Learning to be a more versatile journalist

By Liam Casey

 We have been learning to be more versatile journalists at Camp VJ 2010 at the Toronto Star. Or, more accurately, we have been learning how to become a photographer/videographer/multimedia editor at the three-day workshop that began on Monday.

This is an age of convergence. Photographs, slideshows, podcasts, interactive maps and videos can all augment our story-telling ability on the web.  

Camp VJ students hear about capturing audio.

Angela Pacienza, director of online news at the Canadian Press, had a few tips for the journalist looking to add video skills to their repertoire. Many CP journalists use a Canon FS200 to record video while reporting, even for spot news.

The trick, Pacienza says, is to limit raw video footage to 10-20 minutes and to keep the final video to two minutes. Gone are the days of the five-minute cinematic documentary — we’re journalists, not auteurs. 

Something as simple as a raw, unedited 30-second video can augment a spot news story online. Video editing becomes even simpler if you’re a CP journalist: shoot the video on scene and hand over the raw footage to Pacienza, who edits some videos herself.

But editing video isn’t that hard – especially with user-friendly programs like Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie. More sophisticated software, such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro, can be used, but it’s not necessary – I mean, who really needs Alpha Transitions? (Answer: non-linear video editing nerds probably do.)

What works best to tell a story? This is an important question to ask yourself when reporting. Sometimes video is the best option, but other times it’s photographs, or an audio slideshow. Plus, it’s important to be mindful of the shelf life of a project. If it’s a short news story that will be outdated in a few days, then spending a few days on a slick video is pointless. 

Some tidbits from Pacienza’s Twitter feed: AoA is a cool (free) tool to help you extract audio from video. Gives you mp3 or wav file.http://ow.ly/1MChf I subscribe to ibaudio for affordable royalty-free music. Great for video, multimedia projects.http://ow.ly/1MzSo

And Pacienza’s five approaches to telling a video story. 

Ellin Bessner, a journalism professor at Centennial College, then took to the mic to talk about the world of audio.

Details of her tips on audio recording and editing is especially helpful, and more importantly, written in plain English. Audio as a story-telling form has been around a long time, but people are still listening. Radio has taken different forms of late from podcasts to Internet radio stations and satellite radio, which means learning the art of audio is not an outdated skill.

Gear is important for high quality audio, but even an iPod or an audio recorder will be good enough for the web with the proper microphone — of which there are many.

"Being a multi-platform journalist is great - you have so much gear, you lose a lot of weight!" Bessner says. An omni microphone is the most versatile microphone, according to Bessner.

The BBC’s training centre explains the various microphones available. Simple sound editing software like GarageBand, which come standard on Macs, are intuitive and offer royalty-free jingles, sound effects and music. The software is also perfect for creating podcasts as well as your next synthesizer-laden 80s rock anthem.

A couple of quick tips from Bessner:

Hold the mic firm and six inches below a person’s chin.Be mindful of the cable that connects the mic and the recorder — the cable itself could be a source of interference if it is moved around.Jewelry, cell phones and refrigerators can also lead to sound interference.

To avoid these problems, remember to wear headphones while recording. This will allow you to hear for sound problems and to adjust on the fly. 

Richard Lautens, a Star photographer, was next, and he gave a quick tutorial on photography.

"Photography is like a chess game ... think about three moves ahead," Lautens says. That is, think about what you want to shoot and where you need to be in order to get that shot.

Lautens took out his professional telephoto lens and body, which looked more like the Terminator’s minigun than a camera. The body cost about $5,500 and the lens a mere $18,000. Fortunately, some good work can be done with point-and-shoot cameras and even iPhone and BlackBerry cameras.

The trick, he says, is to play around with them and try out the various settings, like the night-shooting setting or the sport setting that captures moving objects better than the standard settings. Apparently it’s all about settings.

Don’t forget the rule of three, Lautens stresses.

Take shots from three different distances: short, medium and long. Also, take shots from three different angles at each distance. That equals nine photos, by my math, which gives photo editors some choice.

