Went to a panel on reporting from the front lines. On the panel was: Craig White (Chief Photographer, NBC News), Kaj Larsen (Producer/Reporter , Current TV), Phil Alongi (Alongi Media Solutions & 20 Year Producer for NBC News), and Brian Natwick (The Pentagon Channel). They all talked about their experiences in covering wars and conflicts. Pretty scary stuff. I am glad that there are people doing it, but I don’t know if I could do it. I wonder about the students. Will they be going out and doing that type of reporting?

Then I went to see Josh Schwartz, the man behind Chuck and Gossip Girl. He talked a lot about how hard it is to stay afloat if you are doing shows that don’t have a traditional audience. Younger viewers are turning to different delivery platforms to get this entertainment fix. That doesn’t necessarily show up in the ratings, and without the ratings you aren’t going to be on the air for long. He did give some hope in that some people are starting to get into web programming. Not much pay there yet, but there is a lot of freedom.

Saw a lot of equipment vendors. I’ll have a lot more to talk about them when I start ordering for next year.

Finished up the night at the RED User party. There were a lot of speakers talking about the different post production and color correction work flows. There were also a lot of vendors with RED specific accessories and add-ons. Got some good ideas from tonight’s presentations.

He mentioned a couple of good websites to check out. If you are interested in doing some surfing check them out:

Interactive Narratives

Multimedia Shooter

Both have good examples of the direction that new media journalism is going.

So after looking around at a lot of different options, I found that the best choice was Sound Slides.  This was a program that was created for journalist, by a journalist.  It is a very simple user interface, but it allows for high quality results.  You import jpegs to create photo slideshows and audio if you want to create audio slideshows.  If you are creating a non-audio slideshow you can choose the order of the photos, the transition type, and time, and change the color of the player to match your website.  You can also edit captions that can be desplayed with each photo.  With the Plus edition you are able to edit the pictures to your imported audio file.

There were a couple of features that I would have liked to have in the program.  For one, basic audio editing would be a great time saver.  Right now you have to edit in another program and import the audio file into Sound Slides.  The ability to write text slides would also be nice.  They have a caption feature and you can key people but there isn’t a place where you can lay out text anywhere on the screen.  The best solution is to create a slide in Photoshop with any text that you want.  Let me know in the comments if you know of any solution out there that has all of these features.

I have found quite a few newspapers using the same software on their online sites (or at least I think it is).  Check out some great audio slideshows at the Chicago Tribune site, the Lexington Herald Leader Photographers site, or search through the Sound Slides showcase forum.

Additional Information: Eamon Hickey has a good writeup of the application on Rob Galbraith’s Digital Photography insights website.  Berkley’s Knight Digital media center also has a good tutorial on using the program.

You can purchase the software, (or download a trial version), find the manuals, and forums at the Sound Slides site.