Soundslides from our time together in New Orleans: www.chezmitch.com/cpressnola1.
By way of illustrating use of narration and/or music to accompany photos, here are some images from the retreat Carol and I made in Gloucester: with narration (www.chezmitch.com/gloucester1) and with music (www.chezmitch.com/gloucester2). As with all intellectual property, if you're going to make use of music for something more than demo or educational purposes (such as this blog), you'll need to pay a royalty, get special permission or purchase royalty-free music (to find examples, Google royalty-free music).
If you're looking for a way to enable your photographers to simply display multiple photos online, without audio, Flickr can be a good option: www.flickr.com (free or $24.95 a year for the pro option with virtually unlimited upload space. Photos of you on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolbill/sets/72157600207734149/.
You also have the option of directing your readers to a slideshow on Flickr.Some urls are just too long and complicated to publish in the print editon, though, so you can ask your IT folks to create or redirect or, even more simply, just create one yourself at www.tinyurl.com. Here's the tinyurl for our Flickr slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/yoquvc. That's a shorter way of saying: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolbill/sets/72157600207734149/show/.
To display videos, YouTube is free. From the opening session in New Orleans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdSKhU0s6Z8. As Joyce gently (and quite accurately) noted, this particular video raises the important issue of quality control. I'd pin the reponsibility in this case on the camera operator as opposed to the equipment ($89.95 pure digital camera from Target.com ) or the YouTube technology. Trust me: with just a little time and editing, you can produce much higher-quality video than this.
Another issue is copyright, of course. Some TV organizations have made deals with YouTube authorizing presentaton of their material, but it's often difficult to know whether a particular segment has been authorized or not. Take this TV report on the Pope's trip to Brazil, for example.
As I mentioned during our session, quite a few news organizations -- including metro dailies -- are relying on Blogger and other vendors for the technology they need to supplement their own Web sites.
Dailies are using so-called news blogs to update readers between their editions (here's a good example from the Providence Journal: http://www.beloblog.com/ProJo_Blogs/newsblog/). Here's how a weekly (TIME) enables users to track stories in a particular niche (Middle East): http://time-blog.com/middle_east/. And here's a discussion of this new story form by my Poynter colleague Leann Frola: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=121679.
Anyway, hope these ideas and links are helpful. If you'd like to set up a Blogger.com page (free) so you'd be ready on short notice, just let me know and I'd be glad to give you a hand with that or anything else mentioned above. Good luck, everybody.
All best,
Bill
