The students in Multimedia Journalism voted on one another’s audio slideshows after we did a screening and critique in class last week. Winners got their choice of two versions of Auburn University College of Liberal Arts T-shirts as a reward. Around here, that means either orange on blue or blue on orange. Either’s a great option.
Hands down, the students’ favorite was Reese Counts’ piece on a Triumph Motorcycles shop not far from campus on Opelika Road, a place called Skinner’s. As you’ll see, Counts had free range of the place, and access means a world of possibilities when shooting still photos.
Kate Seckinger’s piece on Chick-Fil-A took second prize. You can see the rest of the audio slideshows by clicking the links below. Please enjoy!
- Megan Barkdull: Neon Lights and Acceptance
- Graham Brooks: Capital City Baseball Classic
- Ashtyne Cole: From Corks to Canvas
- Reese Counts: Skinner’s Motorcycles
- Alex Derencz: See the workings of an Eagle Eye Newscast
- Becky Hardy: Behind the Scenes: Panera Bread
- Jonathan Harrison: Red Clay Brewing Company
- Derek Herscovici: Calvin Davis
- Lauren Klepac: Hyunhee Ban
- Pierce Quinn: Auburn vs. Bama
- Kate Seckinger: Chick-Fil-A: A Southern Delicacy
- Mary-Kate Sherer: Wake Up Coffee Company
- Anna-Claire Terry: A Successful Life in the States
They were produced by creating audio stories in Audacity, shooting, culling and editing photos using Lightroom and Photoshop, and blending the two media forms in Soundslides’ Demo version.
Unfortunately, WordPress.com blogs do not work and play well with complex projects that combine folders and files, so we used Google Drive as a host server. It’s not an elegant solution, and most of the students noted that following the upload steps in precisely the right order and some of the subtler aspects of Google Drive made the upload the most challenging part of the assignment.
But that’s the way journalism works in the online world in a time when many newspapers are shedding their dependence on paper and ink in favor of browsers and bandwidth: Everybody needs to know a little technology, regardless of whether we believe (or even want to believe) that we’re technology people.
Multimedia journalism uses technology in the service of telling a story.
As with so much in life, learning to do this using Google Drive had a learning curve. When you first do a thing, it can be frustrating. When processes break down, you have to figure out how to troubleshoot it. That’s what everybody in this course did together (and that includes me) for this assignment.
Michael Fuhlhage, Ph.D. 