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.

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.

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.

While learning about themes and design at a yearbook workshop in Dallas this weekend (and how to up the journalism quotient), I began thinking of how online journalism concepts could be incorporated into the yearbook. (No worries — I would never advocate getting rid of the physical book. Who knows if the Internet will be around in 100 years?)

User-generated content — Many yearbook staffs are already soliciting photos from students through Facebook. I could see the photos — a form of citizen journalism — displayed on a page devoted to submitted photos or throughout the book with a special tag to indicate it was a reader photo. This would be a great marketing tool and help build buzz around the yearbook. Contests could be held during the year for students to submit their best photos. This could be especially useful for small staffs. (Before the photos made it into the print yearbook, staffers would have to get the larger digital file of the photo from the submitter in person rather than take it off Facebook to preserve the quality of the photo.)

UPDATE: Christine Grazio, a rep with one of the yearbook companies, added polls and quotes to the mix of possible user-generated content. Which makes me wonder — why not have a contest or solicit first-person personal essays from students to be printed in the yearbook?

Website — A yearbook website will be more static than a news website, but it’s a necessary tool for marketing the book and gathering information from teachers, administrators and students about upcoming events and coverage ideas through tools like Google forms. Staffers could post updates on the book throughout the year and even ask students to vote on the theme and cover design to get students more involved and feel more connected to the finished product. A calendar showing which events yearbook staff plan to cover and a schedule of group and individual posed photos would not only show those outside of class how hard staffers try to cover a variety of events, but it would also help teachers, coaches and club leaders determine whether their big events are on staff radar.

Social media — Facebook and Twitter are good marketing tools for the newspaper and yearbook. And they can be useful for finding story ideas and sources. Lots of yearbooks on Twitter. It helps if one staff member has the role of social media editor to plan posts on these sites and create a social media strategy.

These are the three areas I plan to focus on this year. Hopefully my students will be able to come up with others. If you have had success bringing online journalism to the yearbook classroom, please share in the comments section or send me an email.

That might be so, but this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to online journalism. During my days as a “print” reporter, we too faced the stress of being the first to post stories and hoping they’d end up in the “most viewed” section of the website. I’d equate that stress to the adrenaline rush that hits right before deadline — any deadline.

What’s causing journalists to leave the business might have more to do with the 13,500 journalism jobs lost in the past three years. Fewer journalists mean more work for the ones left behind. Or less news. Many news organizations scale back coverage, even as they increase rates, which is a rant for another blog. But for online-only news organizations like Politico or traditional newspapers aiming for a large presence online, the competition is fierce, causing too much stress and then burnout, according to the article:

Physically exhausting assembly-line jobs these are not. But the workloads for many young journalists are heavy enough that signs of strain are evident.

“When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,” said Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of the digital media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I worry about burnout.”

I think the article could have used more reporting, and the premise should be shifted more to journalism in general, but the stress is real, regardless of what’s causing it.

How can this be avoided in the classroom? And what skills do students need to be better prepared for what awaits them?

This is a topic that needs more discussion. I don’t think any teacher wants to prepare his students to enter a sweatshop, so first off is to encourage them to choose a second major, just in case.

• More seriously, getting all students somewhat involved in the running of the website and creating an environment where site management is spread out among several students, with each one having a specific role, can ease some stress. Don’t let all of the work fall on one or two students. Content-management systems are made for easy uploading of information, so all students should be able to post their own content — pending approval of the editor or adviser, of course.

• Encourage students to unplug occasionally, even in an “online” journalism classroom.

• I’m hoping others have better ideas, but in the meantime, I’d like to encourage students to be leaders and even entrepreneurs in this new world of journalism, so they can eventually create their own work environments where it’s understood that quality journalism takes time and manpower.

Because the best journalism cannot be done as the Times article describes, “shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.”

Good ol’ shoe-leather reporting still gets hits. And with iPhones, it’s easier than ever before to leave the newsroom and report from the field.

UPDATE: Online news outlets have responded to the Times article. Here’s a good one.

