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How to get your sound in the cloud

A good story doesn’t just need a good narrator - on the web, it also needs to have its own channel. With online media, it’s about share and share alike: there are countless tools that journalists and journalism students can use to create and share audio files. But what are the DOs and DON’Ts of good quality audio journalism?

For professor and blogger Paul Bradshaw, actuality, debate, background, emotion and podcasting are most important.

I would add two more: accessibility and awareness. There is little point in uploading an interview with an exclusive source or a first-hand account of an oil disaster if your audience is unaware of where they can listen to it. 

We can record interviews on our phones, edit and upload them to the web within minutes, for example through Smartphone apps ‘Audioboo’, ‘Monle’ or ‘Fire’. It’s all very simple.

But one basic rule of thumb can’t be overlooked: Make it easy for your listeners to find your podcast. How? It has been said over and again: Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, and Wordpress are all good ways of promoting your audio and making sure it won’t fall on deaf ears.

Tools of the trade

Freelance journalist Marcus Bösch lives in Cologne and works for Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, where he produces the weekly “Blogschau” podcast. Bösch also created an entire podcast using his Smartphone and uploaded it to SoundCloud, a site where you can share audio through an embeddable player. The 34-year-old also teaches online journalism at the DW Academy and says his basic advice is that a podcast needs good sound levels.

He says: “Over-modulation is annoying and so is a podcast you can’t hear because it was recorded way too low.

“I am not a big fan of people starting to talk into a microphone just for fun. Those kinds of podcasts usually last for hours and you’ll never listen to them again. Apart from that it’s quite easy: Think about what you want to tell people and do it.

“Technology on the web is becoming way more simple. Just drag and drop and then you are there. That doesn’t mean that you can produce great work just because you have great tools.”

Bösche stresses that training is crucial - although, he says, it has become a lot easier to teach yourself the basic skills of a multimedia reporter, for example through Mindy McAdams’ blog and the Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency (download here).

Creating your own channel

Then there are the people who provide the infrastructure journalists can use to share their files: Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung are in their late 20s and wrote a book on trust in social web spaces (download here). The young entrepreneurs moved to Berlin to start SoundCloud in 2008 - the site now has more than 1 million users. 

Ljung is a tech-savvy sound designer who studied human-computer interaction and media management. He subscribes to National Geographic and New Yorker magazines and uses a Kindle to read e-books.

“What I’m interested in is the fact that a lot of new technologies have become available for creators - journalists being part of that group,” says Ljung.

“I am interested in how these new technologies affect journalism and to what extent they make it easier to connect with sources and gather material.

“The fact that journalists are beginning to share their files through our site is something we had hoped for. I used to work as a sound designer and created a lot of sounds for films, so I am aware of the many different ways sound and audio files are produced. They can be nature sounds, sounds of everyday life, interviews, podcasts or music. 

“We don’t want to restrict or choose what kind of audio files can and can’t be published on SoundCloud. We are interested in setting up channels where people can be their own editor and upload their own content.”

How does SoundCloud work? The site’s main function is to help people share and collaborate on audio tracks. Users can stream audio via SoundCloud’s servers, with the option of allowing their peers to download songs. One of the site’s main features is an embeddable music player, which can be shared via blogs and social media. The player lets users comment directly on a specific part of an audio file.

You can join the journalism group on SoundCloud to share your audio files.

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Flickr images from users Thomas Hawk and Chuckumentary

 

Tags: alexander ljung, audio, cologne, deutsche welle, distributed publishing, dw academy, marcus bösch, mindy mcadams, multimedia reporter, online journalism, online media, paul bradshaw, social web, sound, soundcloud,

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