Mistakes to Avoid Checklist
T2 & T3 FINAL ASSIGNMENTS
Sharron | May 2020
Every year we review and grade work and every year we see a collection of common errors that crop up every year. So we made a checklist to help you avoid them! They are written in no particular order.
1) POOR ENGLISH / No Copy Edit and or Fact-Checking (aka verification)
This is a very important error and probably the one that loses most grades each year. Writing clearly and concisely provides a challange even if you are a native English speaker — and most IMMJ students are not, meaning extra attention and strategies are needed. You should by now have hooked up with a consistent copy editing peer. However, for some students this is not enough and you should work with a native speaker a few hours each term to polish important drafts and final submissions.
COPY EDITING: (There are usually two scenarios)
- The first is very serious, this applies to text and video subtitles which are broadly difficult to comprehend throughout the story. As you all know, if the level of English seriously hinders comprehension when your work is submitted, examiners simply disqualify the text portions and this seriously impacts the grade, in fact it usually results in a fail. Even with perfect English, each T2 & T3 assignment typically takes one hour for each examiner to grade. As you can imagine nobody has the time or patience to re-read sentences that don’t make sense to decipher meaning.
- The second applies to assignments where the content and reporting of the project are actually good to excellent — but sloppy English means that there is a lack of clarity in the expression — and that good to great reporting is obscured. This is a very common problem and it’s also very frustrating for tutors! Because while we may have an inkling that the reporting is good we just can’t reward it if it’s not intelligible. Again bearing in mind that the marking process is lengthy and examiners have limited time to try to figure out your meaning unless things are delivered clearly and concisely. Don’t waste your own hard work!
FACT CHECKING: In The Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel wrote that journalism’s “essence is a discipline of verification.”. Your main job as a journalist is to get stuff right. Of course, you need to be using credible sources throughout your reporting but that final careful fact check prior to submission is vital. We still encourage you to do it the old school way, print out your text/subtitles/captions, and with a marker highlight all facts, names, dates, numbers, stats, the evidence used to support argument or assertions, etc. Check each and everyone and ask your copy edit peer to do the same while you work on their feature.
Take a look back at our Term 1 Copy Edit & Fact Check class notes for more help
2) AVOID CLICHES IN YOUR WRITING (and narration)
Rome wasn’t built in a day
Hemingway once said what the writer needs is a “built-in shit detector.” One Poynter writer says that he’d like to build a built-in cliché finder.
CLICHES — Clichés are expressions that either have an overly general meaning or have “lost their meaning” over time. These overused phrases do not provide a specific meaning or image. You are probably familiar with many of them.
BANALITIES — For example, the beginning sentence of one past student’s work on lack of water in rural China reads:
“It is difficult to imagine a life without water and the thought of it is terrible. For today’s China, water is a vital resource however in the village of Jinan, known as the “City of Spring”, supplies are insufficient.”
It sure is difficult to imagine a life without water — without it we’d all be dead in 72 hours. Avoid stating the obvious! Be specific, tell us that the water supplies are scarce, and tell me what the concrete impact of that insufficiency is. Avoid cliches and banalities when writing. Figure out what you want to say and then write in a clear, concise, and direct manner. Of course, you can and very often should interject some creative and descriptive writing in the shape of rich quotes, anecdotes, and observations. But beware of opinions and cliche phrases. Read your writing out loud back to yourself a few times to make sure it’s smooth.
READ
• PRINCIPLES OF GOOD WRITING: Allan Little | BBC Academy
• AVOID CLICHES LIKE THE PLAUGE | POINTER
3) DON’T BURY THE LEAD or NUT GRAPH (In your video or text)
In a short daily news story the most important newsworthy point of the story comes in the lede itself. While a longer news feature may have a more creative lede and then present the newsworthy point of the story directly after the lead in the nut graph. Unless it’s an immersive story, usually, each media element in a multimedia feature, will have a nut graph and the whole story will have an overarching nut graph (which is typically delivered in text)— don’t bury your nut graphs!
In any story you will need to let the audience know the focus and point of the story clearly and pretty quickly. Term 2 & 3 assignments are longer-form feature stories and It’s your nut graph that will clearly and concisely deliver the news value of the story to your reader. It will tell the audience what the story is about and why they should care. The nut graph is a paragraph that you formulate, once all the reporting is done, that outlines what the main focus and point of your story are. Usually it’s a kind of mature and evolved written version of the focus that you selected in the pre-reporting phase. However, sometimes focus shifts or changes altogether — maybe you found a different story or a more interesting focus while reporting. In that case you simply change focus and your nut graph will reflect that.
