Multimedia & Executive Training


I’m so lucky to be old enough that I began my career as a multimedia reporter, sort of.  My first TV job was at WMTV, the NBC affiliate in Madison, Wisconsin.  Two of us would go out on a story.  I’d shoot my partner’s story, he’d shoot mine.  We edited our own material.  What ideal training for what was to come a few decades later.
A couple years ago I trained a fabulous producer how to use Final Cut.   He had produced pieces all over the world, but he’d never pushed the buttons.   Today, there are no newspaper reporters, there are no television reporters, there are no radio reporters.   We are all multimedia journalists.   And conceptualizing the multimedia project is far different than planning a traditional print or broadcast piece.
Today’s multimedia journalist has to do it all. 
I travel with Avid, Final Cut, Adobe Premier, Photoshop, AfterEffects, video camera and microphones.  I can train journalists, videographers, editors.   For government and business officials needing to improve their ability to deal with hard-nosed reporters on camera, my years of investigative experience really pays off.  
I’ve conducted successful training missions for IREX, the International Center for Journalists, Radio Free Asia and the U.S. Department of State in the Republic of Georgia, Cambodia, Egypt, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Israel and Kenya.
I understand the business side of things because I ran my own video marketing company for three years.  I got my online education riding the dot com rocket from startup to blow up with one of the finest news organizations during the dot com boom – APBNews.com.    We won the first award given by IRE for web reporting the day before management announced we were bankrupt.  Thank you Mark Sauter for putting me in charge of usability testing.  Boy, did that teach me a lot.   And it’s one reason I’m able to help organizations improve their web sites.
And thank you to Kent State University, a university that wants its professors to stay involved with the business.  It’s that attitude that allows the School of Journalism at Kent State to deliver the most highly practical journalism education in the state of Ohio.
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