Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. “Try to be conspicuously accurate in everything, pictures as well as text. Truth is not only stranger than fi ction, it is more interesting.” – William Randolph Hearst, American publisher 486 Journalism: Publishing Across Media Introduction “This is a great story, Max. What kind of visual are you planning?” “Can’t we just use her yearbook portrait? I don’t have a very good camera.” “It’s not the camera, silly. It’s what you do with it. “That’s like saying, ‘I can’t do math because I don’t have a very good calculator.’ The simplest equipment can create powerful multimedia stories, if you have the skills.” Scroll through your social media news feeds and count the number of photos and videos posted. Some are personal, some are political, some are funny or celebratory or sad. At least a few are selfi es. Our lives are rich in images. They appear on billboards, on the sides of buses, in advertisements, through television, in your textbooks and in your teachers’ PowerPoint presentations. We seem to trust pictures. We say: A picture is worth a thousand words. The eyes do not lie. I have to see it to believe it. These clichés show the extent to which we trust our eyes to tell us the truth. This makes visual journalism powerful. Visual journalists can take their audience to a unique place and a unique time, to a specifi c moment. With a simple image they show, rather than tell, a story. But do photos and audio recordings give us the pure truth? Not exactly. Al Tompkins, a veteran TV broadcaster and broadcast news instructor, explains that what our eyes see and how we perceive what we are seeing are two different things. “While vision goes on between the eye and the brain,” Tompkins writes in his book Aim for the Heart: Write, Shoot, Report and Produce for TV and Multimedia, “perception is a process entirely within the mind.” Tompkins explains our perception is shaped by our previous personal experiences and our ideas and values. This makes multimedia storytelling more complicated than simply pulling out a cell phone and releasing a shutter or pushing record. It requires thoughtful, thorough preparation to decide when, where and how to shoot or record. To craft an experience for your audience, focus less on the equipment you have—or do not have—and more on the skills and knowledge you need as you choose your media and create journalism that transports them. Photos, audio, videos or interactive graphics, when carefully collected and edited, have the power to engage your audience’s emotions. It is not that seeing is believing, but that feeling is believing. When we feel something, we are more likely to be convinced.