Each individual medium video, text, and even graphics and images need a nut graph — a main singular point they aim to communicate. Before editing ask yourself what part of the story am I trying to communicate with this particular medium? If you are not clear about this in your own mind — the audience will certainly be confused.
Your complete multimedia feature needs an overarching nut graph too. Your audience needs to know what your story is about and why they should care quickly — this is especially true when faced with a longer multimedia story or project with various elements. You’ll need to give people a very good reason to give their attention — to consume, click or scroll. People land on a multimedia project and realize it’s going to be a time investment — they’ll make a quick decision about whether to invest their precious time. If you leave people confused for more than a couple of paragraphs, they will click away. So figure out a way to tell your audience what the story is and why it’s important. Perhaps it’s a sentence that encapsulates the nut graph written as an introduction that outlines what the story is about and why it’s important — whichever device you use — don’t bury the nut graph!
Read
4) POORLY STRUCTURED WRITING (Use the Diamond)
IF IN DOUBT AND UNLESS YOU ARE ALREADY AN EXPERIENCED WRITER. PLEASE STICK TO THE DIAMOND STRUCTURE AS TAUGHT IN CLASS. IT’S A SOLID APPROACH TO WRITING A TEXT FEATURE OF ANY LENGTH.
You may have done some good reporting, gotten good interviews and information from a variety of sources but you have structured the text poorly. Things come in an illogical order and lack structure. If this applies to your work, you will need to do some self-study and read and analyze more English Language news features. We have now covered the writing structure in class in detail. If it’s not making sense to you by now that’s because you aren’t reading and analyzing text features yourself. There is nothing more tutors can do to support you if you are not reading quality news features and self-studying. We don’t expect things to be perfect but we do expect you to apply the very clear guidelines of the Diamond structure.
While the ‘diamond structure’ is certainly not the only approach to text feature writing, very few students will have the skills or the will to try another approach. The diamond structure is the one you should be using in this case. Do not simply write a ‘Wikipedia’ style article bunching together facts. We expect a standard journalistic text feature with a beginning, middle and conclusion, including primary and secondary sources, soundbites, relevant and reliable information, descriptions and anecdotes, etc. Read back on the class notes and follow the structure. (Use the worksheets we provided).
5) VIDEO TEXT SLIDE OVERLAYS THAT LOOK LIKE SUBTITLES
If you are using text slides instead of narration to add context to your story, they must look professional not ‘studenty’ and they must also be easily distinguishable from regular sound byte subtitles so as not to confuse the audience. Think about design, format, font, and color carefully — look at how other outlets format theirs. If in doubt use the format we used during Term 2 intensive for the #disABILITY series (see below).
• Little Ants
• A Wider Road
• Dancing in Silence
• Voice of the blind
6) SUBTITLES ARE BADLY FORMATTED
Your subtitles are hard to read because they don’t have either a drop shadow or gradient. Or the font isn’t suitable. If in doubt use the gradient like in the #disABILITY series and a simple font like gill sans or Arial.
7) NO HYPERLINKS for ATTRIBUTION
We have discussed this in class a number of times. Please refer to the writing section on Multimediatrain.com (Writing online). You must attribute your sources and where possible you should be hyper-linking it’s one of the biggest assets of online journalism.
• https://www.theodysseyonline.com/best-practices-journalism-hyperlinking-citations
8) TEXT IS BROKEN UP SO MUCH THAT READING FLOW IS INTERRUPTED
This is not easy. I have seen plenty of online professional multimedia stories that also have this flaw. So it’s one to take care with. If you are going to have a substantial text piece in the multimedia story, or smaller chunks of text transitioning from one media to another — really consider how you will insert and ‘chunk’ it.
It often works to break the text into chunks between media but if the chunks are too small that can interrupt the flow of reading a longer text and the audience struggles to follow the narrative. Think about breaking the text into chunks where there are natural breaks in the story. Don’t break up text mid idea, point, or thought. Try to make sure that the text transitions in and out of the following and preceding media. You might use subheadings between chunks to help your audience scan through and make sense of the structure.
Again there really are no fixed solutions, but beware of doing something that simply looks nice on the page. The design isn’t just about the LOOK it’s also about USER EXPERIENCE, imagine you are the audience looking for the first time at your project. Remember an audience will only ever look at a project one time in their life — they won’t go back to re-read or watch — so they need to have a smooth experience and be able to easily navigate and follow the story. When mixing media you need to make your choices about where things go, how prominent they are, the order they go very carefully. For text read through yourself, get a friend to read through — watch them as they view — where do they get bored or confused? That’s where you need to make a change.