This will avoid any grumblings over a lack of selection. Well, they may still grumble.

Lautens also points out that on the Star’s website, photos receive significantly more hits than video. 

More of Lauten’s tips:

Portraits are good, but don’t forget about action shots, they can explain a story in a single glance. Don’t forget to crop photos, this creates a close-up image, which may look better than the original photo.

A worklight with a clamp from a hardware store, at a cost of $10, is a much better option than expensive lighting kits. And some tinfoil wrapped around the bulb yields a spotlight effect. Signs like “Exit” or “For Rent” can add colour or commentary to an otherwise pedestrian shot. Want an underwater shot? Place your camera in a dry, empty fishbowl and partially submerge it under water.

Presto, MacGruber, an underwater camera. 

Check out the Star’s photoblog and their photodesk — just give yourself some time, it’s worth it. Now, what to do with all that audio, video and photographs?

Chicago-based journalist Robb Montgomery, the brains behind Camp VJ, reveals VuVox, a free online tool that creates slideshows, with or without audio. Video can be embedded into the slideshow as well. Fact: it’s much more intuitive than Sound Slides, which is considered a dinosaur by many in the digital world. If it’s a conference on multimedia, than where are all the slideshows, podcasts and movies? Stay tuned for some of the work we produced in the afternoon session.

Liam Casey is a graduate student in the Ryerson journalism program, and begins an internship in the Star newsroom next month. Follow him on Twitter: @liamdevlincasey

Turkey diary: A stranger in a strange land

By Jasmeet Sidhu

A middle-aged man with a lit cigarette in his mouth, the owner of a 5-Euro a night hostel in the middle of central Turkey, led me up a set of stone stairs and opened up a door revealing a dim-lit room with six twin beds.

"This is where you sleep," he told me, closing the door and leaving me alone in the room where one of two flies buzzed over my head. I dumped my backpack, sat on the squeaky bed that would surely collapse under my weight, and asked myself the same question for the hundredth time: "How in the world could I possibly think this was a good idea?"

A hill overlooking the city of Göreme, as the sun sets on the mountains.

Let me back up for a bit. I've been in Turkey for the last couple of weeks, visiting the cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Diyarbakir with my Peace and Conflict studies class from the University of Toronto, on an academic trip to apply the concepts of our international security course to one of the most important and interesting countries in the 21st century. The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of meetings with NGOs, Turkish government officials, and sight-seeing, all with my 14 other classmates and Professor.

However, as the "academic" portion of the trip came to an end and my classmates quickly dispersed in various directions around the world to begin their summer vacations, I decided to stay put in Turkey for a bit. By myself. I was called both brave and foolish. I think I was a little bit of both.

Now, this might not be a big deal to you adventure-folks that routinely pack up your bags and land in various countries and cities around the world by yourself. But for me, this is the first time that I would be truly traveling by myself, in a country on the other side of the world.

For various reasons, namely being young, female, somewhat introverted and timid, and having had a bad experience with a mugging on a school trip to Namibia two summers ago, traveling by myself absolutely terrified me. I could have easily came back to Toronto and slid back into my comfortable life of reality-show watching before I officially started my internship at the Star in June.

However for some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to "stretch" myself, overcome fears from that one summer I was mugged, and try traveling by myself, for isn't that what intrepid would-be journalists are supposed to be able to handle?

The second that I departed from my classmates and set out to explore Turkey on my own, I suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. The city of Istanbul, which I had become quite familiar with in my time with my classmates, suddenly took on an almost terrifying quality. The noise, the hustle and bustle of the streets, cat-calls from vendors and stares from locals that I had disregarded before suddenly set off the depths of my fearful imagination that every brush of the shoulder with a stranger and every stare-down from a man across the street would lead to a mugging, rape, or scam.

During those first days alone I lamented, in my hotel room alone too scared to venture far, the unfairness of being a woman in our world, and the limitations and dangers that I would forever face no matter where I went in the world simply because I was born female.

