Audio editing tips: 'An aggressive process'

Planning to use Google Voice to put together a multimedia project featuring audio responses from your audience? Here are some tips on editing audio to keep in mind.

"Editing should be an aggressive process," advised Mark Lewis, corporate multimedia editor for JRC. "Cut until you think that losing one more piece would sink the project. As a rule, tighter tends be better." 

Select for emotion
Audio is an excellent way to convey emotion — as a listener, we can hear the intonation of the speaker's voice and understand the emotions driving it. That means audio can be a powerful tool, but in order to capitalize on it, you've got to be selecting for those passion-filled, emotional responses.
Skip over the dry, monotonous responses. If you include them, you risk losing the listener. So no matter how well-versed the response is, it's not worth including if it means driving away listeners.

Keep it short. Really, really short.
We're all familiar with the term soundbyte, but what is a soundbyte, really? I like this sentence from wikipedia that sums it up this way: "A short phrase or sentence that deftly captures the essence of what the speaker is trying to say."
How short is relative. In a video I produced this week, I included a clip of an accident witness simply saying "Ka-boom!" to describe what the accident sounded like. In the context of the video, it worked.
A good soundbyte can be as short as a couple words. Whether it works is all about context and emotion.
Moving quickly from one quick soundbyte to another gives these projects great movement to keep the listener engaged.

Lead with the best
Just as we know to lead our stories with the most engaging information first (and your videos, now that you've all been through the JRC video training, right?), the same goes for audio.
Saving the best response for last is useless if the listener gets bored with the less-than-best responses you led with and ditches before he or she reaches the end.
Keep them engaged. Start with your best.

Reduce redundancies
If you asked five people for their opinion on something and they all gave the same answer, would you include all five answers in your print story? I hope not — space is tight, right?
Apply the same method to audio.
If you have a bunch of responses that are essentially the same, take the most passionate one and cut the rest.
Even if the point you're trying to convey is that everyone is saying the same thing, be selective. Choose the best and get rid of the rest.

Giving credit
I struggled at first with how to give credit to the people who participated — many left their names verbally, which meant I'd have to call back to confirm spellings if I was going to use a scrolling credit screen.
I ended up using their audio instead, selecting the brief second or two it took them to state their name, and using them at the end of the project. You'd hear my voice say, "Today's audio contributors include" followed by each person saying their own name.
Just a suggestion.

Google Voice: 'Great engagement tool'

I'm loving that Google Voice is catching on as an engagement tool. Here's the latest on these projects:

Delaware County Daily Times produces 'Delco Speaks'
After the Philadelphia Eagles recent loss to the Cardinals, the staff at Delaware County Daily Times used Google Voice to ask its audience, "What should the Eagles do now?"
The responses poured in — 60 calls in the first 10 minutes after posting the question.

Here's the finished product:

 

Feedback on putting together these projects
I asked Vince Carey, online editor for Delco, what he thought about using Google Voice.
"I found the process pretty easy, but pretty time consuming," Carey wrote to me in an email. "We got over 60 calls and going through each message before deciding which ones to download wasn't a lot of fun."
He added: "To be truthful, I think it's a fun idea, but can't be done daily."
I agree, this isn't a daily project. I really think the best uses of this tool will be for those big breaking news stories or issues that people are deeply opinionated about.
Getting so many calls will make it more time consuming to go through the messages, but I think it's also a sign that we've done the right thing by engaging the community on a topic that they want to be heard on.
I'm going to post later with some tips on editing audio that should help reduce that message review/selection time too.
And while the process can be time consuming, I found that practice helps. As with everything, the more you do it, the more experience you get and the more efficient you become — the whole practice makes perfect theory.
Steve Buttry, director of community engagement and social media for JRC, recently chimed in on Google Voice too, calling it a "great engagement tool" and asking staff to let him know how it's working out.
Thanks Steve!

Coming up — tips on editing audio
Just like learning how to structure a story, there's some things to keep in mind while editing audio.
Check back tomorrow for some general tips on that.

