Getting Started

This part of Multimedia Journalism is called Getting Started, and that’s what we are going to do – straightaway. We won’t spend a lot of time theorising about things. Instead, you’ll jump straight in.

In the book version of this chapter

Aims of this section

To give you core journalism skills and show you how to:

• Write a good basic news report
• Take good news pictures and create a still picture story
• Film and edit a video story
• Record and edit a podcast.

You’ll master the basics of spotting, researching, writing, editing and publishing in each medium.

And you’ll create basic news websites, plus a blog, and publish text stories, picture stories, video and audio packages to them.

In the online version of this chapter

Things move fast in the world of multimedia journalism

The textbook you have bought is still the cornerstone of the MMJ project, and everything it has to say about journalism is still valid.

But some of the examples mentioned there, some of the software and hardware, have been superceded.

Which is why this website is so important. It is kept fully updated.

Where there are major developments, we have introuduced new, web-exclusive chapters

There are new chapters in this Getting Startes section on:

• Social media
• Data Journalism
• Using HTML and CSS to code web content

Where there are very new developments, in areas where things are not settled enough to write a definitive chapter, you'll find masterclasses covering them. And this logo will appear to alert you to the new content:

And you'll find numerous ways to keep in touch with developments. So you should...

Keep in touch: Check out the blog, mobile version and Twitter feed

You'll find the blog that accompanies this course here, and the Twitter feed here.

The mobile version of the blog, with regular video updates to this site, is here

Subscribe to them and you'll receive regular updates on many aspects of multimedia journalism.