Here’s a tentative plan for a new media training I’ll be doing in Austin in August for TAJE and ILPC. I’d love feedback on topics I should include or leave out. These are lessons I also plan to cover in the first couple of months of school as my students at Dripping Springs High School get their website up and running.

Intro to online journalism

Important elements: multimedia, interactivity, connectivity and immediacy

These should be used as a guide for any web projects and the site as a whole. I have students come up with ideas for how they will address these areas after analyzing scholastic and professional news sites.

What makes a good website?

This is where I fit in the importance of finding a balance of content-aggregation and content-creation.

How does this fit in with the existing program?

This is where I get kind of philosophical. Incorporating online journalism into a scholastic journalism program (or a professional newsroom for that matter) is more than just adding a website and putting the print stuff online. I don’t like to gloss over the massive change required to give students the most realistic experience. The web must come first. Print must now give readers a different experience: longer stories written in a narrative structure and fewer stories that give weeks-old news in inverted pyramid form. The web and print must be equal, which includes the amount of pull the staff for both publications have over content.

How does a website work?

We don’t all need to be writing code, but we can’t rely on the techie in the corner to do everything. Knowing how websites work is an important tool for everyone to have, and knowledge is of course power. Giving up that kind of power isn’t good for journalism — or a scholastic journalism program in the long run as kids with that knowledge graduate.

What are my website options?

First you have to decide between a static versus dynamic site. Once you go with a dynamic site, you pick a content-management system. There are also a couple of choices for programs that don’t want to set it up, which are great options for the first couple of years to get the hang of posting to the web. You’ll pay in flexibility or cost though.

Set up a site using WordPress as a content-management system

WordPress is the most widely used and the easiest to work with without knowing too much code, so I would go with this one. But no matter which one you choose, going the route of a content-management system (the dynamic site) is the best choice because students should be familiar with the concept and have experience uploading to the web. Which brings us to…

Designing and posting

Web design

Usability, accessibility and good old-fashioned design come into play here.

Writing for the web

It’s different, as are headlines. I also like to cover blogging in this portion.

Photos for the web

Copyright, quick editing and creating photo galleries and stories.

Making the site mobile

Oh-so-important for teens. Anyone out there creating iPhone and iPad apps?

Putting the print edition online

Issuu.com is the big one.

User-generated content

Staffers can’t be everywhere. Make use of students who are — and their photos.

Multimedia

Storyboarding

An important part of multimedia is planning. Make sure you do this and you’ll never see a video package that makes you wonder if all this fancy stuff is taking away from the actual journalism.

Podcasts, audio slideshows and video

These are the big three. People ask what programs students should know. Audacity is a free, easy-to-learn audio editing program. I like Soundslides, which was developed by a journalist for meshing audio with photos in a super-easy format. For video, iMovie is just as good for students who don’t have the time or interest to take a more-intensive video training to learn Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Free web-based multimedia tools

From map mashups to multimedia tools like vuvox.com and dipity.com, there’s no shortage of free tools out there to create cool multimedia projects.

Managing a site

Staff organization

This is a biggie. I’ve yet to see two programs organized exactly the same way for print, broadcast or convergence. Here’s how I plan to set up staff, and here’s how other schools do it.

Legal and ethical issues, advertising and marketing

Social media is a becoming a large part of marketing a site and newsgathering, which increases the need for social media ethics policies.

Putting it all together

Gotta have a plan. Who will post what when? Who manages the Twitter feed? What is breaking news? How will you handle posting breaking news to the site? What topics would work with a live chat? Where are we? Is this real life? Why are we doing all of this?

Oh yeah, because it’s important for students to learn these skills, and for the future of journalism.

This year for the first time, the summer workshop offered a convergence option, which I had the pleasure of instructing. Over the four days, we went over options for having a news website and the basics of online journalism, and participants created websites with WordPress as the content-management system and learned how to edit audio in Audacity and create audio slideshows in Soundslides.We also talked about staff management, multimedia storyboarding and writing for the web.

Whew.