I quickly moved out of the city of Istanbul to a small town in central Turkey, Göreme, located in Cappadocia, thinking that the small-town setting would help me alleviate my fears of being by myself and help me to face the challenges that traveling alone brings. It's been barely week since I've been on my own, and I feel that I've already traveled a month, considering the height of emotion and the long hours of solitude that traveling by yourself inevitably brings. 

The loneliness factor is not to be discounted, though I wasn't quite prepared for it. Especially as I wistfully gaze at couples and groups of friends all around me and feel like I'm the only one in the world who has decided to travel by myself, I am sometimes reminded of what I might be missing had I shared this experience with a friend or family member.

I remember thinking this exact thought as I sat on top of a hill overlooking the city of Göreme, and watched the sun set on the beautiful mountains the city is known for turning them into various shades of pink, purple and blue. It was a beautiful moment, but one enjoyed alone.

I am reminded of my solitude certainly every time I tire of taking landscape shots and try to insert myself into the photo by clumsily attempting a self-shot with my camera, only to have only my forehead appear in the picture (I'm occasionally saved of such terrible photographs by kind couples who pity me, such as the one taken by a Russian couple posted in this blog).
Eliminating the usual noise from my life, I realize how utter solitude is in itself, when I have no one to share my simplest thoughts with, can indeed be overwhelming.

Safety is always a factor. Having been traumatized in the past, and having my mother's vigilant warnings and her own fears over my head, I am constantly assessing the safety factor of my situation every 10 minutes or so. I find myself asking the questions, "How many other females are in this restaurant, on the street, in this cab?" "How many hours do I have until the sun sets?" "Does this guy believe my story of my fake friend or fake boyfriend who is back at the hotel to avoid suspicion and danger due to my solitary presence?"

This experience is making me come face to face with all the fears and anxieties that I have faced in my life, with no support or cushion of others to fall back on, like I have for most of my life. So far, I've found myself opening myself a bit, attempting new and experiences that I may not have done otherwise traveling in a group (such as horseback riding - who knew I so capable?).

I see myself trusting a little bit more, mainly out of sheer necessity, that not every man is a rapist, mugger or scammer. And indeed, I'm starting to find joy in the simple things, such as getting free entrance into a museum because I was by myself, or waking up every morning deciding how my day will go, with no one to consult, compromise or negotiate with.

Traveling alone is a strange and different experience. Especially as a young female, there are many risks and dangers to be had every step of the way from the moment you last depart your friends or family members. However, I hope by the end of it all I can view this experience as a positive one, and agree that I was both brave and foolish to do it, but better for it.

Jasmeet Sidhu is a graduate of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and is currently in Turkey for a month. She previously worked for the Star in the radio room last summer, and writes a blog for the Star on climate change, where she covered the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen. In mid-June she will join the Star's summer intern program. Follow Jasmeet on Twitter.

UBC J-school students win prestigious U.S. award

By Fabiola Carletti

It’s that other j-school in the west—at least, that’s how I used to refer to the UBC School of Journalism. 

Call me a self-centered Torontonian, but when considering graduates programs in journalism last year, I had my sights set on reputable Ryerson.

Nevertheless, I applied to the Vancouver program as a kind of flight of fancy, mostly wanting to contemplate the thought of skipping back three time zones and settling into that rainy city on the Pacific coast. (Okay, and maybe I thought it'd be pretty cool to report during the Olympics. Slight influence.)

Long story short: I ended up nixing my acceptance (and paid deposit) to Ryerson and making the last-minute switch.

After a wonderful first year at the school, I should really give the program some much-deserved kudos—especially given their students' most recent accomplishment.

Ten students from the school's International Reporting class, which is taught by former 60 Minutes producer and UBC Associate Professor Peter Klein, have won the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, a top U.S. award in journalism.

The international reporting team put together an impressive news documentary called "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" on the global crumb trail of electronic waste. It aired on the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE/World last year.

The documentary is also nominated for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in the International Category.

Our director and Associate Professor Mary Lynn Young has called the recognition "a tremendous honour for a new, innovative Canadian journalism program."

