Digital Help from Mark Briggs

Chapter 10 of “Journalism 2.0: Howto Survive and Thrive: A digital literacy guide for the information age” by Mark Briggs is about basic video editing. Knowing how to use video editing software is an important part of modern journalism, since it allows a text story to be brought into a new platform. Visualizations reach audiences on a different level, since a reader can watch the story come to life. According to Briggs, good audio is one of the most important aspects to the video component of a story. iMovie and Movie Maker are two examples of programs that journalists can use to edit video footage. Since video footage packages have several different clips that need to be organized, edited, shortened, or zoomed-in, these programs have several features to allow for this work to be done.

        

         Briggs mentions that it is important to use the Title feature in the iMovie and Movie Maker programs, in order to keep the video in coordination with the story. If the two pieces have similar sources, as packages usually do, the Title component becomes even more important because it keeps the reader at pace with the content. The Briggs text shows how to use iMovie (and for PC users,Briggs links to a set of different steps for a separate video-editing program) using step-by-step instructions that are easy to understand.

            The Timeline feature of iMovie and Movie Maker is easy to use, Briggs says, and is important to learn, since this is where the beginning steps of video editing are.  The Timeline feature allows a user to drag chunks of clips, or the entire clip, into the Timeline window to be edited or cut to the user’s preference. Making these decisions accurately is important. The video content must be organized so that the reader gets a new take on the same story, not the same take of the same story, which is often a mistake many new journalists make. After reading Briggs' tutorial on how to edit video in iMovie and Movie Maker, I feel prepared and ready to take the text content that I produce and create an additional layer to the story with visualizations. If you are not convinced yet, read what this blogger has to say about why journalists should add video to their stories.