Course Overview
- Title:
- Find Focus for Your Video Stories: A Poynter Tutorial
- Type:
- Video Tutorial
- Cost:
- $9.95
- Time Estimate:
- 11 minutes
About Video Tutorials
In a video tutorial, Poynter faculty teach tightly focused lessons on key journalism skills. Loaded with practical examples and instruction, each tutorial gives you tools you can put to work for you right away.
With tight deadlines and short attention spans, it's important to tell compelling stories quickly and concisely. In this video lesson, Poynter's Al Tompkins will teach you how to make the toughest job easier -- finding your story's focus.
Learn how you can take complex issues and create easy-to-understand, compelling stories. Using examples from news stories and commercials, you'll see how a three-word guideline can help you tell sharp, focused stories.
Once you learn this technique, you'll gather more of what you need and waste less time gathering information you will never use. And you'll be able to take a single story and tell different angles for different platforms.
Watch the free video preview
What Will I Learn:
- How to ask the question that identifies what your story is about
- How to use a three-word guideline to keep your story on track
- How to select key information to tell the story
This video lesson is part of Telling Memorable Video Stories: A Poynter Tutorial Series. You can purchase the individual lesson here or purchase the entire series.
Who should take this course:
Reporters, writers and others looking for ways to focus their stories quickly and use their time wisely to gather information.
Al Tompkins
Al Tompkins is Senior Faculty/Broadcast and Online at The Poynter Institute. He is the author of Aim for the Heart: A Guide for TV Producers and Reporters, which is being used by more than 70 universities as their main broadcast writing textbook, and the Poynter NewsU course Reporting, Writing for TV and the Web: Aim for the Heart. He is also the author of Telling Memorable Video Stories, a video tutorial series at Poynter's NewsU.
Tompkins teaches in seminars at Poynter and teaches at workshops and conferences on the road. He has been a presenter at national conventions for IRE, RTDNA, NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, Unity, NLGJA, PRNDI and NPPA. Since 1998, he has taught seminars and workshops in 41 states and four countries.
Technical Requirements:
This course requires the Flash Player 8 plug-in. For the highest quality viewing experience, we recommend using Flash 9 or higher.
This course contains audio, so please make sure you have your speakers or headphones on.