And Peter Klein is proud of his students as well:

“People work their entire careers to get either of these awards," he said, "so it’s pretty special that our students achieved this recognition for the great work they’ve done.”

But before this all seems way too self-congratulating, I really have to encourage you all to see for yourselves:

Not only did the international reporting team make me rethink all the e-waste I've created in my time, they've also challenged me to see the word "student" as a mere modifier--and not a blight--on the word "journalist." 

Fabiola Carletti is a Toronto Star radio room reporter and graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. She recently graduated summa cum laude from York University, having earned an honours double major in Professional Writing and Communication Studies. Her digital footprints are all over the internet, but you can learn more about her by reading her blog or chasing her around on twitter.  

Photo: Lewis Kelly, a first year student at the UBC School of Journalism, shoots some b-roll at the UBC farm.

Nepal dispatches: Faces

By Jayme Poisson

I have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this beautiful country over the past six weeks of traveling through Nepal, with one eye behind the camera lens.

Along the way I have been collecting pictures of the faces of Nepali women, men and children - some have become my friends, others were gracious enough to let me in for a fleeting moment.

 I hope you enjoy these faces of Nepal as much as I do.

Rampiyari Dahal, 29, is one of the main characters in a documentary in am shooting in Nepal.  She has had 'fallen womb' for the past eight years and recently had a hysterectomy at a government sponsored health camp in Dolakha. I asked her why she smiles all the time. She replied, quite earnestly, “because I am happy.” 

This little boy  from Dolakha loved the camera.

Dr. Binod Dangal, director at the Gaurishankar General Hospital in Dolakha, examines an x-ray of a young boy who broke his arm.

A woman at a health camp for women in Timal, near Ghorka.

While en route from Kathmandu to Dolakha we stopped on the side of the road

to chat with locals.  This women had a quiet beauty about her. 

In rural Nepal, back-breaking labour is part of daily life for everyone. 

Infant playing outside the Gaurishankar General Hospital.

Girl playing in a rusting ambulance outside the Gaurishankar General Hospital.

Boy playing with a toy gun in a village in Nepal’s Terai region,

near the border of India.

On the roadside on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

The baby looked like a little Buddha - a true old soul. 

This girl had more spunk in her baby finger

than most people have in their whole body.

Teenage girl at the health camp in Timal was a little shy at first.

Three-year-old in Timal.

Chandra has driven us to many places in Nepal. I always ask him if he is all right or "thik cha" as they say in Nepali and he always replies, "I am happy wherever I go."

 :::::

Jayme Poisson is a Master of Journalism student at Carleton University. She will be trekking through Nepal during May while making a documentary about delivering maternal health services to remote and conflict-affected areas. In mid-June she will join the Star's summer intern program. She will be blogging regularly while in Nepal.

The global digital transformation of newspapers

By Madeleine White

Robb Montgomery, CEO and founder of Visual Editors, brought the world to the editors and publishers at CNA's Ink and Beyond conference Friday morning.

Montgomery previewed clips from his ongoing documentary, "Breaking the News", to a room of almost 100 industry leaders. The movie showcases Montgomery's global-trekking journey to find out what is happening to journalism as it gets swept up by a digital wave.

His presentation centred around the theme of evolution and how newspapers have to start making revolutionary changes to survive in the natural selection the marketplace imposes on the industry.

"Evolution by its nature is a very cruel force even though it sounds gentle and slow," he said. "It's an extremely cruel and unforgiving environment to be in and we're in that."

The five showcased clips shoed how different media makers around the world are dealing with the pressures of providing quality content on multiple platforms.

The first segment was in Edinborough, where Ally Palmer formerly from the Scotsman declared that the newspaper industry was in a crisis even if there wasn't a recession -- it was being forced to evolve because of changing technologies. But even if the way news was being delivered was changing, brand recognition -- being the place people trust for valuable information -- was critical to engaging the younger people and surviving, he said.

Mario Garcia, who was interviewed in Prague's Futuroom, echoed Palmer's urge for brand-building but added part of good journalism now involves being able to report differently for the different platforms -- be it SMS or touch media, like the iPad. 

