About the Job

As a photojournalist, I like to think there's some built-in idea of the rememberance of a still image. ... Seeing 10 photographs over a minute of audio is a very different experience, for me, than seeing a minute of video. Even if it's the same material.

I'm certainly not going to try to pick a fight between video and audio slideshows, because I personally think that if there's a great videographer, a great video storyteller, who goes to an assignment, and a great photojournalist who does audio who goes to an assignment, they're gonna both come away with great stories. And if a weak one goes on either side, it's gonna be weak. But, for me, I do think ... there's a deliberateness in the editing [of still images], there's a deliberateness in the visuals.

I personally like audio slideshows. ... At the same time, there are people out there who I know work in video online and they do such a great job that, if I was to say, oh, I could have an audio slideshow of this story or I could have this one guy go do video, there's no choice. I'm gonna go with the more gifted storyteller, not the person who works in a certain medium.

I think that if you just started to do them, the audio slideshow is gonna take about four or five times what it would have taken just to do the assignment visually. ... I think what we're seeing in the industry right now, is that the people who learn these skills, add these skills to their bag, they'll get on an assignment where they have more time, or they'll really listen to the assignment and say, wow, there's great audio here, this could be a great narrative. Then they jump on those. And they'll fall back to the [assignment] desk to ask for more time. Or they'll do feature stories.

There haven't been a whole lot of ... hard news stories done in audio slideshows.

Most of the people [who] are using Soundslides are not online journalists. They're people in print papers who want to see their work online.

When I was a photojournalist, I liked to go out with a reporter who respected photojournalism, and then I respect what they do. ... I hope that we [can] get to the point where the reporters [are] trying to do some of the audio ... and [working with the photojournalists].

I hope that's not too utopian of me to think that. Because I think that makes sense. But it does involve two people on something. And there are large parts of our industry that say two people doing one story doesn't make sense.

I think they key, number-one thing is that [most audio slideshows are] too long. ... They'll create a three-minute audio slideshow, and because it's three minutes long, they'll have to use so many photographs. Well, I'm sorry, there just aren't that many good photographs in your edit. National photographer-of-the-year portfolios can be 30 images, and you're telling me you have 30 images from that one news event you were at for two hours, ... it just doesn't make any sense. ... I think a lot of people are making them far too long.

They're not being respectful of the time commitment that their audience is giving them. The attention that someone gives you as a journalist online, that attention is currency.

I would say the second thing [after length] is that, visually ... they are applying the ideals of still, print picture editing, to online picture editing. Essentially, they're not shooting for the medium. There are images you can look at and say, that image does a great job of getting me from this image to the other image. Well, are picture editors, or photojournalists, trained to think about their photographs in that way, that this is a transition image? Are they even shooting those images? In most cases they're not.

If you have a really great image, leave it up there for a little longer. Find a way in the audio, so the audio supports that image, and then there should be times where there's an image that supports the audio. Those two things should exist in the same audio slideshow. ... I think a lot of people [think] ... an audio slideshow is just a vehicle for their photojournalism. And it isn't.

The most important thing is not your photojournalism. The most important thing is not your audio journalism. The most important thing, overall, above anything else, amen, to the end of it, is the story and how well you communicate that to the human being who's on the other side of that computer.

I'm self-trained in programming. ... There's a ton of programming in [Soundslides]. It's all programming. And so, I had to learn a lot of things that I wouldn't have otherwise learned.

I guess after the first week [as an intern at The Herald-Sun], I was like, that's it, this is what I wanna do, for the rest of my life. Journalism, gotta do it. I loved the newspaper. Absolutely loved being a journalist.

I think mainly it was the idea that people would let me go into their lives and get to see part of their lives and then help other people understand their lives. Basically the idea of connecting humans to humans, through the medium of journalism, was fascinating to me.

And then, ... being a photojournalist is a really cool way to spend your 20s. You get to travel and you get to see a lot of things that people don't get to see; it's not a desk job. If you were a [photojournalist], you didn't have to cover meetings, for the most part. It's a cool thing. I just loved it.

