Ryan James Loew

So I’ve been told by two separate friends that this blog is horribly out of date. It is, and I apologize. I’ve been busy. (Not an excuse.. I know).

About a month ago I started work as a Mobile Journalist at the Lansing State Journal in Michigan. From day one, it’s been exciting. I’ve helped with coverage of homicides, state shutdowns, GM strikes, more murder, tornadoes, a 900-lb man being removed from his home (don’t ask), and any other general mayhem that happens in Mid-Michigan. It’s been fun. And I’ve been producing a lot of video/multimedia. So stay tuned.

My last video piece during my ten weeks at the Star. Here’s the story that accompanies it.

All in all, I’m happy with the amount of multimedia I was able to do while I was there, considering the fact that I also was responsible for covering a beat and writing at least a story a day. I’m also glad that I was assigned to a bureau writing for a community section. While I wasn’t handed huge A1 assignments, I was given the opportunity to find my own stories, write about people in a small community and then say to my editor, “You know, some video would be great with this.” And he was receptive and eager about it.

As one of my last story assignments for the Star, I covered a dedication ceremony for a newly built elementary school. Parents and students got to tour the building, and everyone seemed pretty excited. I made some photos, seen below, and wrote this story.

I’ve been on a video kick lately at the Star. Here’s the latest, a profile of a 90-year-old mechanic from Brownsburg, Ind.

This video, for the Star, accompanies this story.

Here’s a story I did recently for the Star about the Hendricks County Fair Queen Contest. I also shot some video, found here on indystar.com, or you can just watch it here:

Took these photos before interviewing Pastor Karen Devaisher of the Avon United Methodist Church for this story.

So, I did this story about a stellar local athlete for The Star a little bit ago, and I also shot some video. Here it is:

Thought I might as well post the links to some podcasts I did for stateronline.com. No one really taught me how to create a podcast. I basically dove in and figured out what worked and what didn’t through trial and error. I recorded using a little Olympus digital recorder and a Shure SM58 mic. I edited with Garageband.

It’s funny because if you listen to each of them from the bottom up, you can literally hear me learning more about audio. And something weird happened with the Bob Saget one, perhaps when uploaded to stateronline’s back end. Anyways, enjoy.

An audio slideshow I did for indystar.com:

I shot this to accompany a story I did about a park in Avon, Indiana. I went out to get a couple photos, but I ended taking the extra time for the slideshow.

So I was at my parent’s house last night, had some free time, and I decided to make a quick slideshow of some of my photos using Garageband and iMovie.

It’s mostly stuff I took recently on May 4th mixed in with old stuff from a photo journalism class and stater.you photos. I like profile shots.

Music is “As Serious as Your Life” by Four Tet. Enjoy.

Ward-by-Ward is a multimedia project I did during the last two weeks of the spring 2007 semester with Barb Hipsman’s Reporting Public Affairs course.

Throughout the semester, the more than 20 reporters in the class had been covering each of Kent’s six electoral wards. As the semester came to a close, they also started interviewing residents for short, non-traditional feature stories and taking photos of their neighborhoods.

We then decided it would be interesting if we put those interviews and photos together for a map-based multimedia project.

The reporters provided the photos and the vignettes, and I sat down with members of each team to record them talking about their wards and then combined that audio with the pictures in Soundslides.

Are there things I could add or change? Absolutely. I’d add audio and video of the residents. I’ve like to add reader-submitted photos, stories, audio and video. But for the time limit we had to start the project, I’m happy with it.

And I do mean start this project. Other Stater staff members, I hope, will continue to add to this project.

Stater.you is a multimedia project I created that’s based on a simple premise: There are well over 30,000 members of the Kent State community, and we all have our own stories to tell.

And it can’t hurt if we get to know each other by sharing those stories. So every week from February to May of this year, videographer Mike Wieclaw and I went out to different locations on campus with a camcorder to talk with members of the Kent State community.

We then posted those video interviews online.

Much of the work involved was split 50/50 between Mike and me. We co-decided who to interview. I took their photos while Mike set up the video shots, and we asked questions together. Usually all we have to ask though is “What’s your story?” (Ask someone that sometime and see what results you get. A surprising number of people will talk your head off.) Then together we typically edited about five minutes of video per person down to about one to two minutes. Finally, I uploaded the videos to a player I’ve created using brightcove.com.

It’s all very fun and interesting. And suprisingly simple.