Montgomery, who passed around his iPad so delegates could play with it, showed the room what media on these different platforms looks like. He brought the crowd to Las Vegas where he met a 27-year-old Russian editor-in-chief named Svetlana Mamixchenko. Mamixchenko has build her own media house from the ground up and it was awarded the best designed newspaper award in 2008. Her paper, Akzia, is multidimensional -- having a presence in the mobile, internet and print worlds.

She has also been able to capture the elusive youth market. Montgomery attributed her success to the experimental ideas her young news team try.

"It isn't that hard to go from a print-focused mentality to a multi-media mentality if you have the right chemistry, the right leadership that is open to new ideas," he said, adding the right people are often younger.

"These leaders need to understand that we're in a Darwinian evolutionary phase. We need to try, we need to fail and we need to fail often so that we learn to take that knowledge forward in the next experiment."

Montgomery also brought his audience to 24 Sata's newsroom. It's a daily newspaper in Croatia that publishes online and in print. It's another newspaper geared at and run by young people. Boris Trupčević, the editor-in-chief, boasted that when the paper started the average age in the newsroom was 26. Five years later, the company is still young at 31.

Trupčević stressed that key to 24 Sata's success was its flexibility. He suggested that newspapers should be prepared to change every two years -- specifying that change can be small. His newspaper has seen a lot of changes, including a throw-back to publishing two print editions a day when 24 Sata distributed an afternoon paper to commuters in town.

All of the changes, Trupčević maintains, have been to make the digestion of news simple and low-cost. Take the paper's website. On one page you can read the article, browse the photo gallery and view the video. The changes are working for 24 Sata. In 2009, the company saw a 19 per cent profit, said Trupčević.

Montgomery finished his previews by bringing it back home. His final clip was a brief interview with his former colleague at the Chicago Sun-Times, Michael Cooke. Cooke, now the editor-in-chief at the Toronto Star, spoke about how despite all of these changes the paper still needs to make money because good journalism is expensive.

Cooke's sobering comments seemed to jump-start the question and answer period in Montgomery's presentation, when Ryerson University's chair of journalism, Paul Knox, asked how digital changes like SMS alert or mobile apps were going to help build good journalism.

Montgomery's response: "What's your name, I want you to speak in my movie."

Madeleine White is a Toronto Star radio room reporter. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association conference Ink + Beyond.

Three former Star interns win National Newspaper Awards

By Adrian Morrow

Three former Star interns were among 22 journalists honoured with Canada's top journalism prizes Friday night.

Photographer Steve Russell, investigative reporter David Bruser and designer Jason A. Chiu picked up National Newspaper Awards for work at the Star and the Globe and Mail.

 

Steve Russell's award winning photo.

The first time I worked with Steve, we were sent to Union Station last summer to cover a strike by Via Rail employees. The whole morning, Steve worked the scene thoroughly, capturing numerous candid photos of stranded travellers, shooting from every angle and even helped me find some people with the best anecdotes. This same candid shooting and spontaneity had paid off big for him the previous April.

Russell was assigned to get some night shots in the entertainment district for a feature on the effects of the recession, when six men spilled out of a bar and began a vicious brawl on the street.

"I was standing on a stoop so that I could stack up pedestrians and party people on my side of the street, traffic and a busy bar as a background," he says of that night. "I saw something starting to happen at the door of the bar and dropped my camera with a wide angle lens in favour of the camera with a long zoomer (70-200) on it."

The fight was broken up quickly, but Russell managed to snap a vivid action shot of the fight. In his photo, every detail pops, from the ripple of the mens' unbuttoned shirts, to the agonized look on the face of one young man who had been knocked to the ground.

The photo won the NNA for news photography, Russell's second.

Russell, a Sudbury native who grew up party in Peru, studied photojournalism at Loyalist College and cut his teeth as an intern at the London Free Press and the Toronto Star. The Star hired him permanently in 1998.

He remembers trying to learn from every photographer during his summer as an intern.

