working cross-platform | Zack Anderson

“Good luck getting hired if you can’t work cross-platform.”

Chances are if you’re a journalism student, you’ve heard that just a few times, to say the least. But with other classes, extracurriculars and sleep (optional), you might struggle to find time to work on your video, audio, photo and web skills.

A truer statement has never been spoken.

Yes, working cross-platform is hard, but here’s three skills you can add to your multimedia toolkit and still have time for a little shut-eye (maybe).

1. Live-tweeting
Don’t have a Twitter? Sign up now. Yes, journalists can screw social media up and report what they hear without verification. But Twitter has some great benefits for journalists if used correctly.

One of these is live-tweeting. Volunteer to live-tweet a school event for your student newspaper. Professional newspapers live-tweet, so it’s great to get the experience.

Here’s a few tips.

Do your research beforehand. Find out if any people or groups important to the event have Twitter accounts. If so, follow them and write down their Twitter handles to have handy at the event.
Set up an account with TweetDeck or another social media manager. This way you can tweet, see if people are tweeting at you, see relevant tweets to retweet and respond to tweets all from the same screen.
Use Twitter handles and hashtags in your tweets. Remember that research you did? During the event, tweet at those accounts if relevant. Use hashtags if it makes sense. You’ll get more interaction this way.

Also, check out these live-tweeting best practices from Twitter itself.

2. Interactive maps
BREAKING: You can learn to create an interactive map (or other graphic) in Adobe Flash in 1 night. It’s true. I did so myself when I had a multimedia component due for a story, and it was 10 o’clock the night before.

My secret. This awesome tutorial from the folks over at Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods website. The website’s a project of their multimedia urban reporting lab and has a few other resources in addition to this one, which is easy to understand and definitely doable in one night.
My advice. Be patient. The tutorial’s clear, but you might need a few tries at the process just to get used to Flash’s interface.

Don’t have Flash? Not a problem – I’m sure your J-school does. So get to work!

3. Storify.com
Storify is like Twitter: sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. Why? Because you can create wonderful amalgams of text, photos, video, web links, Tweets and more. That’s why.

Seriously, if the web is the museum, Storify is the the curator. Students at your college are reacting to a college announcement on social media? Pull their posts, official university press releases and other related content all together. It’s easy. Like interactive maps, you can learn to do this in one night.

Just a few tips.

Use Storify to tell a story and not only to throw a bunch of related content together in an unorganized mess. If necessary, add some text between pieces of content to make it all flow.
Install a Storify bookmarklet/extension in your browser. It’ll let you add content to Storify stories as you run across said content on the web. No trouble needed.

What is your experience with these multimedia skills? Are there any other ones you think are easy to pick up that you would add to the list?