For the past week, I’ve been watching the TwitterLocal Feed, recommended by Mark Hamilton. You subscribe to all the local tweets in your feed reader.

Back in the old days of some 15 years ago, I had a great editor who would make an effort to scour the town and find out what people were talking about in coffee shops and bars, around water coolers and parks.  He would constantly ask reporters, “What are people talking about.  That’s what where we ought to look for stories.”

With TwitterLocal, I can find out what people are talking about on my phone.  Every once in a while, they’re even talking about what we’re reporting.

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the new technology to serve our own purposes of disseminating information.  But I’m reminded we need to also take time to use it to learn more about the people we are hoping to reach.

Jack Lail and I are now connected.  Jack is the managing editor of  multimedia for the Knoxville News Sentinel, a paper that’s been a leader in the push toward online.

Jack blogged an invitation to “be sociable” and connect to him on Facebook, Linked-in and other social networks. So I did.

We’re a part of a growing, yet feisty group of people trying to meet the demands of a changing industry. And we need to stick together.

Ryan Sholin talked about trying to find the early adopters in each newsroom, and what a struggle that has been for him:

“The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It”

It’s a struggle for all of us.  Think about it.  If there’s only one, or two, or even a handful of people who are trying to make the shift in our mindset, that means there are many more resisting.  It can be a lonely space.  We need to support each other as much as possible.

So let’s connect, stick together.  I’m passing forward Jack’s invite to “be sociable.”

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Collaboration is to be the next step in my multimedia journey.

It’s a natural progression, and a welcome one.  The past year of learning has at times been a lonely process.  But it’s been necessary.  It’s hard to work with someone else, when you don’t know how the process works.  It’s one reason I took a Flash course.  I’m not a designer, but it helps to understand how it all works.  Reporters who don’t at least understand the basics of audio and video, hoping the photo department will pick it up, is destined to frustrate some photographers and videographers.

Last week, photographer Jaime Oppenheimer and I worked on the drug court story.  This week, we got more ambitious and embarked on our new project.  We’re still putting the details together, and I’ll post it here once we finish.  But I thought I’d share the process as we go.

We went to prison.  It was a guided tour, but the state officials were gracious and pretty much left us alone to do our reporting.  We spent hours, and Jaime left her still camera in the car.  She shot everything with a Sony HD cam, and she’ll pull stills off the video.  She hooked up a shotgun mic to the camera, and lugged a heavy tripod along.

I took along my Edirol09 and a pair of earphones to collect some natural sound, interviews and pick up some parts that might augment Jaime’s video.

I was stoked with the information and images and stories we collected in those hours. Jaime, however, felt a little overwhelmed.

It reminded me of the different roles we’d played in the past and how they’re converging in a world of online, multimedia delivery.  As a reporter, I can never get too much information.  I can pick out the best of the best.  I had collected interviews and documents for months.  This was just the color to trim out and dress up the other information.

Jaime had all the images and sounds swimming through her head. She’d filled up two hours of video cards.  How were we going to sort it all out?

Other aspects overwhelm me, such as the thought of actually editing the video.  To me, that’s the hard part.  No problem, said Jaime.  That doesn’t bother her.

That’s where collaboration begins.  On the long drive home we talked about what we remembered about the visit.  We listed the images that stood out in our minds, the sounds, the quotes.  We made a list.  Then from there, we asked ourselves, what would be better told in video?  In stills?  What audio stood out?  What anecdotes would be better detailed in narrative text?

Soon, we had outlined a short video, numbering the scenes in order and the audio bed that would go underneath it.  I don’t think either one of us had actually scripted a video before.  It at least gave us a starting point.

Jaime has the day off today.  I’m going to try to edit some audio tracks, and then give them to Jaime to pick out some images for another video or a slide show.

When I write the story, that will further cut down our material, because we’ve decided we want the multimedia to add layers and depth, not repeat what’s in the story.

Next week, we’ll begin putting it all together. I’m excited at the prspects  I think I’m going to like this role of co-producer.

A year ago, I sat in front of computer for hours, trying to make the sound synch with the movement of the lips in I-Movie, or make Final Cut Pro reach some sort of finality.  Usually, my frustration would hit its peak long before my wife sent me a text message wanting to know when I was going to get the hell home.

I don’t know when exactly I began to feel more comfortable with all this, but I know it came, the same way I learned to write over the years, because I was too stubborn to give it up. I am now trying to include multimedia in nearly everything I do, because I appreciate how those layers can add depth to the story.  Just as writing through the difficult times made me a better reporter, so is being persistent with multimedia.

