some of these things are the same: eating pizza on deadline nights, arguing about commas — just with teenagers, not copy editors, although not too different when you think about it — opening “gifts” in the form of yearbook proofs, going to softball games. Some of the others include encouraging students to have the confidence to do — interview the principal, ask nosy questions of their peers and teachers, get “paid” to spend an entire weekend with the latest Call of Duty game to write a review, meet famous people like Elizabeth Berkley (Jesse from “Saved by the Bell”), whom you should invite to your school to talk, and see their names in print.

Which is better? Which is worse? They both have good and bad points, and having calculated those points in my mind on rough days, I’d say it’s an even trade.

But hey, ask me again next year. Everyone says your first year is the hardest, and I believe it, but if it only gets better from here, it’s quite likely teaching journalism will tip the scale.