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Farewell gathering for Winthrop disabilities director

Gena Smith

Faculty, staff and students will honor Gena Smith, Winthrop's program director for
Students with Disabilities, who is leaving the university after 10 years.

The farewell gathering for Smith will be held Tuesday at the DiGiorgio Campus Center's Richardson Ballroom from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

Smith will be honored for her contributions to Winthrop as disabilities program director. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Jackie Concodora at 323-6169.

Audio slideshows

We are not meeting Wednesday because that is our “24-hours in the Life of Winthrop” shoot. Everyone in this class is expected to participate.

IMPORTANT – Tomorrow at 11 a.m. is our orientation meeting for how we are going to accomplish this logistically difficult task. YOU MUST COME TO THIS MEETING TOMORROW AT 11 A.M. The meeting will be held in 101 Johnson (downstairs).

Most of you have completed your “Reporter’s Notebook” project, so now we’ll proceed to our first video assignment.

This will be a slideshow with natural sound.

You will conduct interview(s) and gather natural sound. While the Reporter’s Notebook focused on sound, this combines sound with still images. You should use Adobe Premiere to create this, as I want you to become familiar with editing on Premiere.

Go to a visually arresting event or location within the next week. Shoot video or stills – but video might be easier because it captures the sound. You can pull the stills off the video if you choose this method. Or, you could just shoot stills and capture the sound separately – with the hand-held mics, for example.

Make sure you get a variety of shots…. Closeups, wideshots, medium shots. Mix up the perspectives in your photos. Be creative; play with shadows and light. Don’t be boring and shoot all faces – shots of feet or fingers, etc., can be very effective. When you’re done you’ll choose 20-30 of the best shots and marry them to your audio. You can add music if you like to add drama and pace to the piece.

I’ll allow you to kill two birds with one stone for this assignment – if you wish, you may use the stills/video you shoot for the “24 hours in the life of Winthrop.” But if you take this approach, don’t forget that the sound is very important, so you’ll need interviews. Alternatively, you can do something different for this assignment…. Go to a basketball game, for example, or to the park just beginning to flower, or to a tennis match, or the Winthrop lake, etc.

Have your material (sound and images) ready to edit by next Monday’s class. I’ll give you time to edit these pieces and write your story.

I also want you to do a print story to go with your piece. See examples here: 

Assignment for Wednesday

Assignment for Wednesday: From the syllabus:

Find best examples of multimedia journalism from around the web. Find a single multimedia package on a big issue (or smaller examples on several issues); write a blog post examining what they did with multimedia and why; examine how effective it was. Embed links; add photos to your blog. Try to find something that is doable (or at least elements that are doable) for a beginning multimedia journalist. Could you do anything like this this term? Start thinking about your term project and perhaps muse about that. Include your own observations – it’s a blog… be creative. Write at least 400 words. Have posted to blog by Wednesday. Here’s a link to an article that highlights the top 5 multimedia journalism websites. However, there are many, many others. Feel free to explore.

Today's assignment

Today: Print your blog post assignment that was due today. On your blog, post headlines, blurbs and leads for handout given out in class today. In addition to posting them, print out your headlines, blurbs and leads. Pointers on leads : They are usually written in the past tense and are complete sentences. Lead with the most interesting or important thing or the thing that has the most impact. Leads are usually a single sentence in hard news, but in softer, feature news the lead may be several sentences as it may include description, action, narrative or anecdote.

Cool video on photo editing

Embedding is disabled, so go to this link.