Creating a useful survey that entices your audience to respond, however, requires planning and time. Think about it: If a video does not captivate within 10 to 15 seconds, people click off. That’s for an an activity that requires them to just sit back, relax and watch. Now imagine how difficult it is to get people to lean in, to contemplate and analyze their own experiences and reactions as they fill out a survey.

Here are a few tips for journalists on creating a compelling and effective online survey tailored to return results.

Focus

Before you even begin to write up the questions, you need to ask what exactly you are trying to learn from this survey? Just like a well-written article or well-produced Web video piece, keep it focused. Don’t try to cram in questions to cover all the different angles of your topic. Pick a focus and stick to it. And be sure the results are presented quickly and in a way that will be interesting to respondents

Length or Time

No one wants to sit through questions after questions, scrolling and scrolling down a Web page. Once people realize a survey is going on and on, their focus wavers and they put less thought into their answers. So keep it short and choose your questions wisely. Ask only questions that you know you need answered. Each question should result in a data point that works toward goal–whether it is information on source with a particular experience or it backs or disproves a thesis. Here is an example of a brief, focused survey from Lives in Focus: Family Life Behind Bars

In other words, your survey should require minimum scrolling no more than three to five minutes to fill out completely and thoughtfully. Have a look at this survey on unreported crime. What’s the problem here?

Types of Questions

There are numerous categories of questions–from multiple choice to open-ended–that can return exactly what you need if deployed correctly. This survey, done by The Local, was a smart follow-up to story about a fatal accident in the community. But editors later realized the questions asked were subjective and very hard to quantify and map in a meaningful way. This survey about cultural diets, also done by The Local, was much easier to quantify.

• Multiple Choice:
  • Offer discrete numerical quantities rather than descriptive qualities so that you collect numbers that can be graphed. For example, “How often do you eat out?” Never (0 times); No more than twice a week (1-2 times); Often (3-5 times) / Daily (5-7 times). Avoid: Sometimes; Often; All the time. These are subjective qualities.
  • Make the choices mutually exclusive. In other words, people should not struggle between the choices or have several apply to them.
• Check Lists:
  • Giving people the option of selecting various common items or experiences will make it more likely that people complete the survey.
  • Make sure to give them choice of adding “Other” and a place to enter what “other” is.
• 1 to 5 scale:
  • Allows people to rank their experience, likes and dislikes.
  • Always keep the scales well-balanced. At one end is “Excellent” and at the other end is “Atrocious.”
  • Space your adjectives evenly. In other words, the choices should represent a complete spectrum and not leave gaping holes. For example, you should avoid: “Loved the event / Had a good time / Hated being there!” There are several degrees missing between “Had a good time” and “Hated being there” that could provide useful data.
• Yes and No:
  • As in all forms of journalistic interviews, avoid “Yes” and “No” questions.
  • Caveat: There are some good uses of the Yes/No question in a survey. After you collect some background information or context, you may ask a Yes/No question to categorize each respondent and then lead them into a separate branch of the survey.
• Private Info:
  • Remember to ask for a name and contact info. You’ll need this to verify or follow-up.
  • Inform people that you will NOT be sharing or publicizing the data in any way.
  • Use a Text box to collect this data.
• Open-ended:
  • You provide a longer text box to capture people’s experiences and perceptions.
  • Limit this to one or two MAX per survey. Too many open-ended questions can turn off respondents and limit your ability to chart or graph results because the answers often are not quantitative.
  • An optional, open-ended question or two at the close of a survey can sometimes yield great material to be used as anecdotes  or quotes.

Order of the questions

• Provide a variety of question formats to keep them interested filling out the survey
• Using the same format question after question can result in people answering without much thought.
• Make them flow in a logical order.
• Perhaps one question answers a question generally, while the next asks for specifics.

Presenting the Findings:

• Just collecting the data makes the page appear static. Instead, consider presenting the raw data in real-time as people fill out the survey. Seeing results encourages participation.
• Or entice participation by saying respondents will be taken to results page once the survey is completed.
• Is there an end-date on the survey or will you continue to accept responses. A deadline might encourage participation but it might also be irrelevant.
• Crowdsourcing v. Open-Source: Will you share the data in a format that others can analyze and manipulate?
• Is this a one-way experience. They give, you take? Or can the data provide a service to those who took the survey? Can they use that info to make any informed decision?

