Teaching Yourself To Fish

Many of my Sun colleagues have asked me how to go about learning different multimedia skills that you can apply to journalism, and how to start preparing yourself for the future of the craft.

More than a year ago, I asked that same question to Adrian Holovaty, the techno-journalist who created Chicagocrime.org and more recently, the wildly innovative Everyblock.com. His advice to me: just start doing it.

Since then, I've spent many, many hours -- mostly outside of work and on my own time -- engaged in self-education, class-taking and fun experimentation. Now more than ever, it's really important to start looking at the skills in your professional toolbox. What follows is a list of things you can do to prepare for your role as a digital journalist.

1) Learn how to do video. Be the geek at the family or friend get-together who shoots video, edits it later at home, uploads it to YouTube, and shares or promotes it to others. Learn video editing techniques on a simple program, like Windows Movie Maker, or the Mac's iMovie. When you're confident, start playing with Final Cut Express or Pro, a more professional software program that's used by many media outlets, incluing the Sun. Web video will become increasingly important in the future. Why? Because as broadband networks become better and faster, people will be watching more and more video online: at their desks, on their laptops, and on their smartphones -- and even on their living room couches.

2) Take a beginner class in Web design. It will make you a more technically proficient blogger, because you will learn the structure of a Web page, and how to maximize the use of keywords -- which has never been more important for finding content online. Learn HTML and CSS -- the basic languages used in Web design. Build your own little Website from scratch -- without using Dreamweaver as a crutch! (I recommend some kind of class structure for those who learn better in a structured format. I've taken classes at the University of Baltimore. But most other local higher-ed institutions offer such courses. Also, check out lynda.com for online courses.)

3) Mock up a Google blog. Do you worry you don't have any blogging experience? It's okay. Just hit Blogger.com and start your own free blog today. Keep it private so that no one can read it except for you. And then, experiment with it. Hack it. Teach yourself how to change the look of the blog. You can learn a lot about HTML and CSS simply by experimenting with a Google blog. They are extremely forgiving to the novice user. Equally important, learn how to use and interpret Google Analytics -- which will help you understand the Web audience. It's vital.

4) Photoshop. Play with it. Do fun things to your photos with it. If you don't have Photoshop, try to find a cheaper, similar program, where you learn how to do basic editing and resizing of images. Regular web work practically requires that you do at least simple image-editing in Photoshop or something similar.

5) Learn how to collect high-quality audio. Don't own a digital recorder yet? Why not? The recorders now on the market act like little flash drives. Mine -- an Olympus -- can hold audio recordings and music files. I plug in its USB drive into a computer and easily transfer high-quality audio into an audio-editing program. A good interview can easily turn into online content.

6) Online Social Networking. Try to stay out front in how people are networking online, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or some other application. Knowing how to quickly tap these networks for breaking news, feature story ideas, and source-building is both vital and efficient. My favorite online addiction right now is Twitter Search (search.twitter.com). Type in a keyword and you can see how people are using it on Twitter. Everyday, I monitor "Tweets" by geography, simply by searching for "Baltimore," "Towson", "Annapolis", and other relevant keywords.

7) The importance of databases. Kudos to one of our newsroom colleagues for offering to give Sun reporters some training in how to use Microsoft Excel and Access later this month. More than a year ago, I remember asking during a show-and-tell session with the "Ground Rent" team, for staff training in Excel and Access. I recall one manager saying that if any other reporter needed help with databases, they should just enlist the help of the three people in the newsroom who knew these two vital programs well. Well, a year later, two of those people took a buyout and the third is about to take a long break on extended maternity leave. The buyouts took several people out of the newsroom who knew how to do at least some computer-assisted reporting. We need to bring that knowledge back. Knowing how to work with databases is important, because the data can often be used to build interesting online applications (i.e. The Sun's homicide map.)

Lastly, I'll leave you with this link to an American Journalism Review story, which talks about how NPR (with assistance from a Knight Foundation grant), is spending $2.5 million to re-train its 450 journalists for a multimedia platform. I guess we're still waiting for Tribune, and all of its Zell money, to do the same. Since we're allegedly "partners," I suppose we have the right expect more training, so we could go out and do journalism in the 21st century.

But we can't hold our breaths waiting for that -- cuz it probably won't happen. For you, it is far too risky for the sake of your own future, to expect any training on the level of what NPR is doing. So go out and teach yourself to fish. You may not get to use these skills here, but I guarantee you that your next employer will expect this stuff from you.

Do you have any tips for how print journalists can adapt to doing their jobs on the Web? Share them below. (Please post useful stuff -- save the snark for your own blog.)

Update: Okay, a little snark is okay. Just make a good point, too, while you're at it.