"The way they can smell the story amazed me. The lessons I learned in how to approach a variety of situations and stories are tools that I carry with me every day," he says.

From Nannygate to Jaffergate, it's been a big year for the Star's investigations team, and one of their own was feted Friday.

David Bruser won his second career NNA for "The War at Home," a series about the mental toll the war in Afghanistan has taken on Canadian soldiers. The investigation was at once a series of intimate portraits of men with deep psychological scars brought on by the horrors of the war and an indictment of the army's seeming indifference to helping them overcome their trauma.

Bruser, who studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent two years at the McComb Enterprise-Journal in Mississippi before joining the Star's one-year reporting internship program in 2003. As an intern, he covered the fatal hostage-taking at Union Station. Subsequently, he worked as a business and transportation reporter before joining the investigative team in 2007.

"Because the Star under editor Michael Cooke provides support and resources to the investigations team, I and my colleagues have the great opportunity to try to do stories like the War at Home series," he says, who credits investigations editor Kevin Donovan more his mentorship, the staff of the Star library with their research help and multimedia guru Randy Risling (himself the recipient of an NNA Friday) for putting together a web component for the series.

When I worked at a student newspaper at Ryerson University, there was one campus paper, out of the hundreds from across the country, that always stood out for its design. With visually arresting covers and creative, magazine-style layouts, the art in the University of Ottawa's La Rotonde always seemed a big step ahead of the rest of us.

It wasn't until I started working at the Star that I met the guy behind it: Jason A. Chiu, a veteran of campus journalism. In addition to La Rotonde (where he served as co-editor-in-chief and production manager), he worked as a designer at student papers the Fulcrum and the Ryerson Free Press, and spent a year as the head of the Canadian University Press's graphics bureau. He came to the Star in 2008 for a year-long design internship.

Chiu, now at the Globe and Mail, won the NNA for presentation with David Pratt for the layout and design of "Decoding the Decade", a Saturday Globe package analyzing the first 10 years of the 21st century. He describes the project as a team effort, with input from editors across the paper.

"Being nominated was a great feeling, being recognized as the winner in your category is a step above everything, few things can compare," he says of his NNA win.

Chiu credits his Star internship with helping him move from small weeklies to major dailies. He says it also taught him the endurance and focus on deadline that helped him put together big projects like the one that garnered him his first NNA.

"These skills, while they might seem arbitrary, were key in the long hours it took to conceive the Decoding the Decade package, the countless late nights I spent working on the weekly Saturday Globes and of course, that time Bob Geldof and Bono were in the Globe newsroom skedding stories and rewriting ledes," he says.

Russell, meanwhile, offers some advice for incoming Star interns that applies aptly to young journalists anywhere, whether behind the lens, holding a notepad or laying out pages late into the night:

"Dive in, commit to it, get your stories/pictures looked at by as many of the writers and editors you can," he says. "Don't find a mentor -- find two or three. Develop a thick skin! Ask for critiques and don't shut down then you hear something negative about your work, listen hard, that is when you learn!"

Adrian Morrow spent the past two years in the Star's radio room. This summer he will report for the Globe and Mail.

Toronto Star's Daniel Dale, Spectator's Nicole O'Reilly picked top young journalists

By Ann Hui

Two young journalists, Daniel Dale and Nicole O'Reilly, were awarded Friday morning with the Hon. Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists.

The recipients were selected by a panel of senior editors with the Canadian Newspaper Association, and given their awards at the CNA's annual luncheon during the Ink + Beyond conference in Toronto.

Daniel Dale, the winner of the 25,000+ circulation category, is a general assignment reporter at the Toronto Star. Dale joined the Star in 2007 as a summer reporter after interning at the Guelph Mercury and in the Washington bureau of the Houston Chronicle.

His winning entry package included an in-depth look at Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier who was killed after a collision with former attorney-general Michael Bryant. Dale was the first reporter to speak with an eyewitness to the collision, and went on to speak with numerous friends of the victim (after messaging every single contact on Sheppard's Facebook page).