Final Touches:

• Keep questions simple. People should have to figure out what you are asking them!
• Make sure you are not passing judgment. You want to find out what your audience thinks. The survey is not your soap-box.
• Have a friend or colleague take the survey:
  • How long did it take them?
  • Were they confused about the any of the questions?
  • Are you missing an important element?
  • Is there a stronger logical order to ask the questions?
  • Were they interested or bored?
• Once you publish it and have some results you can’t change it. So get it right!
• Search Engine Optimized Title: Write a strong SEO headline that draws an audience.
• Compelling Precede: Write a strong intro that entices people to participate.
• Provide a time estimate: “This survey will take no more than 5 minutes to fill out.”
• Remind your audience that this is not a scientific survey based on population sampling.
• Who ever has the link can participate and those who don’t have the technology can’t.

The service makes it remarkably easy to collect and post video at breaking news or scheduled events. The Qik app uses a phone’s built-in still camera so you don’t need a phone with video capability.

Qik is free (though the app comes at a price with some service providers), works on more than 140 types of phone and provides easy upload to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. Videos are automatically stored to the Qik site where you can also generate an embed code that can be dropped into blog or webpage for live-streaming.  Cover it Live, a top-notch live-blogging service (see the DNJ post), can broadcast Qik streams.

Online video is making huge gains, posting double-digit growth in the last year, according to recent research. Some 80 percent of online news users regularly watch video and the expansion in video viewers on web-only sites is up a whopping 300 percent since 2008.  Qik offers online journalists a low-budget and easy-to-produce way to get at this market.

To date, Qik does not offer editing capability. However, the Qik Video Pro app allows users to zoom and apply assorted filters to videos. It also offers enhanced audio and a selection of different upload options.

Qik is not without competition, Kyte and Flixwagon being the two closest contenders.  A comparison in mid 2008 gave Kyte the edge on video and audio quality, but rated Qik highly for usability.  Both rated better than Flixwagon.

Qik, a Silicon Valley start-up that went live in 2008, aims to be the go-to social networking site for video. It offers all the social networking standard features for  video: Storage, tagging (and geo-tagging), groups, privacy controls and integration with an address book.

In 2009 Katalyst Media, an online production company co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, hosted 24 Hours @ Sundance, an online reality show-style competition, broadcast live from the Sundance Film Festival via Qik. To see Qik in action, check it out.

“Tools for Scaling Your News Organization” reviews a wide array of software from project management to calendars. The 36-page white paper provides a great overview of more than two dozen tools, ranging from meeting management software like Freeconference.com, to file-sharing apps, job tracking software, communications tools, sales lead trackers, and wiki software.

Each of the tools is thoroughly reviewed, and the report also compiles them into an easy-to-read chart showing whether a tool is free or paid, and then grading it on its usefulness.

Among the most effective programs, per the report, are Google’s suite of free software, including Docs, and Calendar and Groups, as well as Basecamp’s project management suite.

But the report also helps clarify when and why a journalist or news organization should use such tools, especially in organizing a virtual team. It also discusses how to introduce tools to a team, and provides an interesting set of comments from a group of respondents about how they are (or aren’t) using the tools reviewed.

The white paper was prepared for an October workshop sponsored by Knight Digital Media Center-McCormick Foundation Leadership Institute.

Download a PDF of the free document here.

You’re out covering a story, working no differently than any professionally employed journalist, perhaps as an intern or for a class assignment.  You’re upholding the same ethical standards, observing the same professional criteria, hoping to get published, broadcast or posted. Are you covered by the same legal protections as your professional colleagues?

It depends. (I know.  Not a very satisfying answer.)

It can vary according to the state a student-journalist works in, on the status of the student (paid/unpaid? state university or private?), on who the student is doing the work for (student publication or not?), and often on the law enforcement or judicial officer who is interpreting the law at the time. In particular, in the area of shield laws and resisting efforts to get notes or source names, students can get shortchanged.

