| This 3,100-word story was published on October 10, 2006 by Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights, a web site for photography enthusiasts. This is the unedited text as submitted. Click here to see the published version. |
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In the fall of 2002, Joe Weiss was headed for a place called Cave City, Kentucky, thinking about the mound of digital pictures that he would soon be buried under, and wondering if somehow he could avoid the crush. Weiss was part of the website production team for Western Kentucky University's Mountain Workshops in documentary photojournalism, and it was his team's job to produce and post the picture stories that would be shot by about 50 workshop participants. The picture stories would be posted as slideshows in Macromedia Flash format, and the complex and time-consuming task of programming Flash was a big hurdle. So Weiss wrote a little application that automated some of the Flash programming. After several mutations and more than two years of fiddling, that little program emerged in August, 2005 as Soundslides. (A license costs US$39.95.) In less than a year it seems to have taken the newspaper photojournalism world by storm (at least in the U.S.) and helped to spark what looks like, at least anecdotally, a sharp upsurge in multimedia journalism. Suddenly, everybody's doing audio slideshows. Soundslides is a simple utility for making slideshows with audio in Flash format. It's been compatible with the Mac OS since its inception, and, as of this writing, has just become available in a beta for Windows. You feed it JPEG photos and a sound file in either AIFF or MP3 format, and it outputs your slideshow as Flash files, along with the HTML files necessary to display the Flash files, in a single folder that can be uploaded to a server without additional work. Your audio file is your timeline and the program has simple, intuitive controls for timing each picture individually. It automatically picks up IPTC captions; you can add or edit captions and credits in the authoring window; and the finished shows allow the viewer to hide or display the captions. The program's features and user interface reflect Joe Weiss's background. A journalist since 1996, he has worked at two daily papers, first at The Herald-Sun, in Durham, North Carolina, where he was both a staff photographer and, later, the director of photography and multimedia, and currently at The News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is an interactive producer. Weiss is at pains to emphasize that he considers computer programming a sideline. "I'm a journalist at The News and Observer," he says. "I enjoyed creating this software, but I don't want it to be my career." From its limited scope and customization options to its emphasis on caption handling, "this is an application that's really built for a niche," says Weiss. "Soundslides is made for journalism." "The format that I think is easiest for photojournalists to make the first step into multimedia is to gather audio, and then put their photographs to audio," he continues. "It's the easiest way to pick up the concepts and skills of linear—in other words, time-based—storytelling and editing. My hope is that [Soundslides] will make stepping from still photojournalism into multimedia and into audio just a little bit easier." It seems clear that Soundslides was born into a world very much ready to receive it. By mid-2005, broadband Internet connections were commonplace, and more than 80% of Internet users worldwide had Flash. But most important by far, at newspapers, where print circulations have been declining for decades, the drive to exploit the Internet, and the idea that this was necessary for newspapers to survive, had been gaining force for several years. Multimedia presentations, impossible in print, are an obvious option to experiment with if you're a newspaper hoping to hook readers on your website. This business imperative dovetailed nicely with the desire of many photographers to get play for their images, and to do more photo stories, and so Soundslides found a doubly receptive audience. Audio slideshows existed long before Soundslides, of course, and many newspapers continue to rely on custom Flash programming to display their multimedia projects. Some use Soundslides for smaller stories done on deadline and do custom Flash presentations for large, high-profile story packages that are not deadline driven. Many others use Soundslides but tweak it to partially customize the appearance of the shows. What was new about Soundslides, and what fueled its quick acceptance among newspaper photographers, was that it freed them from Flash and the time-consuming collaborations with the Flash programmers in the paper's online department that were previously required. At The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Photographer and Photo Coach Brian Peterson had been doing a multimedia column called "Witness", in what he calls "painstaking" cooperative efforts with The Star-Tribune's online department, for some time when he heard about Soundslides from a colleague soon after it was released. "I immediately downloaded it," Peterson says, "and within half an hour I realized this was a great tool and something that all of our photographers could use if they wanted to. It just seemed so simple that it was hard to believe it hadn't been done before. Word spread pretty fast among photographers who had been doing multimedia the old way. It was kind of a godsend." "The problem with the way we were doing it before is that we were spending most of the time behind a computer tweening pictures and making them fade," says Josh Meltzer, a staff photographer at The Roanoke Times in Virginia. (Tweening is an animation process available in Flash.) "Soundslides has allowed us to spend more time on reporting and editing and storytelling, which is what we're supposed to be good at." With Soundslides, a single photographer can produce a Flash-based audio slideshow from beginning to end in an hour or two (one shooter told us that, using canned music from Apple's Garage Band for audio, he had done one in two minutes). Once any necessary editorial checks are passed—at some papers a photo editor and/or a copy editor (who checks the captions) must sign off on the show—the finished piece can then simply be