I’m not the last person to start using Twitter – it just seems like it, as the micro-blogging, breaking-news information network just keeps growing. I joined Twitter several months ago, with Ryan Sholin’s encouragement. But I didn’t really use the account until the past week.

Frankly, that little bird scared me.

Twitter is like Facebook fueled by text messages.  Imagine being able to send and receive text messages all over the world to everyone at once.  Scary, especially for a man approaching 50. What do you mean: “What are you doing?”  Why do you want to know? Why do you care?

Then I heard stories about how Californians were using it to track the wildfires and later how the Bhutto assassination spread on Twitter.  Ah, real news stuff amid all the chatter.

Last week, I began posting my own Twitters, and connected to friends I’ve made on-line, at conferences and through this blog.  I also signed up for NPR news updates, NewsBreakingOn and the New York Times updates.

I watched the returns of the South Carolina primary.

You can find plenty of help getting started, including  I found Nico Luchsinger’s “Why Journalist’s Should Use Twitter” and Shawn Smith’s “Ultimate Guide to Twitter Resources and Tools for Journalists.”

Journalists have reported getting news tips from sources and even help with interviews.  I even see some potential for investigative pieces, watching it unfold in small increments as the reporter digs deeper into the story.

And there’s quite a discussion going on in the “New to Social Networking” and “Story-Telling Innovations groups on Wire Journalists.  Oh, yeah, join that while you’re at it.

I know, I know: more social networks to join, more web sites to check.  But this is where our readers are going.  Let’s go with them.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s free, and I use it on the go from my mobile phone.

Add me: rsylvester.

Then start Twittering your life away.

As we jump head-first into the pool of election season, I hope everyone takes note of a recent Pew Research Center study that suggests 24 percent of Americans regularly learn something about the presidential campaign from the Internet.

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=384

While the study states people also learn about the presidential campaign from areas such as local TV news, cable and nightly network news and daily newspapers, the use of the Internet for political information is gaining in popularity. More people are “coming across” campaign issues while they are online doing something else.

What does this mean for journalists? How about more interactives such as image galleries, audio and videos of speeches/rallies, polls to gauge the public’s interest on issues? What about forums to promote dialogues? As the cliche goes, the possibilities are endless.

Bottom line: we, as journalists, need to tap into the public’s consciousness and use multimedia to offer new ways of telling stories.

Not the Indianapolis Star.

When NFL rules stifled attempts to shoot video, photographers Matt Detrich, Matt Kryger, Sam Riche and Robert Scheer decided to make time-lapse audio slide shows using fast paced stills as animation.

“We originally thought the post-game video would be more popular, but the audio slideshows have actually been getting more hits,’ they tell AP Photo Managers.

Innovative reporter and photographer teams could find lots of ways to make this work.  While there’s been a rush to video lately, I’ve found that an effective slide show actually can be more captivating than video, because it accents those moments in time that only stills can capture and makes your audio stand out.

Indy used Quicktime to give this effect.  But you could also use Soundslides.

Our on-line content developer Katie Lohrenz and I did a similar experiment this past spring with coverage of an art show.

Try it the next time you have an assignment with strong visual potential.

(Via CyberJournalist.net)

The online eyes in our newsroom today were ogling the Las Vegas Sun’s new multimedia site.

Judging by discussion groups and bloggers, there was similar envy in newsrooms across the country.

Look at the front page. There’s a variety of videos that both jump right off the page and can fill the screen.

This is a great example of what newspapers can do. We will refrain from using the ton of gambling metaphors rushing through our brains.  But this is one case where we hope what’s happening in Las Vegas doesn’t stay there.

Richard Koci Hernandez has written a book, Multimedia Journal.

He compiles Multimedia Shooter: one of the first inspirations for me to begin exploring the possibilities of being a digital reporter.  He said his 60-page book evolved from a compilation of notes and workshops he’s done.

He promises a hands-on experience.

“The book is packed with over 50 creative exercises and ideas to get you thinking … about photography, video, audio and multimedia,” he writes.

“This project has forced me to practice what I’ve been preaching,” he said..

We should all practice what he preaches.

My philosophy is get out there and get the job done.  Get the news and get in on-line.  And don’t be afraid to shoot video.

Don’t let some accountant turned editor tell you it will break the newsroom budget.  It doesn’t have to.

Andy Dickinson gets us started with his own brand of journalism anarchy in the U.K.: a three-part article,  “How to set up video for newspaper web sites on a budget.

I have to tip a pint of Bass to Andy for this one.  You can get started shooting video, probably with a point-and-shoot camera, small camcorder or cell phone that you’ve already got lying around somewhere, or even in your pocket. Web video is still compressed so much, and shown on such small screens, most viewers can’t tell the difference between high and standard definition.

What you need is some sort of camera stabilization system, so your video won’t shake like the Blair Witch Project, or your grandparents’ last vacation to Branson.

But who wants to lug around some big tripod? Andy suggests the Gorillapod,  and even has some suggestions for your camera phone.

Or you can literally go DIY and make your own equipment like real filmmakers use.

Most accessories, if purchased new and ready-made cost hundreds of dollars – probably more than your camera.  But there are plenty of tutorials on how to make them yourself , for just a few dollars.

Here’s another site with more ideas, including (my favorite) a Fig Rig made out of PVC pipes for $10.

All that’s missing is audio: the most important part of production.

But you can find a good quality digital recorder for about $60 and add a microphone.  See one of our previous posts for more details.  Reminder: A separate microphone in nearly always better than the built-in mic on most camcorders and lower end digital recorders.