The most notorious (and alarming) recent example of an effort to accord student-journalists reduced protection is the subpoenas issued to the students working as part of an Investigative Reporting class at Northwestern University.  The students dug up evidence that a man serving a life term for the murder of a security guard was actually innocent and transferred their information to the Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions (Innocence Project), which petitioned for a rehearing on the conviction.

The Cook County (Chicago) State’s Attorney subpoenaed the journalism professor, seeking course descriptions, unpublished course material, reimbursements for student expenses, e-mail communications, and the grades of eight students who did the investigating.  The professor provided all on-the-record interviews with witnesses and copies of audio and videotapes, all of which had been posted on the website, but refused to provide anything more.  The validity of the subpoena has been litigated without a final resolution in the Illinois courts.

The State’s Attorney argued that the students were not acting as journalists but as “investigators” when they collected the information, that they may have paid witnesses for their cooperation, and that students are not covered by the Illinois shield law,  which protects journalists from having to divulge confidential sources or the information they provide. A coalition of news organizations filed a brief with the court urging that the subpoenas be quashed..  In particular, they called the notion that students are not covered by the law “unsupportable.”

The Northwestern situation set off alarm bells in many states (there is no federal shield law for journalists yet), many of  which had struggled with the definition of journalists in their shield laws but had not embraced student journalists within their protections.  New York, for example, has a shield law, which does not protect bloggers or students; there are currently bills to extend the law’s coverage to bloggers and there has been discussion, but no action, on protecting students.  Maryland, which was the first state to enact a shield law, in 1896, passed a bill in April as a reaction to the Northwestern case to protect students – becoming the first state to expressly include students in its law.

Another recent case, also involving Northwestern, is a bit more encouraging to student-journalists. While a graduate student at Northwestern, Carolyn Nielsen investigated and reported on the murder conviction of Thaddeus Jimenez.  After two witnesses recanted their original testimony, and with help from the university’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, the conviction was overturned.  When Jimenez sued the Chicago Police Department for wrongful arrest, the officers subpoenaed Nielsen’s notes and correspondence with the defendant. A federal judge in Seattle, where Nielsen is now a journalism professor, quashed the subpoena, ruling that the privilege applied and that “[a]ll of the documents were created with journalistic intent from inception, and culminated or are intended to culminate in publicly consumable publication.”

But, as you can see, it depends.

Two other areas of legal coverage where students and their work may be treated differently are access to newsworthy events and copyright.

Whether due to lack of government-issued press credentials, or just because they feel they can, law enforcement officials often attempt to exclude student-journalists from newsworthy events or crime scenes in a way that they would be reluctant to try with professional journalists.

A good article with some hints on how to politely but firmly assert your rights has been compiled by the Student Press Law Center.

For an overview of copyright issues, particularly those having to do with articles contributed to student publications or compendiums, see the Student Press Law Center blog.

Resources:

• Student Press Law Center
• For shield laws: Citizen Media Law Project
• Online Media Legal Network

The seven-part video – an hour in total – along with the rich assortment of examples, resources and tutorials is as compelling as it is complete a road map of the way forward.  Journalists ranging from the indie blogger to those working in large corporate outlets need to learn how to present stories extracted from the unprecedented amount of  data now available. That data may be collected independently with free and easy-to-use polling tools like Polldaddy or gathered  through sites like Data.gov and Google Public Data Explorer.

Here are two examples of data visualization presented in the documentary:

The Jobless Rate for People Like You, developed by The New York Times, allows viewers to drill down and personalize unemployment data.

The Stimulus Tracker, by MSNBC.Com, allows viewers to see where stimulus package money has been spent down to the county level and weigh its effectiveness. Viewers can also track where the money was spent relative to the voting records of politicians.

The idea that information presented visually and interactively on the web is a powerful way to draw in readers isn’t all that new. Infographics and interactive illustrations of events ranging from the trajectory of a plane crash to a winning Superbowl play have been around for years.  But growth in data visualization specifically has been hampered by the prohibitive  time and cost of parsing the data, developing the code and producing the final product.