READ
• Text-focused tips for creating engaging narratives for media-rich stories
9) A NOTE ON TRANSLATING SUBTITLES
This is another painstaking and time-consuming but very important task, I know from my own experience. It’s something that takes me a lot of time and energy in the polish edit stage. Of course for your rough cut, a basic translation for subtitles is fine. However, when you polish your video the subtitles need to be considered with extreme detail. An audience can listen and digest information much faster than read it — so if you translate everything word-for-word you are in danger of making it impossible for an audience to keep up and follow. Once an audience can’t follow, they become confused and switch off. So don’t think you need to translate everything literally or word for word. You may want to keep full sentences in the sound bytes for the listening Chinese audience but simplify or drop a couple of non-critical words or phrases for English subtitles for your reading audience.
Also, don’t have soundbite after soundbite — leave some ‘breathing room’ for your audience to digest and reflect and take in information at certain points. Make subtitles as concise as possible while still retaining the character of the delivery and of course the meaning. This takes some time, I suggest writing the script down in a word doc and reading out loud to yourself, work it for an hour or so until you are really happy with the flow and word choices.
A final note, beware of very technical terms that when translated an English audience will not understand. For example, one past student translated ‘Zuoyezi’ center, as incarceration center — technically this is correct — but Incarceration sounds like a prison! The postpartum birth center works better. If you confuse your audience you break the flow of the video and lose their attention, in most cases they are gone.
They will not rewind. If you are in doubt of words to choose, look at other news outlets dealing with the same topic, and follow their terminology. Or ask your tutor. If you give tutors a video script of your subtitles at editing stage in the future — already edited to the best of your ability we can also help to make quick changes.
10) USE MUSIC WITH CARE — NO BLANKET MUSIC TRACKS
No ‘blanket’ music tracks, please! Choose your music carefully and use it sparingly! As discussed in class you need to consider music way more carefully than picking a nice tune and slapping it on the timeline. Occasionally I myself do use a single track raising and lowering the volume at various points — however, if I’m doing this I will really carefully select a track that naturally has different paces and tempo throughout. Often, it can take a few hours of searching to find a single track that works. You might spend a day and build your own library. Don’t think you HAVE to use music if you don’t want to omit music altogether and go with ambient sound.
“It can be tempting to add music to every production since it’s such a powerful mode of communication. Therein lies the problem. Picking a track that evokes the right emotion is a subjective undertaking. Furthermore, the same music can strike people in very different ways. (…) use caution when incorporating music into feature stories, and plan to avoid it altogether for hard news.” (From Pointer)
SEE
- Music in Multimedia: Add Sparingly, Not as a Crutch
- Listen to how three different soundtrack options dramatically change the emotional feel of the same short film
11) THE STORY DOESN’T FLOW — USER EXPERIENCE IS POOR
Your reporting and information may be killer — but the way you have laid things out on the page and told the story doesn’t work. Maybe you didn’t plan well, and you didn’t have a clear idea of what you wanted to achieve from the beginning or more likely you did a poor job with the edit, or left too little time for editing and polish editing and really working with your chosen platform at the end. REMEMBER, YOUR AUDIENCE IS ONLY EVER GOING TO READ YOUR STORY ONE TIME. It can’t be confusing for them. It has to be clear and smooth, informative, and interesting.
Multimedia is not simply a mash-up of multiple forms of media. It’s a combination of mediums that work together to tell a single story. While you’ve spent weeks reporting and putting it together, your audience will only spend 10 or 20 minutes with your story. It needs to clearly and concisely communicate the most important and interesting points. Don’t try to tell your audience everything, filter and prioritize the information and only deliver the information that they need to know.
Once you know what you want to say, lay elements out on the page so the audience can easily understand where they should begin and how to travel through the story. Their journey from one piece of media to the next should be fluid — less is almost always more! How will you order you different media elements in a way that is seamless and doesn’t overwhelm your audience? Don’t expect people to click on heaps of videos. It’s your job to sit with the story on the page and make sure that every single piece flows well together, that one section transitions well to the next. Also, give your audience a good idea of what the story is about early on. They should be able to land on the page and quickly gain a summary of what the story will deliver. (See don’t bury the nut graph)
If you want your story to flow, you’ll need to do two things.
1) Spend time planning at the beginning, visualize how your story will be told. You won’t know every detail exactly, but you should have a clear idea and identify a clear inspirational example of the general look, feel and structure you are aiming for. Will it be chaptered or a scrolling story, identify online examples you will emulate and consider why are they the right choices for YOUR story.
2) Leave plenty of time for editing. You’ll need to edit individual elements but you’ll also need to leave time for making USER EXPERIENCE adjustments. Ask friends or family to view your story, where do they get bored or confused? Pinpoint those points and make adjustments.
