Focus on the "memorable moments"

There are many ways to cover a music festival, and we appreciate the differing approaches. For example, day by day reporting from the scene conveys the immediacy and excitement of the festival experience, and is a great approach when you have on-site internet access and the willingness to spend time writing and posting each day.

In many cases, Festival Preview bloggers will wait to submit their festival reports until after the event. That's great too, though we like to publish blogs within a few days after the end of the festival. If it ends on a Sunday, our goal is to have our coverage up by the next Wednesday.

That leaves bloggers with the task of summing up multiple days of nonstop music and festival immersion in a short time and limited length. We've found that a useful format for doing that is to focus on the festival's "memorable moments."

I've used that approach in a number of my own festival wrapups. For an example, here is my report of the memorable moments from the recent Spring Strawberry Music Festival.

The format lets you summarize festival highlights with one interesting paragraph, a clever subheading and ideally a photograph. Stringing together a series of such items produces a festival summary that's quick to produce and fun to read.

Video killed the text blogging star

Well, not really. Text will always have a place in online publishing, but the YouTube generation also expects to watch and listen to online content as much as read it. So Festival Preview is very interested in producing and distributing multimedia content.

So far, we have produced an audio preview of the Chicago Blues Festival and a video interview of Joe Craven, emcee of the Live Oak Music Festival. More audio and video segments are in production and will be posted in the next several weeks. Thanks to Maggie Dilly, our Final Cut Pro wizard-in-training, who is helping us move into this new realm.



For those of you who are multimedialy inclined, we invite you to join our adventure by taking your digital camcorder or audio recorder with you to the festival. You'll have to be careful when shooting the stage. Most artists and festivals actively discourage filming of performances, and performance videos are not the most interesting anyway.

Instead, give us the flavor of the festival--the sounds and the colors and the people. Talk to lots of people--attendees, staff and volunteers, musicians, vendors, the guy in the adjacent campsite. Artist interviews are especially welcome.

Also shoot yourself doing a standup from the site. End it with a sign-off: "From the music meadow at XYZ Music Festival, this is Susie Blogger reporting."

Next your footage needs to be edited. If you have the skills and desire, you could cut and sequence your own finished video. Or we'll do it for you, which will likely result in faster turnaround, especially as we hone our production systems. You can ship us your raw footage as mini DV tapes or DVD discs or other video format. Ideally, you would also send your ideas on what material to use and how to tell the story, and we will work with you to produce it.

Then our in-house multimedia team will produce a finished video, with titles and soundtrack, running about four minutes.

For now we are just experimenting with multimedia content on Festival Preview, but imagine in the 2008 festival season we have a new video every week in each of our five genre pages. That's our goal, and we hope that you can help us reach it by contributing your own audio and video content to Festival Preview.

What music bloggers can learn from a war correspondent

As a music festival blogger who frequently hauls a computer and digital SLR camera around in a backpack, I have often wondered what the ideal setup would be for mobile reporting--especially since I expect to be adding a video camera to the arsenal in the not-distant future.

So when I got a chance recently to hear war correspondent Kevin Sites talk about his experiences as a solo digital journalist covering global hot spots, I went to hear his lecture at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

A former network television news reporter and producer, Sites had spent 12 months in 2005-06 producing Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, an original news program for Yahoo. He visited every conflict region in the world--a week to 10 days in each location--filing daily multimedia news reports.

He illustrated the talk with examples of his produced pieces, such as one in which he does a first-on-the-scene reporter standup after a missile strike in Tyre, Lebanon, and another where he provides post-story impressionist narration over raw footage of a funeral in Gaza. He also went to Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Nepal, and elsewhere.

When reporting, Sites carried a pack containing his digital news-gathering tools: Sony HDR-HC1 high definition digital camcorder with wide angle converter lens and SteadyShot image stabilization, Samsung SC-X105L digital camcorder with "headcam," high-definition digital still camera, 12-inch Macintosh Powerbook, Hughes R-BGAN satellite modem, Thuraya/Hughes portable satellite phone, and Palm Treo GSM mobile phone. And, yes, a notebook and pen.

Total weight: less than 18 pounds. His support team back home kept a second loaded backpack on standby in case of loss, theft or damage.

He compared his opportunity as a multimedia Internet journalist to his former career as a television reporter. "On TV, I was limited by the format of a television package--a minute and a half of video, sound bites, B roll and a reporter standup."

In the Internet format, there is no limit on length and with multimedia there are many ways to explore the story. "It's more like newspaper reporting, but you have technology married to narrative form, and the result is richer story," he said.

He also said he got better access to stories by working solo rather than with the big footprint of a video crew.

In the beginning, however, he often didn't know which of his tools to use first. "Anytime something moved I was taking notes, and anytime nothing was happening I was shooting video," he said.

As he got better at it, he learned that notetaking is the spine of every story, making it easier to establish trust with his sources than if he had them on camera. Later, he might ask the same questions again on video.

Rather than try to tell big-picture story, he said he would focus on small stories--profiling a soldier or a rape victim, for example--as a way to illustrate the bigger context. The series of these pieces he produced over the course of his stay in each region added up to a rounded story, he said.

Sites talked about the difficulty of producing reports late at night after a full day of reporting--an issue that might resonate for festival bloggers. His goal was to file an 800-word piece every day, but frequently when he started writing after midnight the words wouldn't flow.

He would also be editing video and stills at that hour to make his morning transmission deadline.

While the Hot Zone program was groundbreaking as a way to produce original journalism for the web, it gained only modest advertiser support and Yahoo is not committed to continuing it. Sites said the company has shifted its news focus to a search model in an effort to compete with Google.

Sites ended his talk with a summary of some general lessons that may apply to our less dangerous form of blogging:

* Use all dimensions: text, photography, video. Each is suited to different aspects of the story and combining media tells a richer story.

* Storytelling is what it is all about. Give the reader/viewer a context for understanding the issues.

* Don't get in the way of sources. As much as possible, let your subjects speak directly to the reader.

* "Shoot on green." Automatic modes and rough cuts provide sufficient quality for the immediacy of the web.