The documentary does an excellent job of addressing these issues and the many other practical realities of producing and presenting visualization in a journalistic context.

In ‘Part IV: A New Era in Infographics’ Hannah Fairfield,  Graphics Director  for the Washington Post,  points out the importance of simplicity and the need to clearly present to viewers how to navigate the visualization. It’s also important to present the information in a way that is meaningful to those represented in the data.

In ‘Part VII: Technologies and Tools’ an assortment of heavy hitters in the field discuss the variety of tools now out there or in development that allow news organizations large and small to reduce the coding involved in producing interactive data visualizations. Many Eyes,  Protovis, and Flare are examples of software that offer templates to present timetables, charts and maps among other things.

In addition to their value as news content data visualizations have a lot of design appeal. IBM researcher Marten Wattenberg acknowledges that while stream graphs like ‘The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008‘ are beautiful and effectively draw readers in, in reality they may not provide much depth of information. In the news world there is often a trade-off between design, approachability, deadlines and the actual information contained in a graphic.

In ‘Part VI: Exploring Data’ the documentary hones in on a topic that comes up throughout: the need to contextualize data and to give it narrative structure — the need to tell compelling stories with the data. Award-winning New York Times designer Amanda Cox along with others acknowledge the difficulty in striking a balance between allowing users to personalize data and draw their own conclusions while also providing the kind of narrative context that makes the information valuable journalism in the first place.

This may endure as data visualizations most vexing challenge.

When fully adopted, HTML5 could dramatically change how interactive graphics will be designed and used on the web. Most interactive content today is build and presented in Adobe Flash, a third-party, proprietary plugin. Flash videos and interactives don’t work on the Apple iPad or iPhone, two devices that are changing how users access web content,  because Flash isn’t packaged with the browser, nor can it be installed by the end user.

Key Elements of HTML5

• New, more semantic markup elements. HTML5 introduces new markup elements which will make it easier for search engines and other bots to better understand the structure of your web page, potentially improving search engine optimization (SEO). These elements include <article>, <aside>, <section>, <summary>, <header> and <footer>.
• Native support for audio and video. Previously, to play audio, video, or interactives in the browser, the end user would need to rely on third-party plugins. The goal of HTML5 is to have browsers support basic media without the use of Flash, Quicktime, Real Player, or Silverlight.
• Canvas: “a rectangle on your page where you can draw anything you want.” After native support for audio and video, Canvas gives Flash the biggest run for its money because it makes all sorts of animations, infographics, and interactives possible.
• Geolocation. Any web application can now access the user’s location through the browser. On a desktop, this is through IP or wifi hotspot lookup but on mobile this is generally by GPS, which can be significantly more accurate.

HTML5′s Implications for Interactive Journalists

The best demonstration of HTML5′s capabilities is a proof of concept music video produced by Arcade Fire and Google. Load the link in Chrome, Google’s latest browser, and pay attention to different pieces of the interactive experience. In particular, watch the graphical content being rendered in real-time over media elements, as well as all of the different ways the user can interact with the application.

You can also test how well your browser supports various parts of the HTML5 specification. As of September 2010, Chrome scores 217, Firefox scores 139, and Safari scores 208. The biggest opportunity with HTML5, having all modern browsers fully implement the standard, is also its biggest challenge. For HTML5 (and CSS and Javascript) to become the dominate tool for interactive journalism, it needs to ensure developers that the user experience will be consistent cross-platform.

Whether we’re looking for one-offs contributions or trying to develop an ongoing relationship with someone in the community, the overarching reality at the Local (and most hyperlocal projects) is that we don’t pay contributors. The challenge then is to find what will motivate a community member to spend his or her own precious time producing pieces for no pay. The journalist becomes much like a psychologist, probing for clues as to what will make a community member contribute. This really isn’t so different from when reporters have to find the one persuasive argument that will hopefully open up a reluctant source.

Here’s a list of a few motivations we have tapped over the past few months to fill the site with community contributions:

• The Glory – People love to see their name in a byline (especially when it’s on NYTimes.com) and they want to share their posts with family, friends and colleagues. That’s one of the primary motivations. We realized just how important the glory is for people when we tweaked our system by introducing a distinction between CUNY J-School student and community bylines. This small change broke the links to longtime contributors’ work making it harder for them to share. As one contributor reminded us when urging us to fix the coding problem quickly, the byline and all the attention it brings is a crucial incentive when working for free.