SEE:
12) WHEN EMBEDDING VIDEO PLEASE USE A SELECT A CUSTOM THUMBNAIL NOT RANDOM FRAME
This is not essential for T2, though it’s a bonus, in T3 this is a must. On Vimeo this is easy, on Youtube, it’s a little tricker and you’ll need to verify your account.
READ
- This video tells you how to verify your account in 20 seconds
- Here is a video telling you how to upload a custom thumbnail
- For Youku, I don’t know the best options. Are there any other good Chinese video options — please let me know?
13) DIGITAL RESEARCH PAGES ARE OBLIGATORY, NOT OPTIONAL
Not having a digital research page will likely lead to a failure of your modules as it’s a huge omission.
Read:
14) CONTROLLING EXPOSURE (Video/Photography)
At this stage, you should be able to handle basic camera technique. If you can’t you may have missed workshops and have not put suitable self-learning and practice required to catch up. You will be penalized. Please speak with your tutor if this is an error that you are having trouble solving. I suggest reading your manual and looking at online tutorials for your specific camera model.
READ:
- https://www.adorama.com/alc/0013840/article/The-Exposure-Triangle-Ep-107-DSLR-Video- Skills-with-Rich-Harrington-Adorama-Photography-TV
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQw28-3LEU4
15) LACK OF JOURNALISTIC FOCUS
All stories need a clear and journalistic driven story focus. We have talked about this in class multiple times, the pitch/outline & nut graph sections of your production briefs are designed to support and develop this.
At this point if you are still struggling to understand what story focus is, either you have missed copious amounts of class or are not doing the required reading, and or rarely consume any quality journalism. You should read the notes outlined in the project form and look through the Pulitzer Centre examples. You should follow our Facebook page. You should consume more journalism.
Read these notes that I have put together:
• https://medium.com/immj-key-reading/finding-focus-and-writing-a-nut-graph-e61cd135b22f
16) VIDEO TELLS BUT DOESN’T SHOW
We make it very clear that you must from the outset select stories and projects which have the potential for strong visuals. Ideally, there should be some live action — in other words, you should capture events as they are actually happening.
You should only produce a ‘Talking Head’ film, a video-driven by interview if you have purposefully chosen to do that. Not simply because of a lack of b-roll through a lack of thought or planning. You can see some examples of intentional talking head videos here.
There are other exceptions too like narrated explainers or visual essays. However, for most types of video, from character-driven narratives to short-form news documentaries, you are expected to have strong relevant visuals and b-roll sequences. Stories with weak visuals will be heavily penalized and in some cases may fail. If your story has no visual potential you shouldn’t have selected it or you must find a way to make it visually engaging.
Disclaimer: IMMJMA projects are diverse, there may be times when talking heads are the best choice. If taking this style, discuss it with your tutors.
SEE:
- https://shorthand.com/the-craft/how-to-create-compelling-video-for-multimedia-stories/
- utm_content=bufferdec1d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
- Listen to the MMW podcast Jonah Kessel & Online video
17) NO EXPERT INTERVIEW
In most cases, this is certainly going to impact your grade considerably, it may lead to a fail. This is a journalism program, journalism is about searching for and presenting the most accurate version of the truth possible. To do this you will need to speak to a range of people, those impacted by issues and those that study or have a reliable knowledge or understanding of the issues. In news features, both micro and macro stories are needed. You may have found a great character to follow and convey a bigger story or issue but you also need to arm yourself with contextual knowledge.
Secondary expert sources are great and very useful but we also expect primary sources at the stage of your Term 2 projects. That means speaking with credible experts. You might meet them face to face or call or mail them. If it’s impossible to speak directly with an expert there should be a good reason and in that case, it will need to be clear that you have read and cross-referenced plenty of quality secondary sources. Sometimes you might speak with experts and they don’t feature in your final report but they have helped to shape your understanding of an issue. This is fine. Finally, as you are student journalists your access to expert sources can be very limited, we understand this. But be creative and reach out to the sources you can and work hard at it. Don’t simply go to the easiest source to fulfill your teacher’s requirements — try as hard as possible to get to the best source. To find the most credible sources and to properly assess the information they give you will need to do plenty of research around your topic. This advice from The Journalists Resource below is excellent:
Mapping the discourse. On any important issue, there is likely to be a long-running debate with a set of established compass points. Therefore the idea that you can find ‘an expert’ who can explain the issue quickly over the phone is unrealistic, and so, probably, is the idea that you can find two experts, one on each side, who between them can do justice to the subject. Instead, you should familiarise yourself with the expert discourse on the subject. You don’t need to read everything, but you need to know what the major schools of thought are, and where the debate stands at present, and you should be able to read the primary material for yourself as a way of enriching what other people tell you about it.