Now there’s a problem:  you don’t have a mic input on you little phone or camcorder, do you? Well, look at those big network television news crews and real filmmakers who have audio pros to capture the sound separately.

Dare to take the guerrilla challenge:  Shoot a video on your cell phone, or your point-and-shoot, and pick up the audio separately on your digital recorder, using a microphone. Then find someone who has a good editing software, such as Premier Elements or Final Cut Express and try to synch it all together.

Talk about workflow, Mindy McAdams has found an answer.

Actually, she found BBC’s 10 percent answer, which came from Google’s 20 percent solution

Take 10-20 percent of your time and work on a project of your choosing.

This is where your gmail was born.

In the newsroom, four hours could produce another multimedia element to a story.  A video or slideshow or cool aspect to that weekender you have to produce anyway.

Let’s all start asking our editors: Give me a few hours, or maybe even a day, and leave me alone. Or ask nicer than that.

Then use that time to do something cool and make better journalism.

We’ve had some fun, so far, diving into multimedia and online journalism.

But it hasn’t been easy.  We’ve spent hours of our own time learning the basics of audio and video to try to deepen our work. Now it’s time to put all of this to good use and just make it a part of our jobs.  It’s time to stop talking and start etching these new skills into our everyday lives.

You’d think our new cutting edge skills would be reason to celebrate.

Not always.

“We’ve got a paper to put out.”

“Quit playing with the new toys.”

“Don’t put that story online this afternoon.  People won’t have anything to read in the paper tomorrow morning.”

Those required to make on-line a part of their jobs can’t be expected to simply add it to their current workload.  The new tasks must become a respected part of a reporter’s or photographer’s workday.

Creating and maintaining news blogs is as difficult as writing a column.  An audio slide show is as challenging as writing a story.  Video?  More so.

We need to figure out how to write the story, edit the audio, video, and get it all on-line.  It can be done.  Think on-line first. Write shorter stories.  Use extra information in multimedia.  Stories that don’t fully bloom, put as quick hits on a blog.  Use blog items as briefs for print.

Reporters need time to make the couple of extra calls needed to covert an on-line item into a short story.  Editors need to have multimedia skills.

But it has to become a part of the job.

This isn’t extra stuff.  It’s the stuff.

For those who haven’t read Rob Curley’s article in The Journalist, you need to.  It will inspire you.

Those just getting into this new era of journalism, and there are many, can use the article as a barometer of just where they stand.  More importantly, they will be able to gauge where their employer stands.  Go through Rob’s seven steps to save the industry, which we’ve tried to discuss further on this blog.  You can take stock of what’s going on in your news organization and see how far along, or how far behind, you are.

Now to be fair, Rob’s discussion on this point was about opening a diablogue between a newsroom and it’s readers.  That’s important.  But I’d like to expand this a bit to talk about the dialogue we should be having as journalists.

This is your career we’re talking about.  These seven steps also will serve as the basis for being able to get a journalism job in the future.  Print clips just aren’t going to be enough anymore.  You’re going to have to show you’re capable of telling stories in many different ways.   If you can do this, you’re talents will be in demand.

News outlets that are losing money will be looking for folks who can do this.  I think it’s going to go from an employers’ market, where many newsrooms threatened layoffs to keep the ranks, to an employees market, where those scrambling to catch up are going to be bidding for the few out there who can produce the goods demanded in an increasingly on-line world.

Those who refuse to change, both on the employer and employee side, will gradually disappear.  Or at least, they will be less significant.

That’s the extent of my predictions for 2008.

Change may be coming sooner than you think.  Andy Dickinson, who has encouraged me and others this past year as we’ve ventured into new territories, says we’ve got six months to get our act together, at least on the video end of the web.  Andy’s insightful predictions have spurred quite a discussion over the past several weeks from Mindy McAdams and others who are really watching how the industry is changing before us.

As you read those posts, go beyond what they are saying about video.  We need to be redefining our skills and they way we deliver content to readers.

Because, as the title of this post indicates, we are entering into an age where a dialogue with our readers will drive what we do.

We are already seeing editors watching web stats and seeing what readers are really reading. I always like to point out when a story I wrote gets buried in the print edition but pops into the top 10 on the web, just to say “I told you so.”

This dialogue and metrics and page views and time spent and all the other numbers available to us now, demonstrates how the times are a-chanin’.

When my father worked as a broadcast pioneer in the 1960s, he remembered when as a news director of local television station, someone would ask him “What is news.”

“News,” he’s say, “is what I say it is.”

He was right back then. The news directors and editors used to decide what people heard and watched and read.  That was the news of the day.

Now, readers decide what they want.  And with the whole word just a click away, they can decide whether their news comes from their local newspaper.com, TV.com, or across the ocean from BBC or Al Jezeera.

What we have to decide is how we keep people engaged in their own communities and what’s important around them or right next door amid increasingly shorter attention spans and a myriad of choices

To do that, we may have to step outside our comfort zones.  We may have to convince editors in love with bureaucracy and minutia of planning and zoning or city budgets that they should hear when people are clamoring for more information about health care. Maybe it’s deciding that the best way to tell a story is with a compelling video and not with words.  Or maybe words speak much better than pictures.

And if the most popular hit of the day is yet another Britney Spears crises, we are going to have to figure out how to get people to come back and click on the news that really matters to their lives, the investigative pieces and information they need to make valid decisions for themselves and their families.

These are the questions facing us all, as journalists, in the coming year.

And as journalist, we had better be prepared to face them.  And respond to them.

We’d better not just be having this discussion with our readers.

We should be having it with ourselves.