Looking for resources on Google Voice? 
Lots of information and how-to documents available on the post, Using Google Voice for multimedia projects

Google voice project on scandal at Penn State

One of our sister papers in Pennsylvania, the Delaware County Daily Times, used Google Voice to crowdsource reaction to the scandal at Penn State earlier this week.
They crowdsourced the question using a story file on their website on Wednesday morning, asking their audience whether Joe Paterno should step down.
At that time, the Associated Press was reporting that Paterno would announce his plans to retire at the end of the season later in the day — which he did. Even later that night, though, he was terminated by the board, effective immediately.
The question was posted online just before 11 a.m. Wednesday. In less than an hour, about 20 calls poured in.
I tried to do the same here in Michigan, but perhaps Penn State is just too far removed from us for folks to be passionate enough about the subject to call in. No calls from Michiganians on this one.
The efforts of the staff at Delco definitely demonstrate that the right question about the right story in the right market make this a worthwhile project.
Seriously, when you get about 20 calls in less than an hour, you know you're engaging your audience on a topic they want to be heard on. That's valuable.

Here's the final result:

 

Link, Delco Speaks: Your reaction to Joe Paterno's resignation announcement, then dismissal

Learn how to use Google Voice for a project like this, Using Google Voice for multimedia projects 

Hey Google, we want an embed code for the hangout!

Some colleagues of mine at The Trentonian, a JRC paper in New Jersey, used another cool Google tool to help them cover the election last night.
Editor Joey Kulkin, staffer Joe D'Aquila and reporter Sulaiman Abdur-Rahman teamed up to use the Google hangout to get live interviews with candidates, concluding with an interview of the winning mayoral candidate.
I caught up with them earlier this week when they were testing it.
Because Google does not currently provide an embed code for its hang outs, D'Aquila and "tech guy" Ryan Boyle used a screen capture feature through Ustream, which gave them the live feed used on their website.
Pretty awesome.
I talked with my coworker, politics reporter Charlie Crumm, about potential uses in our own office.
"Is this something I could teach an 70-year-old politician to use?" he asked me.
I think so. It all depends on the individual, but knowing the politician he had in mind — one that at least is aware of the impact applications like Twitter and Facebook have — I do think it's possible.
It's super easy to join Google+, if you haven't already, and from there, starting or joining a hangout is a click of a button. As long as you have a webcam, you're ready to rock n'roll.
You can see in the embedded video file below that The Trentonian had a reporter on the scene to do the interview with the politicians.
At The Oakland Press, we're also thinking about ways we can use this when we can't physically get to the interviewee.
Something like this could also be used in conjunction with a live chat so that viewers could feed questions they have directly to the reporter, who can ask and get the interviewee to respond in real time.
I love Google.
But really, Google could make this a whole lot easier on us by just providing an embed code for the hangout. So, come on, Google. At least consider it.
Hats off to The Trentonian team for innovating a new way to use yet another cool Google tool for journalism!

The Trentonian's livestream using Google+ hangout

Video streaming by Ustream  Here are some additional notes from D'Aquila on the set up:
We found some soda crates in the room and used them to prop up a web cam in front of my laptop’s screen. The camera was hooked to a desktop we lugged into the conference room. I started the google hangout then positioned the camera to grab what I wanted. We used an audio patch cord that I just happened to have (one I use to hook an ipod to a portable boombox) and we used that to feed the audio from the laptop to the desktop-speaker jack-to mic jack. I then set up a third computer, a notebook, to use as a monitor to watch what viewers on our Web site would see and listened with a headset.
He also said: "Google has created something called 'Hangout On Air' which can be embedded, but they haven’t made it available to everyone yet. Soon, hopefully. It will be a very useful interview tool once they do."

Using Google Voice for multimedia projects

Merriam-Webster still defines Google as a search engine. Isn’t that silly? Google is so much more than that.

The latest and greatest Google product to grab my attention is Google Voice, a free service that has some really exciting applications for journalism.

Google Voice is essentially a routing service — you get a local phone number with a digital voicemail account that can be tied to other phone numbers and email accounts. For instance, you could route all calls to your work and home phones to your cell phone.

But that’s not what I’m excited about — in fact, I don’t the service at all for how it was intended. I leave my phone lines unlinked and use the Google voicemail account to collect messages.

The voicemail allows you to download audio messages in an editable format.

Think about the possibilities there.

It’s an incredibly simple (and don’t forget, free) way to collect comments and reactions from our audience.

Those messages can be edited into soundbytes and placed over slideshows or even used as simple audio files to accompany a story.

Ways to use Google Voice for journalism

I first used this tool to crowdsource “Where were you” stories for The Oakland Press’ coverage of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Read all about that, A hyperlocal multimedia approach on the 10th anniversary of 9/11

More recently, I’ve gathered fan reaction after Detroit Lions games (check out a detailed case study on that). It was while working on the Lions project that I came across a promising way to crowdsource reactions with immediacy.