By the end, heads were spinning, but I hope the five students and several advisers who braved the course took away a better understanding of how websites work and some ideas for what to put on them.

Here’s one website-in-progress started by co-editor-in-chief Kira Witkin of the Episcopal School of Dallas.

Here’s another by the adviser Laura Negri of the Kerronicle at Alief Kerr High School in Houston, who found a couple of important WordPress plugins for staff work flow:

The editorial calendar plugin sets up a calendar where the web editor(s) can schedule posts for particular days and easily rearrange posts by dragging them onto another day. I’ve already installed it on mine, even though it’s just me. The edit flow plugin is even more essential for high school newsrooms because it adds more possible statuses to unpublished posts. Instead of just “draft” or “published” options as come standard in WordPress, edit flow adds “assigned,” “pending review,” pitch,” and “waiting for feedback,” which allows for multiple edits and reviews before publication.

In August, ILPC is putting on another convergence workshop in Austin with the Texas Association of Journalism Educators, which I’m revising to include legal issues, a better web host option (although many advisers recommended Go Daddy, the company must have been having a bad weekend) and other tweaks based on the first run-through of the training.

Once the training is tweaked, I’ll post more of the lessons on this site. In the meantime, my next month is about preparing for the fall and helping my students start their own website later this month.

Kreytak was covering an awful but intriguing case here in Austin about the murder of Jennifer Cave and subsequent convictions of Laura Hall and Colton Pitonyak. It’s been a long, drawn-out saga that spawned my all-time favorite line, supposedly spoken by Hall to a friend about why she would help Pitonyak chop up a body: “That’s just how I roll.”

I told you it was fascinating.

Anyway, last week was Hall’s second sentencing trial, and Kreytak updated Twitter every minute or so with dialogue and details from the trial (best to read from bottom to top):

Twitter feed of Hall's sentencing trial

Many of those quotes and details made it into the web and print versions of the stories that came out of the trial, so Twitter acted almost like a reporter’s notebook.

High school students won’t often be covering trials, but there’s plenty to live-tweet during prom (the PG version), major games and graduation. Each one of those has the potential for interesting dialogue and tension.

Want an example that doesn’t include chopping off body parts? Here’s adviser Matt Rasgorshek’s take on his students’ experiences with live-tweeting games. Students at Westside High School in Omaha, Neb., found Twitter helped one reporter keep better notes during the game, which meant better details for the web and print stories.

Live tweets from Westside High School basketball game

Here are some more cool ways to use Twitter in newsrooms that could easily translate to the classroom.

But catching the end of the weekly wjchat on Twitter, I saw that some experienced journalism professors weren’t on board with the change. Hopefully, we’ll hear more in the coming weeks about what they think.

With the changes, students can specialize in either Convergence Photojournalism or Photojournalism. They can be multi-platform designers, magazine designers or news designers. There looks to be some new media skills required for all disciplines. For example, the old-fashioned Photo-J-only students will still have to learn multimedia skills.

So I’m a little confused.

Why give students the choice to not specialize in convergence? Shouldn’t “convergence” now simply be called journalism? Are we still separating the print folks from the online?

Those other disciplines aren’t useless; I specialized in Magazine Writing as a master’s student at Mizzou because I loved to write. Those classes have helped in my career, so I’m not knocking the choice. But had I been more forward-thinking, I would have taken more than two hours in multimedia training and learned more about photography, design and the web. (Just five years ago, only one of those credit hours was required.)

Obviously a lot of thought from people more experienced and intelligent than me went into this change, so I am eager to hear more about the rationale and job prospects for these new grads. I had always understood that journalism students who specialize in a particular subject, like business or science, would have better job prospects. I don’t know if the same is true for someone specializing only in news editing or writing, or even convergence disciplines.

In high school, non-specialization is essential. I’m surprised that even now, there are high school journalism students who want to just write or just take photos and don’t want anything to do with multimedia or websites. I hope I don’t lose students in my program by requiring them to branch out to at least try other areas. But it would be irresponsible not to.