I’ve noticed that many of the participants have done multimedia journalism before and used Soundslides.

Those journalists, much like me, are not here to learn how to do something new, but rather how to do something better. Soundslides is one of those programs you can learn in five minutes. I’m not kidding.

But knowing how to shoot photos, capture audio or use Soundslides is often not enough for great journalism. I’m at this seminar to learn to produce better journalism. I want to make journalism that matters.

Much like how my reporting class with professor Jack Lule showed me how to be a more complete writer and reporter, this seminar is showing me how to be a more complete multimedia reporter (and having the creator of Soundslides here all week is quite nice). The interplay between audio and photos is different than audio and words and even different than audio and video.

Making audio slideshows is easy. They really are. Making good ones, however, isn’t.

What’s remarkable (to me at least) is the age of the attendees. I’m by far the youngest one. What really amazes me is the enthusiasm I see from people who in some cases are more than double my age.

It’s the kind of enthusiasm I don’t see a lot of in journalists my age. One of the hosts asked an older photographer why she was at the seminar. He said she could just mail it in for a few more years and then retire.

The answer is because she wanted to learn. She didn’t have to be here. She is a talented photographer and professor who doesn’t need to keep working much longer.

But she has wanted to learn multimedia journalism for years so she could teach it to her students. It just proves that age has nothing to do with it.

Attitude is everything.