Multimedia journalism is one of those funny things in life.

Most of the people producing it weren’t originally multimedia — they were monomedia. If you’re a photographer you just add some audio skills and all the sudden you have multimedia. Right?

The unique problem of creating audio slideshows is often people work on them by themselves. This means they have to try to capture audio and photos at the same time. Obviously, you can’t do both well at the same time.

Photographers naturally fall back on what they know best — photos. They’ll shoot away, searching for great compositions and lighting. But they’ll let the audio slide a bit.

Those who come from an audio or video background, tend to do the opposite. Photography is firmly an art, more so than many other forms of media. So, an audio or a video person will first concentrate on getting a great interview and then try to get some shots.

In some ways, that’s probably the best course of action. You might as well get one facet of an audio slideshow nailed.

But the best way to get a strong, emotive slideshow is to plan on set times for grabbing audio and set times for grabbing photos. Don’t try to do both at once.

Either both with suffer or one will be a complete after thought. But you should always be ready to switch things up in case you need to grab a great clip or shot. I think, however, figuring out when and where you will do each skill will make it a lot easier.

Even though I already knew how to make an audio slideshow in both Soundslides and Flash before I came here, I am glad I did. There is a difference between knowing how to technically make an audio slideshow and knowing how to create great journalism.

I’m hoping to show the rest of Stripes how to make great multimedia journalism.