The term "multimedia" describes any combination of audio, video, images, text and graphics, but as our feature this month on newspaper multimedia reveals, what resides under that category heading on many newspaper Web sites is just a hodgepodge of media, projects far less polished than stand-alone writing or photography. There are exceptions, and The Roanoke Times is a shining one. This mid-size Virginia newspaper (circulation 100,000) regularly serves up cutting-edge examples of the future of storytelling.

"Experiential journalism is what we're after," says Dan Beatty, the paper's director of photography. "We want our coverage to pull people in beyond just looking at it. Don't just show me an illegal immigrant or a disabled veteran; make me understand in my gut what it feels like to be them."

Staff photographer Josh Meltzer has done plenty of audio slide shows on such big, serious issues for The Roanoke Times as the area's Somali refugees, the roots of Mexican migration (for which he won two 2007 Best of Photojournalism awards), and the Virginia Tech killings. But every few weeks he also shoots, records and edits a lighter entry for the paper's Sporting Life series, alternating with another photographer, Sam Dean; Dean started the series, which takes visitors behind the scenes of nontraditional sports.

Meltzer's two-minute pieces for Sporting Life show how, when done well, multimedia can give a minor story a major punch—and total far more than the sum of its parts. Take his segment on a petite female rodeo rider, which is pretty gripping just on a visual level. Add the bull's deep snorting, the announcer's shrill calls and her husband's urgent narrative as she's flung off the beast's back—"Get up get up!. . .You need ice. Now. Find you some ice. You be all right. You be all right. . . ."—and you can't take your eyes off the screen. Or the Powder Puff series, in which varsity football players don makeup and cheerleaders' uniforms for the traditional homecoming match between female seniors and juniors. No photo can do complete justice to the absurd scene as fully as the sound of balloons being inflated over girlish giggling and male cries of "Hey! Don't take our boobs!"

The sophisticated, tightly edited segments are worlds away from Meltzer's first effort in 1999, the year he joined The Roanoke Times. Few were doing multimedia online, and fewer were watching it. After seeing a computer-controlled slide show at a Minnesota news photographers' convention, Meltzer had thought, "That's a pretty awesome way to tell a story. Somehow it was more powerful than what I had seen on TV."

His first subject was a shopping-mall Santa who sang Christmas songs, whom Meltzer recorded using a microphone hung over the back of Santa's chair plugged into a Marantz tape deck the paper had sitting around. The three hours of tape offered almost nothing usable: St. Nick moved around when he belted out his carols, causing the mic to knock loudly against the chair the whole time. "That was a learning experience, for sure," Meltzer laughs. He salvaged enough to patch together a little slide show, with the help of the paper's IT department and a copy of Flash 3, and posted it online after a week's work. The segment opened in a blank window, with no play button, "no controller or anything, with these tiny little pictures."

These days, he's an all-digital one-man band. Along with his Canon 5D and Mark II bodies and two lenses, Meltzer always brings his audio recording setup—a Zoom H4 digital recorder with four-track capability, an Audio-Technica shotgun microphone for isolating sound and a lavalier mic. The audio gear goes in a waist pack with the mic on pause. "That way it's ready. You never know when you might need it," he says.

He generally shoots first, alternating with recording natural sound. "I very rarely shoot and record at the same time, because then generally they're both half-assed," he explains.

While Meltzer has shot and edited video, and is intrigued by the new generation of video cameras that also capture stills, he thinks still images wield a different kind of power over the viewer's attention. Once he knows the general shape of the story, he will conduct and record the interview, filling in holes and asking the subject to describe what she was feeling at a certain point or to describe the scene in general as if to someone who isn't there. "I try to keep myself out of it as a narrator," says Meltzer, who admits he hates to hear his own voice. "I'd rather the subjects tell their own story."

After the shoot, he "storyboards" the piece, listening to the audio and writing down key phrases on as many as 200 snippets of paper that he rearranges on his dining-room table. Once he has plotted out the progression, he uses Adobe Audition to stitch together the audio and gets feedback on it from the paper's multimedia editor; he'll often ask writers and photojournalists to listen, too.

Only after the audio portion of the story is complete will he drop the photos into SoundSlides, a program that Meltzer says is so cheap and so easy, anyone can build an audio slide show without knowing Flash. The program automatically resizes everything for the Web and can be published with one click. "It's cut production time by a factor of ten," he marvels. "That allows me to focus on just telling a great story."

As more people get their information from screens, they simply don't want to read long stories, Meltzer believes. "Instead of being scared by that, think how you now have four or five ways to get a point across," he says. "I think it's an exciting time to experiment."



Meltzer has some useful tips to pass on to multimedia novices:



Shotgun mics are very sensitive. Minimize noise from your hand by sliding a mountain-bike handlebar grip onto the end.



Always monitor your recording through at least one earphone. You'll know for sure it's actually recording, and you'll hear things like hand noise or the air conditioner running that your unaided ears won't.



Think short. "Two or three minutes is really the most patience people have," Meltzer says. "You have the entire Internet just waiting to be clicked on, and the moment they stop being interesting, they'll leave. Put the 10-minute version on your personal site if you must."



Be patient. The general rule of thumb is that every minute of final audio will take an hour of production time, and every minute of video will take three hours.