At ONA 08 and a week later at Poynter Seminar on ethics, I talked about my online ethics seal idea.

The idea is very simple —  to form a series of ethics seals that Web sites, blogs and news organizations could embed on their Web sites. I want these seals to be in the same vein as the Creative Commons.

Right now there are five seal categories:

1. Sourcing
2. Objectivity/advocacy/opinion journalism or opinion
3. Linking
4. Copy editing/fact checking (does a second person fact check?)
5. Conflicts of Interests

The seals are developed by the community:

• The seals are open source — The community gets to decide which level of the seals means. This also means that people are free to change the language of a seal as long as they open source their new seal.
• That means the seals will evolve — Over time, we can update the ethics seals to reflect the current state of the Web. There will be version 1.0, 2.0, etch of each seal.
• The community is more than just blogs — Any online ethics seal can’t succeed if it hopes to only serve blogs (or “govern” them). Rather a good seal should be applicable to traditional media sources and new media sources. It should be a common ground, because on the Web traditional and new media lines are blurred.
• The seals are just beginning — Right now I have laid out five seal categories. Maybe we need more categories. Maybe we need less. Together, we’ll figure out the core areas to develop seals around.

I did my Poynter project on a no kill animal shelter in St. Petersburg.

Now, the projects that most of us did probably would have been handled differently in a real-world situation. I spent a few hours at the shelter, but in real life, I would have spent more time. I would have called ahead and came during specific events: a new pet being taken in, a pet being adopted out, scheduled exercise situations, etc.

That’s not how things were because of time constraints. We called up potential story contacts and showed up shortly thereafter and captured whatever we could. But in some ways this was good.

It forced us to work with what we had, which was less than we would have normally captured under ideal circumstances. It forced us to maximize what we have.

I was in way over my head with a Canon Mark III. I normally use a prosumer-level Nikon, not a professional-level Canon.

The projects were fun and quite a learning experience. Best advice I can give you: select not compress.

I can now officially recommend the Online Storytelling With Audio & Images seminar at Poynter.

Creating an audio slideshow is easy. Creating a great audio slideshow is hard. This seminar can help show you how to make the latter.

The seminar had many audio slideshow neophytes but also people who had some experience with audio slideshows. Everyone learned something about multimedia, but those who came in with experience made the strongest final projects, because they were able to take an existing skill and take it to the next level.

This was the first time they have offered the seminar, so I think we can safely say it will evolve over time. Even in its current state, however, I think many journalists will benefit from this seminar.

I may have personally benefited the most from this seminar by learning more about audio from NPR’s Howard Berkes. Audio is often the No. 1 component lacking in audio slideshows, and having someone from NPR there all week to work with us was a great bonus. The quality of the audio often doesn’t match the images.

Soundslides is not a tough program to learn (probably one of the easiest you’ll find), but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make good slideshows. Even if you are already creating audio slideshows, you’ll probably benefit from this seminar, especially if you haven’t had any or little formal training in the following:

1. Audio - Using an audio recorder or audio editing program isn’t rocket science. Natural sounding audio is often a challenge, however, and so is being able to weave a strong narrative with just sound. Many people who want to make audio slideshows might benefit from first trying to create an audio story. I’ve had some audio training before, and I still learned a lot from Berkes.
2. How to make a tight narrative with multimedia - The guys at Poynter hammered home the need to select not compress. We all fall in love with our work, but most people will not stick around for a long, meandering slideshow. Having several professionals there to give you advice on what they would cut and why is a big help. I know that advice isn’t possible in my newsroom because no one else makes multimedia.
3. The power of images - If you’re like me, you’re not a full-time photojournalist. And, like me, you might know how to handle a DSLR and take some good photos from time to time, but you don’t know the ins and outs of what makes a strong image. And frankly, you could use some help on understanding the power of images. Joe Weiss, creator of Soundslides, spent a lot of time just discussing the importance of using strong images in a slideshow and what makes a strong image. He spent several years at MSNBC making audio slideshows, and he has plenty of examples to show.

Existing photographers would seem to benefit the most from this seminar because it’s much heavier on audio help than photo help. If I could make one change to the seminar it would be to spend more time on how to physically take a good photo. That’s something I know the non-photojournalists struggled with and felt they could have learned more about.

That being said, I would say that several of the top slideshows were made by non-photojournalists at the seminar. The one thing many photojournalists struggle at is weaving a tight narrative because they have never really had to do that before. The seminar would benefit in the future from helping those photojournalists learn how to weave a tighter narrative.

I can safely recommend the seminar. You’ll learn a lot in a week. Even if your work will not pay for you, I’d strongly consider it.

This is the kind of stuff more j-schools need to teach.

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.

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.

One thing sticks out at the online storytelling seminar at the Poynter Institute: the background of those attending.

Consider this:

I can’t explain why this gulf exists, but it appears photojournalists are more willing to try learning new skills. One of the hosts said that photojournalists are more pliable than print reporters.

Perhaps, it’s less of a step to go from being a photojournalist to a multimedia journalist. I don’t know, but I do know that only three print reporters are attending the inaugural online story telling seminar at Poynter, and there are a lot more print reporters than photojournalists in this country.

I’ll be heading off to Poynter this Saturday for a seminar on online storytelling with audio and images.

That means there will not be a lot of updates next week on the state of journalism and Web development. But it does mean there will be updates on the conference itself. I know a lot of you are interested in learning multimedia journalism, and I hope to give you a report on what I learn and whether or not I would suggest this seminar for other journalists.

If you want to learn something new, but your work won’t give you training, consider signing up for a Poynter seminar. They have many different ones to choose between, and if you sit around waiting for someone to train you, you’ll always be behind.

If you have any specific questions you’d like me to answer about the seminar or look into, just post a comment. I can also ask the Poynter people questions for you.