• Publicity – Authors, store owners, community groups and others traditionally speak to the press when they want to publicize or advance their interests. The only twist at the hyperlocal level is that we try to engage these people to contribute. Take the case of the Garden Notes posts, which gives the newly established Greene Hill School an opportunity to showcase their programs and offerings.

• Google Juice – Having incoming links from a major site like NYTimes.com to your business or personal web site does wonders for your Google ranking. Myryah Irby produces the Local Locals feature in which she stops and interviews a person in the neighborhood for a Q&A while her husband Kevin snaps a portrait of the subject. When Myryah stopped by one of our classes as a guest she mentioned that her husband’s photography web site has steadily risen in the Google ranking because of growing number of links via NYTimes.com.

While a growth in hyperlocal advertising may at some point raise enough revenues to pay some regular contributors, right now links–and the publicity and glory they bring–remain the fair trade currency of the Web with which to motivate community contributors.

To host an event the user (or users) need only sign up, log in and schedule a show time. Cover it Live then generates the highly functional console shown below and an embed code for the event that can be placed in a blog or webpage.

Filterable IM chat with links and photos is only the beginning. Cover it Live cans stream video with the help of services such as Livestream and Qik. It also offers a Youtube quick link, supports Twitter and has an iPhone app. As if that’s not enough, there is a built-in polling feature and running stats on viewership.

So how does the reader see your live event? After you place the embed code in your blog the IM-like window shown below will appear. Content administered by you appears immediately without refreshing and the reader need never leave your site.

After the live event is over Cover it Live will generate an archived version that includes links and photos.

Some other very practical features of the tool are the tutorial demos and the ability to host a practice event that allows new users to become familiar with the tool before going live. The site also showcases several live performances so you can see it at work.

Check it out.

1. Don’t keep your distance.

Fight the urge to sit a few rows away from the speaker or shy away from the subject. You’d want to get as close to the action as possible if you showed up at a presser with a large camera, and you should use the same approach with the Flipcam. First, realize that audio quality really suffers if you’re more than five feet away from whatever you’re filming (as you can tell with the example vid below). You can also tell that the greater the distance from your subject, the harder it is to read words. So sit in the front row. Don’t be shy.

Tip 1: Don’t keep your distance. from DNJournalist on Vimeo.

2. Be careful what you zoom for.

The zoom on the Flipcam isn’t much to speak of (the full, unimpressive range of it is shown in the video below). The clip starts with a really blurry subject, and soon you’ll see how crisp the image gets when you zoom out. And what good did the zoom do anyway? It doesn’t help with the audio, and really just detracts from having a proper visual. Practice a bit before the event begins to get a feel for what the best framing and zoom level is for your need. And remember that a shaky hand is more noticeable when you zoom in, too.

Tip 2: Be careful what you zoom for from DNJournalist on Vimeo.

3. Listen for background noise. Then run from it.

The sound from the interview shown in the clip below is pretty much ideal… except for the sounds of a keg in transport punctuating the subject’s every sentence. It’s really quite distracting. If you can, move the interviewee to down the street or wait a few minutes until background distractions cease. There’s nothing worse than ruining a good sound bite with a hammer.

Tip 3: Listen for background noise. Then run from it. from DNJournalist on Vimeo.

4. Chase the action.

Juggling an interview and the Flipcam can be a challenge. My first instinct was to try to maintain eye contact with the interviewee while occasionally glancing at the screen to see how the filming was going. Inevitably, my arm would shift for a moment and lose half the person’s face, or my subject would move and I’d be focused on a very clean wall. Since then, I’ve learned to watch the screen like a hawk and to follow what’s happening through the screen. Otherwise, the subject can slip out of the framing you’re looking for. The clip shows how to follow your interview.

Tip 4: Chase the action from DNJournalist on Vimeo.