After he received his award, Dale thanked his editors and coworkers at the Star. He also thanked his mother but admitted he has yet to send her a Mother's Day card.

The winner of the under 25,000 circulation category, Nicole O'Reilly, won for her work covering municipal affairs and environmental issues for the Guelph Mercury. O'Reilly has since gone on to her current position as crime and security reporter at The Hamilton Spectator. A graduate of Ryerson University's journalism program, O'Reilly interned at the Globe and Mail, Waterloo Region Record, before working at the Woodstock Sentinel-Review.

One of O'Reilly's winning entries for the Guelph Mercury was a story that looked at staffing levels and staff salaries in the City of Guelph, analyzing and comparing these numbers with population growth.

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Good news for people who love bad news

By Ann Hui

Journalists are used to bad news -- both on the job, and about their jobs. But this year's Canadian Newspaper Association Ink + Beyond conference ended on a positive note, with good news coming from the keynote speaker, Angus Reid.

As CEO of Vision Critical, an online market research firm, and founder of Angus Reid Group, Reid knows a thing or two about what people want. And one of his messages at Friday morning's event is that people still want traditional media.

"The idea that there's a zero-sum relationship between old media and new media isn't true," Reid said, before revealing the results of two major media studies his company performed last year. He explained that though there is a growing category of people he deemed "media maniacs" -- those who consume social media, online media, mobile media, etc. -- that this consumption of media is on top of the traditional media that they're already consuming.

Reid said that part of the reason people continue to want traditional media is because they feel they can trust it. To prove this point, he showed results from a study also performed by Vision Critical, which showed people's trust levels depending on the source of information.

The study showed, in part, that people rate information received from traditional media much higher than information from new media. Highlights of the study:

• Family: 78%
• Friends: 66%
• Broadcast and radio: 45%
• Print: 41%
• Social networks: 13%
• Blogs, forums, chat rooms, etc.: 8%

What this adds up to is good news for newspapers. But Reid emphasized several times throughout his speech that going forward, the reader -- and newspapers' knowledge about the reader--will be key to their success.

The importance of market research about newspapers' audiences: who they are and what their preferences are has never been more important, Reid argued. Traditionally, audience measurements for media have been inaccurate, mired by politics, and clumsy. Luckily, he said, new technology and the efficiency of online surveying will help to combat this.

"I think there is a good future out there for your industry," he closed his speech by saying. "I really believe this."

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

Newspaper lessons from Motor City

By Ann Hui

What do the newspaper industry and the automotive industry have in common?

A lot, apparently.

There's the obvious fact that both industries have taken a huge hit in the recent recession. Plus, the fact that both have been the unfortunate subjects of gloom & doom "the end is near" predictions.

But on top of the commonalities, the industries have historically been, to an extent, interdependent. This relationship -- the dependence of newspapers on automotive advertising -- was the subject of "Under the Hood," a presentation at the Canadian Newspaper Association's Ink + Beyond Conference Friday morning. Because, as the CNA's Susan Down put it in her introduction, "When the car industry has a cold, we're the ones blowing our noses."

At the session, auto experts Dennis Desrosiers (auto industry analyst) and Stuart Payne (former director, Toyota Canada)  compared notes with Jon Wolman (publisher, The Detroit News) and Paul Anger (editor, The Detroit Free Press), discussing possible solutions for the current challenges.

From the auto industry standpoint, Payne and Desrosiers stressed the importance for newspapers to "think outside the box" when trying to attract auto advertising. Consumers and advertisers are looking for an interactive, on-demand and customizable experience, something they argued newspapers are not doing well enough. After all, Desrosiers argued, "why would we spend $2 billion on a new model, and then launch and advertise it in exactly the same way every other car has in the history of the automotive industry?"

But despite this, the two were optimistic about the ability of newspapers to come through, and don't believe that a digital-only future is near for newspapers. "It's still wonderful to open a paper and see a double-page spread ad," Payne said. "It's much nicer for a consumer than seeing a teeny little box online."

Surprisingly, the speakers from the newspaper industry were a little less optimistic about the future of print.

