She's the perfect example of how all the old school journalists out there need to turn their brains around. Pino-Marina is divulging some insider's advice on how to be a sucessful multimedia storyteller. She spoke today at American University in Washington, D.C.
The Big Switch: Print to Video
After less than two years as a newspaper reporter at the El Paso Times in Texas, Pino-Marina decided to take a chance. In 2000, she joined the staff of washingtonpost.com. One of her first big assignments: the Presidential election re-count in Florida. No-one knew who our next President would be.
The story launched Pino-Marina into a digital arena all new to her: filing audio reports for the web. It was the fastest way to keep up with the news that was changing by the second.
“We were re-defining what it meant to file a story," Pino-Marina recalls. "Print still dominates, but it was difficult to wrap my mind around that instead of a print report, an audio report would stand as the story”
A few years later, in 2003, Pino-Marina switched to the Post multimedia division. That's where she began to master the art of the all-in-one reporter, producer, and videographer.
"I’ll call it solo video journalism... the individual is doing the work of a tv crew," Pino-Marina explains. It wasn't easy at first. “There was a big learning curve with the technology."
Soon, though, she would be winning awards. While covering the funeral of President Ronald Reagan in 2004, she was in downtown Washington during an evacuation. A small plane had entered restricted airspace.
She shot and put together a report using video with police shouting evacuation orders and worried downtown visitors asking questions. It won her a breaking news award from the White House News Photographer's Association.
Profiling a former Nazi
As time went by, Pino-Marina completely embraced the role of solo video journalist. She traveled to Mexico to file video reports on the country's presidential elections back in 2006. The year before that, she spent much of her off time putting together a profile of an Arlington, VA, man named Lennie Cuje. The local jazz musician is a former Hitler Youth member who still plays the jazz tunes he loved to hear American soldiers play during World War II.
The piece (which you can see here) has interviews with Cuje and lots of his music along with old film clips from the war-era It was orginally meant to be a magazine-style article, but Pino-Marina couldn't resist the temptation of putting all those visual elements together. What does she love about being a solo video journalist? "You have a lot of creative control."
Secrets to Success
Pino-Marina spoke to about twenty graduate students in the American University class called "Writing for Converged Media". She's now an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland.
Her advice to up and coming journalists? Learn these digital skills that so many converged newsroom are looking for. And when you're looking for a story, she says,"find something different than what you'll see on CNN."
When you find that story that means a lot to you, don't let pressure force you to turn-in something you're not completely happy with, she insists. There's a disadvantage because of the web's insatitable appeitite for new content. Journalists, she says, are often used to "feed the beast".
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