5. Stabilize

But while you’re out chasing the action, try to keep steady. Use your elbow as a kind of tripod by resting it on a surface or holding it with your other hand to keep the shot steady. I’ve turned the audio down on this clip so you can see how distracting it is to have an unsupported shot. If you have a chance to steady your hand, use it.

Tip 5: Stabilize from DNJournalist on Vimeo.

Photoshop remains the top photo editing and graphics program for pros. Among the newest version’s most notable features is the Content-aware Fill Tool, demonstrated here, which allows users to remove unwanted elements from an image as effortlessly as the result is seamless.

For photojournalism the implications of this tool are pretty chilling. Not because digital manipulation of photographs is anything new, but because CS5 makes it just so darn easy.

In 2005 Stephen Colbert introduced the term “truthiness” during the debut episode of the Comedy Channel’s Colbert Report to describe much of the political dialogue in and media coverage of Washington DC. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary made truthiness its  Word of the Year in 2006.

In a New York magazine interview Colbert described truthiness this way: “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist.”

For visual journalism does CS5 mark a leap forward in the advance of “realishness?”

Sure, images were manipulated long before Thomas Kroll, a graduate student at the University of Michigan at the time, invented Photoshop so he could view grayscale images on his Mac Plus. What’s at issue is the proliferation of manipulated images and the impact on credibility among a public already skeptical of what it sees in the media.

Just last month, before the current version of CS5’s release, World Press Photo disqualified 2010 third-place winner Ukrainian photographer Stepan Rudik from its annual competition for digitally manipulating an image.

The World Press Photo rules state: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.” But what does “accepted standards” mean? They vary a lot based on publication type, topic and nation of origin. It’s worth noting that the image was not disqualified for its radical crop or the high contrast black & white toning, but for the removal of a compositionally distracting foot from the background.

Another humdinger of recent memory is a photo filed by Los Angeles Times staff photographer Brian Walski in 2003, who was covering Basra during the Iraq War. Walski joined two images together and submitted the final product as a single photo. He was fired as a result.

Ethical guidelines from the L.A. Times (available as PDF here) are much more explicit than the WPP’s: “We do not add color, create photomontages, remove objects or flop images. We do not digitally alter images beyond making minor adjustments for color correction, exposure correction and removal of dust spots or scratches required to ensure faithful reproduction of the original image. Exaggerated use of burning, dodging or color saturation is not permitted.”

Neither photographer contested that his image was manipulated. Walski copped to his bad judgment and blamed exhaustion and his desire to make memorable images of the war. Rudik maintains that as the “author” of the image he should be free to interpret a scene as he sees fit.

So what does the public make of all this? Studies that examine viewer trust of digital photography specifically, and of media accuracy generally, suggest that things are bad and getting worse. The core issues seem to be the perception of increased partisanship in the media and the growing influence of big money.

Yet at the same time,  people are capable of applying a very canny kind of calculus when evaluating the veracity of a news image. They assess the credibility of the publication in which the image appears and take into account the coverage of other outlets. They weigh the significance of the story against any controversy surrounding how it is being reported. They also factor in their own familiarity with the issue as well as previously published images they may have seen.

The take-away is that audiences can and often do hold top-tier news publications to higher standards of veracity than partisan websites—or  fashion magazines.

As increasing numbers of crowd-sourced images, images produced by semi-pros and images from the blogosphere work their way into the media — not to mention inconsistent standards among established professional outlets –  how are we to fight against the creep of increasing realishiness into the news?  News organizations and visual journalism educators need to establish clear standards that at the same time acknowledge the of the changing tools. We also need to promote dialogue about the impact of these changes on our industry. And we need to embrace transparency about process – especially when mistakes are made. Pretty much the same tools we’ve used all along — only updated to respond to these new realities.

While doing research for this post I was surprised by how many major news outlets had not updated the code of ethics for photography in more than a decade. Here are two examples of news organizations that have. The National Press Photographers Association provides some discussion and resources on the issue of digital ethics in photography. The organization Editorial Photographers of the United Kingdom and Ireland lays out a clearly defined graduated scale for understanding the manipulation of images, acknowledging purely editorial photo ends and where photo illustration begins.

What do you think?