Two stories the past week made me realize how comfortable I’ve become looking for the multimedia aspects of the stories I cover.

The first: a story about drug court. These kinds of courts are prevalent throughout much of the United States, but they’re new to Kansas.  Photographer Jaime Oppenheimer worked to get a couple of dozen photos, and helped collect audio. And as I’ve said before, I’m recording everything.

Between Jaime’s photos, some interviews I’d recorded and some live bits from the courtroom, became  an audio slideshow. I like being able to hear the judge explain what he does and how it plays out in court. I was able to edit the audio and put together the slideshow, while me editor gave the story a first read.  I took a break from the multimedia, worked on the story, then went to finish the slide show.  I was home by dinner.

But multimedia is not only about audio and video. I especially liked getting copies of the essays some of the people who had gone through the program had written for their graduation.  Christy Johnson’s essay has power to it I could not have conveyed in my story alone.

Today’s story was one of those assignments you get when you have a slow day on your own beat, and editors are asking for a story. This time of year, people purposefully set fires in Kansas, called controlled burns. It’s actually good for the environment and helps restore the native prairies on the Great Plains.

I’ve taken to carrying a video camera everywhere I go, so when I went on the assignment, I pulled it out and shot some video.

Howard Owens says reporters should take no longer than an hour to make a video.  The controlled burn video, well, won’t set anything on fire.  But it showed what I was writing about, something I couldn’t tell them quite as well as actually seeing it. And it took about an hour.

I think shooting the video actually helped with what I ended up writing, because it forced me to pay more attention to detail, looking through the lens of the camera.  The video camera served as a notebook, and the quotes that didn’t fit in the video, went in the story.

Once again, I made it part of my workday.  I plugged the camera in and downloaded the video, while I wrote a rough draft of the story.  I pulled quotes out of the video for the story and put the audio track on the timeline.  I went and added the quotes to my story, and while my editor Jill Cohan gave the story a first read, I finished the video and uploaded it to the server.  Then I answered Jill’s questions, put the final polish on it, and went home.

All before my wife could send me a text message, asking where the hell I was.

Michael Bugeja directs a journalism school in 21^st Century America, where he preaches that the Internet and new technology is “the scorpion” that will poison and kill journalism.

In what I consider the best argument against tenure, Bugeja cursed the connected world that is rapidly passing him by in the keynote address at our Midwest regional spring conference for the Society of Professional Journalists.  The theme of the conference?  Convergence of new media.

Yes, this guy. Bugeja says new gadgetry has us chained to our newsroom desks, forcing us to do all of our reporting through the telephone and email.  By the way, he says telephones and telegraphs are not bad.  Apparently, he thinks any innovation that happened, say, after Henry Ford, is dooming us.

“I don’t know when he was last in a newsroom,” said Jared Strong of the Des Moines Register, who sat in on the panel “What I Wish I Had Learned in Journalism School But  Didn’t.”

If Bugeja had bothered to observe some modern newsrooms, he would know that technology actually allows me to get out of the office more, be where the news is, because I’m always connected through my smart phone, my email and my ability to deliver the news through a variety of media, including Twitter.

Of course, Bugeja hates Twitter.  And Facebook.  And really any of the ways that people like to connect now and trade information.

I began covering his speech on Twitter.

Andy Dickinson answered that maybe Bugeja is just trying to get attention.

The most disturbing part of Bugeja’s views is, he could be any of our bosses.  In many newsrooms across the country, people are resisting change with his same fervor, as the world changes around us.  In his speech, he kept referring to himself as “a reporter,” as if that some how brought him out of his academic daydream and down to reality with the rest of us.  It didn’t.

If he really worked as a reporter, in a world without tenure, he would have to face the realities of technology.  He would have to learn new ways or reporting, or he would soon be without a job.  He would soon be called into an editor’s office and be told to get up to speed, or be replaced.  But he doesn’t work in that world of declining circulations and ad revenue that’s moving to the web.  So he can stick his head up his campus and pretend that he knows best.

I felt bad for the journalism students I met at Iowa State who are bright and ambitious and having to listen to this. I felt bad for the older journalists in the room, meaning about my age, because some were nodding and smiling as if this were really making sense.

Still, Bugeja showed he has a glimmer of recognition for reality. For all his resistance, he understands the Web can produce transparency in journalism, allowing our audience to study our notes, our source documents, to hear our interviews.

Don’t feel sorry for his students, either.  They’re smart enough to see the ironies of the chancing media world around them and how out of touch the director of their school seems to be.

“The thing is,” one student told me about Bugeja, “you can only reach him by email.”