presented to the online department for posting. Making Multimedia If, as Joe Weiss hopes, Soundslides helps to usher photojournalists into the world of multimedia, it will be ushering them into a whole new world of reporting challenges. There is, for starters, that audio part of an audio slideshow. Juggling the competing demands of gathering audio and pictures, as opposed to just thinking about pictures, is the biggest challenge to doing day-in, day-out multimedia, Brian Peterson says. "You have to be thinking about almost three things at once. You're thinking about the audio, you're thinking about the pictures, and then you're thinking about how they're all going to go together as a cohesive piece." All the photographers we talked to for this story generally treat gathering audio and taking pictures as two separate tasks whenever possible—shooting for awhile, for example, then putting down their cameras before doing interviews or gathering ambient sound. Even in fast-changing situations, they rarely try to do both simultaneously. "You just have to determine what's more important at the time," says Josh Meltzer. "It's a journalism decision." Meltzer adds that the two tasks inform each other. When he's working an assignment, if he gets a piece of great audio, he'll go looking for pictures to go with it, and vice-versa. Even for the pictures specifically, audio slideshows call for a somewhat different mindset than shooting for the paper. Because you often need only one, or at most a handful, of pictures for a print story, says Peterson, "you dismiss a lot of things. But [for audio slideshows] you're really looking for transitions and details. You can really open your mind back up and start thinking about [shooting] those details." Pauline Lubens, a staff photographer at The San Jose Mercury News in California, echoes Peterson. "Whether it's the detail shot of somebody's hand, or it's a shot of a shadow or a sign or a flag or a silhouette or something that's sort of generic, I try to move it [the eventual slideshow] along like you'd move video," she says. "Probably what I'm talking about is what [videographers] would call B-roll. I don't like to use video terminology for still pictures, so I call them transition pictures." Lubens, who has been a newspaper photographer for 23 years, adds, "Despite how long I've been shooting photo stories, [doing audio slideshows] has greatly improved the range of images I shoot in a photo story." All of the photographers we talked to are continually experimenting with the techniques and mechanics of gathering good audio (and, in some cases, watching and stealing ideas from the U.S. National Public Radio network's journalists whenever they can). Lubens, like the rest of the Mercury News staff, uses an M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 digital recorder, which captures WAV or MP3 audio to CompactFlash cards. (This recorder was the most popular choice among shooters who we talked to.) She keeps it in a fanny pack around her waist with a T-mic attached [model # TK] where she can quickly flip it on to capture ambient sound. "I learned not to do hour-long interviews that you have to edit down to five minutes," Lubens says. She has also learned to ask questions in ways that don't lead to the one-word or fragmentary answers that make for unusable audio. "For some reason, if I say 'tell me' at the beginning of a question, people almost automatically speak in a complete sentence." There is one group she can't cure of their love of crummy audio, however. "Kids are almost impossible. Kids are like, 'Uh-huh.' 'Yeah.' Fun.' [You ask them], 'What do you think about being in The Nutcracker?' 'Fun.'" Richard Koci Hernandez, until recently a staff photographer at The Mercury News, is now the paper's Deputy Director of Photography for Multimedia. Along with colleague Dai Sugano, he spearheaded the paper's deep dive into multimedia journalism more than a year ago. (In just one recent month, Hernandez says, The Mercury News made 104 Soundslides audio slideshows, and Joe Weiss guesses that they have made more use of his program than any other newspaper.) Audio gathering techniques are a constant topic around the paper's photo department, Hernandez says. "At first, we gave everybody a recorder and they would just record everything, the entire time they were [at an assignment]," Hernandez says. "That can really slow you down. If you record 30 minutes, you have to listen to 30 minutes, and re-cut it." A much better method, he says, is to listen to the reporter's interview with the subject without recording it. "By the end of the interview, you've got a better sense of what they have to say, and you can just [re-interview them with] three key questions. When you come back [to the paper], you just have the three questions on your recorder instead of the entire interview." On the question of audio technical quality, Hernandez says, "It's that old saying, if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. You have to apply that exact same rule to audio. You have to get in close for good audio. For a good audio interview you have to have the microphone about a fist away from the mouth." Rather than hold a microphone in somebody's face, Hernandez likes to use a Sony ECM-C115 lavalier mic and attach it to the subject's lapel. He turns on his recorder, checks his levels, and hands the recorder to the subject or has them slip it into their pocket. He then conducts the interview from a normal conversational distance. (The Mercury News also uses the Edirol by Roland R-09 recorder, the Sony ECM-MS907 stereo mic, and the Sony ECM-607 shotgun mic.) At The Roanoke Times Josh Meltzer uses a Sony MZ-NHF800 minidisc recorder/player with an Audio-Technica AT835b shotgun mic. He keeps them in a waist pack, with the recorder set on pause, so that he can activate it by sliding a single switch. He makes sure that he's actually recording, and also judges the audio quality, by using headphones to monitor his recordings while he makes them. He says the windscreen for the mic is a necessity, and to kill the sound of his hand on the mic, he's covered it with standard mountain bike handlebar grips from a bike shop. Audio editing tools seem to be the most consistent source of dissatisfaction among photojournalists doing audio slideshows. The list of programs in use includes the open-source