I [was driving] away from [an assignment at an orphanage], and the things that stuck in my head, the things that were really memorable ... the things I remembered most were the stories the kids told me, not necessarily what I had witnessed, visually, but what I had heard. And so, essentially on a whim, I went to Best Buy and bought a MiniDisc recorder and decided to go back up there, and I was like, I'm gonna do multimedia. Ya know, I'm gonna record these kids. This is what I'm gonna do.

So I bought a cheap mic and a MiniDisc recorder and went up there and recorded these kids' stories. And about that time, this thing called Flash 4 came out, and Flash 4 was the first one that allowed you to stream .mp3 audio. ... Suddenly it meant that if you wanted to see my photographs and hear audio, you didn't have to download 400kb, you just had to download 16kb, and then as you're listening to it, it would download more.

So I made this story, based off of that picture story, and the paper didn't even have a Web site to put it on. ... They had a Web site, but it was a marketing Web site. They weren't even [posting] news at that time. ... I put it up [anyway] and it got a lot of traffic. It was ... a Britannica site of the day. Yahoo recognized it. ... All these site-of-the-day kinda things. And that was how I started [in] multimedia. ... It came out of a frustrated picture story.

There's also a lot of other issues, ... when [would I] have 20 photographs published in the paper? Online, I could do whatever I want. ... And literally, the spirit of that was, I can do whatever I want. I can tell the story exactly as I want, without limitations, even without interaction with any other journalists. ... And it was a beautiful thing. And I think that spirit still exists in online journalism, in a way that it doesn't necessarily exist in collaborative print journalism; that you can create things that are distinctly and uniquely ... what you see.

There was basically Flash. People were hand-building these things in Flash. There were some large organizations that had tools that did similar things to this. But they might not be as elegant, or certainly weren't quite as portable as Soundslides is. My goal was to sort of level the playing field for the unsupported technical journalist as much as I could. I wanted the little papers to have the same advantages that the big boys had.

I tried to pick a price that I thought every photojournalist could afford. That was essentially it. ... There were a couple of ideas. Being a former director of photography, I kind of know photographers can [get reimbursed for] a certain ammount. What's a real nice meal on the road cost while you're out covering a game?

I thought forty bucks was ... kinda that sweet spot where everybody on the staff could ... put that on their expenses. Even if you were on a staff with 20 people, you could say forty bucks for every person, and that's doable.

I see myself as a journalist, and I want to stay that way. So, to get attention for a multimedia application that you've written, ... the last thing I want to do is be typecast as a software developer.

With that said, I get a lot of enjoyment out of helping other journalists ... that's cool.

It's awesome. ... I think it's great. ... Anything that makes people more excited about doing journalism is cool to me. I don't really care what it is. And the fact that this little computer application that was made in the room over my garage has any impact on that is just the coolest thing for me.

I ask myself that a lot. ... The asusmption has been that ... video storytelling on the Web will eventually overtake still photography on the Web.

The problem is that I have no way of knowing if that's true or not, and no one else does either.

Couple reasons not to use video. One, newspapers still need stills. They still need still photography. Two, they have a trained staff, a trained visual staff, [which] is used to working in still photojournalism. ... I think that moving from still photography to an audio slideshow helps the journalist, the visual journalist, because they can maintain the ... quality that they've had with their still photojournalism but at the same time they can add linear storytelling skills, which will be super essential when they get to video.

The interesting part of multimedia, for me, has been this part where we're exploring all these different formats. ... I like to try new things. But I think that there will come a point where we need to have some standardization, in order to, like, speak the language.

There's not a training system in place. There's no audio slideshow class in school or anything.

I can think of a couple people at [MSNBC.com] who do these things day-in and day-out who just see the world a little differently because they do that; and they're really exceptional at it.

Most people are just struggling. They're just struggling to find a way to do it, and find what works best. And I think, actually, that's cool. What else should you be doing? Why not struggle? How do you think you learn?

If we knew all the time exactly how to do everything that we were asked to do, how boring would that be, ya know?