Gemma Givens, Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan and Charly Edsitty on the streets of Tabor, S.D., where they made multimedia productions of the tint towns annual Czech Days Celebration for the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute.

By JOE GRIMM

This summer, I saw young journalists do some great multimedia journalism that their classmates back home might never achieve. These students learned about journalism technology in some intense digital training environments. In some cases, high school journalists leapfrogged ahead of most college students. And some of the college students I saw learned to use multimedia tools that can put them into jobs.

Here’s some of what I saw this summer, some of it as a teacher and some as an observer.

The American Indian Journalism Institute
The Freedom Forum’s Al Neuharth Media Center, University of South Dakota-Vermillion

This 10-day program is run and underwritten by the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute. It has been held since 2001. This summer, Manager of Multimedia Education Val Hoeppner, from the Diversity Institute, flew in from the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center in Nashville with crates of equipment and, with other trainers, went to work on storytelling, photography, audio and video. One of the university’s computer labs became a digital editing room.

The high point of the experience was a day of interviewing, shooting and recording stories at Tabor, S.D.’s, annual Czech Days festival.

Alex Chudler gets prepped for video work by Sarahmaria Gomez, an instructor at the National High School Institute's journalism division at Medill.

Eighty-three top-notch high school students came from across the country and around the world to learn journalism. After several weeks on journalistic fundamentals of accuracy, fairness, ethics, reporting, writing and storytelling, they increasingly turned to shooting and editing video, blogging and photography. At the end, during Web Week, everyone pushed into new areas. In militarily designated teams, they tackled Web design, more video and animated graphics. Their generals ran them all day long, from 9 a.m. until after their 10 p.m. curfew. Instead of taking a break to eat at the dorm, we ate where we were. Some had as much as 24 hours of training and practice in two days.

The Asian American Journalists Association Student Voices
Annual conference, Boston
All students, who came with a variety of proficiencies, produced multimedia. One student recorded, editing and posted his first podcast — with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke. Another, who has had extensive international training and experience, beamed as she asked me to watch her first video.

All the instructors were volunteers. In some cases, their companies paid some or all of their expenses and for their time. Others simply volunteered. The newsroom was a generic hotel meeting room near the loading dock. Laptop computers and other equipment were brought in each morning and taken out at night when the work was done. It lasted for less than a week.

In college courses I teach, it takes one or two months to get in 24 hours of training. Chopped up into convenient class-sized bites of one to three hours, you lose a lot of time starting and stopping as, for each class, you boot up the computers, talk about what you’re going to do and refresh material you discussed last week. When you run straight through, the time is more efficient -– provided everyone stays pumped full of sugar and caffeine.

Understandably, students and teachers are big great fans of 12-hour class sessions. Marathon sessions tend not to leave room for other classes, either, and I’d be lying if I said they don’t talk a toll. We got punchy.

Key ingredients of learning digital skills fast

• Baseline skills or knowledge of journalistic basics are absolutely essential. Some are accuracy, fairness, clear writing, ethics and storytelling. These have to be introduced first and reinforced throughout.
• The right hardware and software are a must. It doesn’t have to be top of the line, but it has to work and can’t become an obstacle or a complicating factor.
• In every case, the real laboratory was the community, not some classroom. Those became training centers, studios and editing suites. The real reporting happened in the real world. The Medill cherubs ran all over Evanston, Ill., for stories. The AAJA student journalists covered the convention, the journalism industry and the city.
• Excellent trainers. In each setting, the teachers understand their stuff and conveyed it calmly, patiently and rigorously.
• Students who want to be there. Before you lock up 10, 30 or 80 students for hours of swimming in uncharted waters, make sure they want it. There will be a little drama, but there is absolutely no time for nonsense.

All this is just great if you can get into one of these programs, but what if you can’t? Know that the basics can be learned pretty quickly, though mastery may take forever. Know that a lot of the trainers I saw were largely self-taught and spent hours poring over manuals, reading and watching online tutorials or learning one-on-one from others, You can do that, too. You might be able to learn it in a high school or university program, but most programs seem to be playing catch-up. Until they get there, you may have to learn your journalistic basics in the usual way and pick up digital skills through your own perseverence.

But you can do it and start leapfrogging people yourself.