Audacity, Apple's Garage Band, Adobe Audition, and DigiDesign's Pro Tools. Designed for much more sophisticated audio and musical projects than a typical Soundslides slideshow, they're needlessly complex, according to the photographers we talked to, but nobody has found a better solution. Beyond the mechanics of gathering audio, putting together good audio slideshows, especially in the one-man-band workflows that Soundslides makes possible, requires more thought about narrative technique and storytelling flow than photojournalists are used to. Pauline Lubens says she's never been a fan of photographers narrating their slideshows, a feeling she attributes to the traditional idea among photojournalists that their role is to observe a story, not be in it. But she's beginning to think of that as an impoverished view of reporting. "I'm thinking more about doing what I call NPR [National Public Radio] audio where the journalist narrates when necessary to fill in the gaps. It's just being the journalist providing information. I think it would give our stories more depth." Questions of storytelling form and flow, hitherto much more familiar to writers, become major issues, says Josh Meltzer. "You're always thinking about what you'll use to open your show, what you'll close with." The audio, rather than the pictures, will usually determine these things. If possible, he likes to open with a humorous or off-the-wall comment, rather than a straightforward statement of the topic and the names of the story subjects. It's a tactic often used by writers and known by the Latin phrase in media res, meaning to start "in the middle" of things. "But you still have to have essentially your audio nut graf," Meltzer adds. "You still need the person saying, 'My name is so-and-so, and I'm a this', and that's something you can easily forget to record." Related to these greater authorship demands is another by-product of audio slideshows, which may have been best summed up by a recent participant on an Internet forum who wrote that doing slideshows "will make you a better journalist." "It requires us as photojournalists to push that journalist side of ourselves beyond just the caption," says The Mercury News's Hernandez. "You have this somewhat unlimited space on the web to tell your story; how do you want to tell it? You want to make it a better experience, a better story, and that does require you to interview the person, ask some additional questions, dig a little deeper, get to know them a little more." On a more nuts and bolts level, there seems to be a general feeling that, except in cases where you've got a really dynamite story, a good slideshow should be no more than two or three minutes in length, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 25 pictures. Brian Peterson says he's found that eight to ten seconds is a decent general rule for slide duration. "You don't want to pull that picture away from their eyes before they're done seeing it," he says. "That's part of the delicacy of putting them together is finding that point." Strong picture editing, as always, remains crucial. "Sometimes we're putting [pictures] in there just because," says Hernandez. "We're just way too loose. I don't mean to sit on a high horse, but we're doing so many [audio slideshows] as a staff, and as an industry, sometimes I can't sit through them. I think, 'man, if this was edited to just five pictures and a little quote, it would be amazing'. But instead it's a minute-and-a-half and there's just too much fat in there." If there's a single way to sum up the appeal of doing audio slideshows among the photographers we talked to, it may be this: it gives them the chance to do more—to take and show more good pictures, to do picture stories and do them deeper and bigger, to be a better journalist, and to be more completely the author of their work, rather than merely an adjunct to a reporter's story. "I think as newspapers' news holes shrink, it's an opportunity," says The Star-Tribune's Peterson. "Quite honestly, our motivation has been selfish. We're losing space in the paper, and we still want to do stories. And online said, 'sure, we'll take 'em'. And they have no space limitations. "And I think it also really preserves the integrity of the still photograph," Peterson continues. "I think we all feared as we got into multimedia that we'd all be shooting video cameras by now. [Instead], we've all kind of gotten into this slideshow mode. It's a different form, and video isn't necessarily better." That form has surprising power, says Pauline Lubens, who saw it most clearly when she did a big story called Journey with Abdul Hakim about an Iraqi boy who was badly wounded in the fighting in Iraq and was later brought to the U.S. for treatment. "When we ran the story in the paper, they gave it two inside pages. If there were no Internet, I would've said 'wow, this is really nice', but there is no comparison between the effectiveness of the multimedia piece versus what's in print. Hearing the little boy's voice. Hearing his dad's voice. The multimedia piece is so much more effective and powerful. "I've been shooting photo stories a long time," continues Lubens, who has been part of teams that were Pulitzer Prize finalists at two different newspapers. "I was feeling like I was in a rut. I was feeling like I needed new challenges, and I would say the opportunity to do these audio slideshows has completely reinvigorated me professionally. I'm just having such a great time in a way that I haven't had in years. I love Soundslides. I hope he [Joe Weiss] becomes a billionaire off this program." Many newspapers are still struggling with how best to integrate audio slideshows into the daily presentation of their news on the Web. The shows end up effectively hidden by obscure links and navigation paths; they disappear after a day; the website's 'search' function doesn't index them. Watching your shows disappear, or get quickly sidelined, can be discouraging for photographers at the many newspapers that are still finding their way with slideshows, Josh Meltzer says. But he thinks the effort is necessary because the future is clear. "It's such an important skill. Just consider it practice for the time when the Internet becomes the most important way to spread the newspaper's news." © 2006 Eamon Hickey
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