Wolman and Anger discussed the papers' joint decision in 2008 to launch the "Detroit Plan," a move that saw both papers cutting their home delivery to three days a week to save on fuel and print costs. The majority of their papers' ad revenue was already clumped on the three days (Thursday, Friday and Sunday), they said, so the decision made sense. The papers still appear on newsstands seven days a week, but in smaller, "express" versions. An e-edition, on top of the paper's website, is also available.

Wolman explained the move by repeating, throughout his presentation that "Newspapers in Detroit are actually living the stories we cover." He described the parallels between the newspaper and auto industrys as "torturous," and argued that, unlike the auto industry, newspapers are without bailouts.

The early results of the Detroit Plan have seen some small successes: 96 per cent of the papers' subscribers, they say, have stuck with them. But the real success, they argue, has been that revenue saved by cutting print costs has allowed them to devote more resources to digital, which is where they see their future.

"Do you believe that newspapers will be back to normal after this economic blip is over?" Anger asked the audience. His sombre tone suggested that he certainly didn't.

"Don't shed tears for print," he said. After all, it's the journalism that's important not the newspaper.

"Look at it this way. At least in the States, the milk man doesn't deliver fresh milk anymore. Doctors haven't made housecalls for decades. But we still get milk, and we still get medicine. It all comes down to the journalism. It all comes down to the product."

Ann Hui has worked in the Toronto Star radio room since September. She is covering the Canadian Newspaper Association annual conference in Toronto.

The overnight shift: notes on becoming a nocturnal creature

By Fabiola Carletti

I glanced through a pub window and saw a young woman removing her jacket. Her cheeks were still pink from the lashings of the wind. 

A man beside her lifted a pint to his lips. 

Outside it was unseasonably cold, and the streets of Toronto shone with the gloss of new rain. Still, it felt like a vibrant Friday night. 

It was May 7 (well, the end of it), and I was on my way to my first midnight shift at the Toronto Star radio room. 

Even though I’d never been a night worker, I felt like I could spot the others. They checked their cell phones and walked a little more deliberately. Many were headed toward the same beacon as I was: a 24 hour Tim Hortons. 

Once there, I felt like expressing my solidarity with the cashier by asking how far into his shift he was. Instead, I ordered a whole arsenal of snacks and an extra large regular. 

"Coffee at this late hour?" said a police officer in a bright yellow jacket. Apparently I wasn't blending in. 

"Yep, I'm on the night shift," I replied with bravado. I could tell the cop was in on the exclusive club of nocturnal creatures. 

"I'm hoping for a slow night," he said, "No news is good news." 

My smirk gave me away. When I told him I worked in the radio room, he threw his head back and laughed. 

Coffee in hand, I slipped back out into the drizzling night.  

---

In the morning -- after eight hours of listening to police speak and static, staring at screens, writing stories, and nursing a cold cup of java -- I felt like I'd stepped through the looking glass. 

I didn't see the sun rise, but I knew it was up thanks to highway shots on CP24. 

At 8 a.m., the morning person arrived looking freshly showered. I stealthy brushed a few crumbs off my lap. 

On my way out of the newsroom, I grabbed a fresh newspaper, feeling outnumbered by the people walking in. They checked their cell phones and walked a little more deliberately. 

But, you know, I didn't mind it on the other side.
In a way, I felt like I was part of a whole other work force. 

As George Orwell once wrote of coal miners: 

"You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on, the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower." 

This is my first experience outside of the daylight world. 

And although my job is nowhere near as difficult as a miner's, I have a whole new appreciation for everything and everyone that makes the world move while the majority are asleep.

--

Fabiola Carletti is a Toronto Star radio room reporter and graduate student at the UBC School of Journalism. She recently graduated summa cum laude from York University, having earned an honours double major in Professional Writing and Communication Studies. Her digital footprints are all over the internet, but you can learn more about her by reading her blog or chasing her around on twitter.  

Photo: "Toronto by night" by Flickr user Ernst Moeksis. Licensed under the Creative Commons.