SEE:
- Finding Credible Expert Sources
- The journalistic method: Five principles for blending analysis and narrative, from journalists resource
- Interviewing a source: Rules of the road; talking with officials and experts
- Finding Expert Sources
- Disclaimer: IMMJMA projects are diverse, there may be times when no big picture expert is needed. This should be outlined and discussed with your tutors.
18) WORK DOESN’T WORK WELL ACROSS PLATFORMS
Your project looks great on mobile but not on a tablet or larger screen or vice versa. In Term 2 you won’t really be penalized for this. At this stage, we encourage students to experiment with new platforms, and sometimes when being ambitious with new tools things don’t work perfectly the first time. However, in Term 3 you will be typically be penalized for this problem. In a world where many people consume most news on their mobile, unless there’s a good reason for stories not to display well across various screen sizes they should. You have much more time to iron out platform issues in T3 so we do expect those problems to be considered and solved.
19) NUMBERS POORLY FORMATTED
The way you have dealt with or written numbers, dates etc in your work is not well formatted. Please refer to the BBC numbers style guide:
- BBC Style Guide | Writing: Accuracy with numbers and measures How can you make numbers and statistics easier to understand and more engaging when creating data-based content?
- BBC Style Guide |Numbers
• Please also round your numbers in a suitable way, you can learn how here
20) NO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY
Not something we’d penalise in T2 and not something we’d penalize too heavily in T3, but it’s definitely something that will catch bonus marks. By now you should have built up an idea of why it’s important to have some kind of a social engagement plan and of how you might drive some story engagement — conversation or distribution etc through social channels.
SEE:
21) YOU MADE A GRAPHIC JUST TO CHECK A BOX (we can tell!)
Most stories can benefit some some kind of a graphic, whether it animated or a simple graph or map. BUT — make sure you choose the things to visually wisely. And make sure you choose the right tool for the job. There’s plenty of info on the infographics page. If you’ve made a graphic just to please us, please don’t bother. It’s not a school assignment its a piece of journalism with professional standards.
22) PHOTO CAPTIONS
Refer to previous guidelines in the T1 assignment brief online. You need to caption images in most instances. Look at multimedia projects online to see examples of how images should be captioned.
23) NARRATIVE ARC OF THE VIDEO ISN’T WORKING
It’s time to go back and do a paper cut. Have your nut graph written — are you clear about the point you want to make? Are there clear sections for conflict, rising tension, climax hook and resolution.
24) VIDEO NEEDS BREATHING ROOM
It’s important to leave some “breathing room” in your video. You don’t want to overwhelm your viewers with a constant stream of soundbites and visuals when they are supposed to be absorbing the message and following the narrative. Leave some time for people to digest and have purely visual ‘breaks’ where the visuals not the words are driving the story and narrative.
READ
- https://fstoppers.com/bts/these-5-video-editing-tricks-will-make-your-editing-faster-and- yourvideos-more-50565
- https://blog.pond5.com/11299-7-tips-and-tricks-to-enhance-your-video-editing-work/
25) YOU HAVE GOOD CONTENT BUT YOUR FOCUS / NUT GRAPH IS WEAK.
This is slightly different from the earlier sections; ‘DON’T BURY THE NUT GRAPH‘ or ‘LACK OF FOCUS’. In this category, it looks like the student has some great footage, some good quotes, and information and that they potentially do have a good clear focus. But they haven’t sifted through the material, prioritised and pulled it together yet. Therefore, things remain vague and hazy….
If this applies to you — you are at the critical point where your work could be edited successfully or not. You have the ingredients. Now you need to cook the dish. Be very clear about what you want to communicate and build around that. To do this write a clear and concise nut graph after reporting and before you sit down to edit. Maybe your nut graph is too broad or vague and or it doesn’t convey the news value of YOUR specific story with clarity. Please see the nut graph notes on the project form and rethink. Talk to a friend or peer. If you don’t get your nut graph right you won’t get the story right. What is the most interesting and important thing you want to say about YOUR STORY? — identify it and communicate it! What’s the story about and why should I care?
Think about how you’d explain the story to a friend over dinner, you’d quickly get to most important, interesting, and meaningful parts!
26) YOU HAVEN’T SPENT ENOUGH TIME IN THE FIELD REPORTING
We expect you in the field reporting. Online research is fine but for visual storytelling you need to spend plenty of time filming, photographing, and interviewing. Have you fulfilled the set quota, have you marked those days in red in the diary section of your PB?
