Journalists' Toolkit

The new Video Resources page has been added to this site.

This is a carefully curated page with links to good tutorials for video editing software, video shooting tips, and the like. It’s intended for beginners, particularly journalism students and journalism educators who are teaching video in their classes.

Video shot with a still camera costing less than $300 is often better in quality than video shot with a video camera in the same price range.

For best results when shooting video with an inexpensive still camera, follow these tips:

1. Do NOT zoom. Ever. EVER! The quality for video on these cameras is only acceptable at the widest angle (not zoomed at all). This is true even though the zoom works great for your still photos.

2. Do NOT move the camera around while shooting. This will make your clips difficult to edit. VERY difficult. Stand completely still, like a rock, while you are recording video. Do not pan (camera moves left or right). Do not tilt (camera moves up or down).

3. Do NOT shoot inside an apartment or a house. They are almost always too dark! Some indoor settings are fine — for example, a brightly lighted classroom with the overhead fluorescent lights on.

4. DO pay attention to the light — not only the amount of light, but also the direction. If the light is BEHIND your subject, the person will be a dark blob in silhouette — and that’s not good!

5. Do NOT shoot in dark places. Video game rooms, pool rooms, bars and indoor performance venues are usually too dark for acceptable video with these cameras. A more expensive digital video camera ($600 and up) can often get decent video in low light, but most of these little cameras can’t compensate for darkness. (For exceptions to the rule, look for a camera with a bigger sensor size.)

6. Do NOT turn the camera into a portrait position (vertical) for video — EVER! Always hold it in landscape position (horizontal).

7. When shooting a video interview, DO stand VERY close to your subject. The microphone built into the camera is going to capture all the sound around you, and unless you are quite near the person who is speaking, the voice will be drowned out by surrounding noise.

More tips for shooting video: Five Shots, 10 Seconds.

Avoiding the shakes: How to hold the camera.

So you have set up a WordPress.com blog. Congratulations! I’m sure you are feeling proud of yourself — and you should.

I hope you have selected a theme that you like a lot (if not, you can change it easily).

I hope you have written and published your first post.

Here is a list of things you need to do next — and that means now — to make your blog speak for your competence and intelligence. What I mean to say is, your blog looks amateurish if you fail to do these things.

1 ) Change your TIME ZONE to the closest city that’s in the same time zone as you (so that the time stamp is correct on your posts). Change this in Settings (see instructions).

2 ) Give your blog an intelligent TAGLINE (instead of “Just another WordPress.com weblog”). Change this in Settings (see instructions).

3 ) Upload a distinctive PHOTO so people can identify your comments easily (it does not need to be your face). Change this in Settings (see instructions).

4 ) Write something on your ABOUT page (see instructions) so it doesn’t say this: “This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself …” (Nothing says “Amateur!” quite as obviously as an unchanged About page.)

5 ) Customize your blog’s sidebar with WIDGETS (see instructions). For example, if your blog theme has a calendar on the side, you can remove it (why do you need that anyway?). You can add your own blogroll, or links to your own Twitter or Facebook pages. Some blog themes have two sidebars; some have a footer; all can be customized with widgets.

6 ) Learn how to embed images in your blog.

7 ) Learn how to embed YouTube videos in your blog.

8 ) Is the “site title” of your blog something like john’s Blog or maria’s Blog? Is that really the best you can do? Just look at the highlighted posts on the WordPress.com home page to see the clever and creative titles people have chosen for their blogs.

9 ) Delete the “Hello, World!” post. This is the little dummy post that every WordPress blog has as its first post. It looks quite stupid to keep this post on your blog. Learn how to delete it — and any other post you don’t want to keep.

10 ) Learn the difference between TAGS and CATEGORIES. Then decide how you want to use these on your blog.