I used our SMS service to reach the audience, sending a message like, “Where did the Lions fall short tonight? Let us know, call 248-291-7332.”

People began calling in the very minute the message was received on their phone. The immediacy blew me away. 

With that in mind, I’m excited about the possibilities this has for breaking news situations, timely collective pieces — think about the how the world reacted to Steve Jobs’ death — or even hot-button issues.

What do you think? Is this something you’d use, or something you have used? I’d love to see more examples of how journalists are using Google Voice.

Learn how

Here’s a handy how-to on getting started with Google Voice, and also some information on using the free tool audacity for audio editing.

Listen to why I used Google Voice for the 9/11 project:

Karen-1-1 by jrctraining  

Listen to how I used Google Voice for the 9/11 project:

Karen-1-2 by jrctraining
 
And hear about the results:
 
Karen-1-3 by jrctraining

The three-Flipcam experiment

Political Reporter Charles Crumm

We've been doing a lot of work at JRC to improve the quality of our videos lately — we've actually just kicked off a company-wide training program that I'm proud to be a part of.

It's definitely something the staff here at The Oakland Press has been craving, as exemplified by Political Reporter Charles Crumm's efforts to make his weekly video series with our colorful County Executive L. Brooks Patterson more pleasing to watch.

Crumm was one of many on our staff to receive training from a local public access consortium called CMNtv and has pitched in to help the filming of many Oakland Press-related segments we've done with CMNtv at their studio.

I'm thinking it's this experience — particularly the knowledge of how TV work is generally done with multiple cameras — that hatched his idea to use multiple Flipcams to film his weekly interviews with Brooks.

For the first time around, it's certainly not perfect. In fact, backlighting on the Flipcam set up to shoot the close-up on Crumm made the footage unusable, so he wound up with only two angles rather than the three he was aiming for.

As one of the trainers for our new video program, I suggested to him that the close-ups could have been closer and a little more off-center, and the video could've been tighter in terms of time too. But all things considered, it's much more pleasing to the eye to watch this conversation from two angles (did you know you're naturally inclined to focus on something — anything — for a mere four seconds before turning your eyes in a different direction?) than just a talking-head style video. I'd also like to see Crumm do a reporter intro — and maybe he did, but couldn't use it because the camera set to him had lighting issues.

The neat thing is that Charlie — after borrowing a Flipcam from me and a third from another coworker — did this all on his own. I think it's a good model for improving Tier 1 videos (talking heads) when applicable.

Here's the video, and below, read what Charlie had to say about this experiment:

"Overlooking the fact that you have two old guys on camera with faces made for radio and voices made for print, here is the background and some observations:

I showed up a half-hour early for the 9:30 a.m. appointment so I would have time to position the cameras, one pointed at each of us and a third for a broader establishing shot, and enlisted Patterson's secretary to help me frame the camera positions. I also wrote out the questions in advance with the goal of keeping the final result to 5 minutes.

I wound up using mostly two angles because I inadvertently pointed one camera right at the window. I left a frame or two in the final video to illustrate the undesirable result.

While flipcams have great audio, the audio volume varies with distance. You'll have to beef up the audio during editing for the shots from the cameras furthest from whoever is speaking.

Editing is a bit more time-consuming since you're jumping sequentially from three different angles.

In short, it's a bit more complicated and best planned out in advance, but not right in all situations.

But it's doable and I plan on doing it again, based on availability of flipcams, subject matter and subjects to interview." — Charles Crumm

See the full story, Patterson: GOP presidential nomination a two-person race

Include obituaries on your brand Facebook page with Legacy app

See the obituary tab on the left hand side of the page?

IdeaLab members may recall seeing an email from Oneida Daily Dispatch General Manager Karen Alvord about adding an obituary tab to the organization's Facebook fan page.

I responded to her saying I didn't think you could add tabs (thinking of the placement directly above the wall). Boy was I wrong!

Kali Zigrino, Managing Editor of the Rome Observer, emailed me back a day later saying she'd found a way to add obituaries by using an app provided by Legacy.

Here are the instructions she shared with me:

"If you just type ‘Obituaries’ in the Facebook search, it will take you to the app, which is powered by Legacy.

Once you get to the app, just hit ‘Add to my Page’ on the bottom left.

Then it takes the local obit feed right from Legacy!"

Pretty cool. I added it to The Oakland Press Facebook page this morning. It's really neat how it automatically pulls in obituaries based on your geographic location.

Here are links to The Oneida Daily Dispatch Facebook page and the Rome Observer Facebook page.

Thank you Kali & Karen!