Hacks/Hackers Demo Day 3 Recap

At the third Hacks/Hackers NYC Demo Day, six speakers whizzed through their presentations covering several topics, from real-time data collection to content management systems.

Read the rest of my blog entry here.

My Moleskin

I was always a tedious note taker.

I like highlighters in different colors, red pens that I alternate with black pens. I like .75 ball pens because it's more fun to write with them than with the .50 ones.

Bullet points were a great way for me to think about subjects, even essays. I always called it my German urge for order.

It's kind of funny to think that that is how I process the death of first my grandmother and now the imminent exitus of my grandfather.

I'm making it into a project, a step-by-step visualization of what started out as an essay about my granny's funeral and is now a clumsy attempt to understand my identity via genealogy.

I've sent out an excel sheet for my family to fill out and it fills me with joy.

One-(wo)man-band

My job is to be a videographer. Translated from jargon-heavy web lingo to everyday speech this means I shoot, edit and script videos and one day possibly even slideshows. 

Whenever I pitch a story package, however, I extend my job description. 

One-(wo)man-band. 

The problem with this is not that you have to suddenly present a story in three different formats. That's just having to juggle different software and taking into account a lot of production time. What killed me was that I realized (possibly too late) I had to report on three stories about the same theme with slightly different angles. You see, components have to complement not re-iterate. And that's where it got icky. 

So here are a few lessons I've learned from this and I hope some of you will find it useful:

1. Preparations: The key to all of this seems to be pre-reporting. Finding your story angle for the print piece in advance will help loads. So once you've got that pinned you can see what's missing or under-explored. The misconception I had was that I could predict which part would play which role. I thought I knew in advance what I would need for each component. But interviews always change your angle on the story, ever so slightly. Hence, figure out the print component. Then the additional components will crystalize when you realize which parts you weren't able to explore in the print story and are important to get the whole picture.  
2. Material: That's a biggie. Not only does the article need a still image. The video needs about 10 images of what you couldn't get on tape while filming the office of your interviewee or visiting a space where an event took place. And the best graphics have great visualizations of data you need to get from your source or have crisp and beautiful images that are cut out or processed in one or another way. So a grocery list while reporting multimedia-style might be: a few photos (for article), images from things your interviewee talking about (for video) and illustrations/3D models/powerpoint presentations/stills/data (for graphic). 
3. Time: Unless you have a team of people working with you, you might want to do this sort of reporting only for enterprise stories.

Suggestions and comments welcome!

The new role of the image...?

Someone talked to me recently, told me that it'd take very long to take a great shot. You wake up before dawn, he said, you go on top of a tall building, talk your way in, if you have to. Or you schlepp yourself from street to street, the body of your camera dangling off your neck, the strap grinding its way to your bladebone. A quasimodo-to-be, ten years from now. Or you swarm around troublemakers, a parasite digging invisible, needle-like arms into the open pores of their subject/object. 

You get the right angle, turn a little wheel on your camera, correct your lighting, click, you got your shot. 

It sounds like an idealist's ode to the photojournalist. And yes, there seem to be a few great photographers out there, who seem to be able to live for a month on one photo's earnings. 

But the viewer clicks on. To photo slideshows, photo series, photos tagged in albums, to interactive maps and graphics. And so a photographer either goes on a scavenger hunt for the next interactive map, running from one building/person/event to the next; or has to take mug shots of 50 people who give representative opinions, Man-On-The-Street polls on the elections, Britney Spears, Detergent; or is s/he is one of 40 random photographers who work for Getty Images, the AP, Reuters, Corbis, who contribute namelessly to a larger project. 

It slaps the photog ego in the face, which is sort of satisfactory to me. It takes away from Walter Benjamin's prediction that photography politicizes/is inherently politicized due to its fake objectivity, its need for a verbal framing. Now the multimedia framing negates its singularity. Takes away from its wordlessness. Contextualizes the photograph for the consumer, while s/he is just as capable of re-contextualizing the image through posting it on facebook/blogger.  The image has become a free-floating currency. The iconic image mutates into a malleable (both in size and meaning) broche, worn, traded, bought, lost, sold. And it loses its charisma, or to use Benjamin's vocabulary, its aura, once more. 

Multimedia musings that seem outdated now

Conceiving a multimedia project is quite the challenge but encourages you to really go nuts with the tools at hand. A white screen is what you have at the beginning and with Adobe Flash, there is almost no limit to your creativity.

This degree really gave us the time to explore various questions that I've heard reiterated in larger newsrooms here and abroad: What the heck do I put in a video; how do I best convey numbers and who still cares about words?

So here are some lessons worth $50k in tuition fees and a lot of sleepless nights in a smelly computer lab: Text matters cause most net media consumers are bored office workers who love to procrastinate around lunch time (when the number of site viewers peak) and they don't want to be caught by their bosses combatting their boreout. Text is still the most effective way for getting you information quickly.

Videos are often not consumed in their entirety for the same reasons but are generally more powerful when it comes to telling more individualized stories. Slideshows are a little work-friendlier. Clicking away on the internet - from afar that looks like clicking away on a excel sheet, right?

And Interactivity. What can I say. Over the past year, I have fallen in love with Adobe Flash. The Flashplayer, that thing you have to download from the Adobe homepage when you're on an old, old PC, is what makes things beam in, move from left to right or click around on maps, photo galleries, etc.

Interactivity, if done properly, draws in a lot of people. Big time. Maybe not for longer than 30 seconds, but as the Internet is seen more and more as a resource to personalize and filter information according to one's own taste, the interactive feature that combines a lot of useful/interesting information with a compelling and easy-to-understand design wins. The LA Times did a crimewatch interactive (google map AIP), recording each murder that happened in Los Angeles. This data base is constantly updated and sorted by name, I presume daily. This lends it longevity that videos or slideshows might not have. Constantly upgraded, constantly renewed data.

To end on a good note:
http://www.wefeelfine.org/