By Sherine El Madany
The Daily News Egypt
Cairo, Egypt
Hosted by the Los Angeles Times

It is hard to imagine how quickly these past five and a half months have gone by. It seems like yesterday that I landed in Kansas City and began my Alfred Friendly/Daniel Pearl Fellowship. I arrived amid crucial and eventful times for U.S. newspapers. I have seen first-hand how the recession has taken a huge toll on the industry, causing rounds of layoffs and shaking up the structure of well-established newspapers such as the LA Times. But it is tough times like these that shape and define the best journalistic practices needed not only to escape the recession but also to generate momentum for the newspaper industry.

The lessons I learned through my participation in the fellowship are ample: enhanced interviewing and reporting techniques, better writing skills, blogging, but at the top of my list is multimedia journalism.

In today’s digital age, the Internet has taken charge, and it is not enough for a print journalist to only use the notebook. Today’s print journalist needs to support text stories with audio, video and other graphic materials. This is one of the U.S. journalistic tools I have learnt through the fellowship and plan to share with my colleagues in Cairo.

In Egypt, Internet penetration rates are still not high enough to jeopardize the print newspaper industry. Egyptians are buying newspapers every day, and the industry is thriving. But as Internet rates are growing rapidly, it is safe to predict that it is only a matter of time until Egyptian newspapers reach the brink where U.S. newspapers find themselves these days. And this is where multimedia journalism plays a strategic role.

The upper level management at my home newspaper Daily News Egypt is well aware of this fact and has taken several steps to launch a new website equipped with multimedia materials. But so far, the process has been easier said than done. And this is why I plan to focus on training my colleagues to effectively use multimedia tools to support their text stories.

At both the Poynter Institute and the LA Times, I have learned that multimedia tools complement the text version of the story rather than a stand alone version. The key question is to decide which medium makes the text story better. Is it audio, video, sound bytes, informational graphs or a mix of these? If the medium does not make the text version better, then don’t use it.

Secondly, I’ve learned the difference between a video story done for television news and one done for a newspaper website. While TV news is about breaking news, cramming in as many details, facts and figures as possible and interviewing several people in one video; video journalism is more focused, more in-depth, more engaging, personal and includes only one of two interviews. The rest of the story relies on media sources: text, soundslides and informational graphs.

These are some of the lessons I plan to share with my colleagues in Cairo. In addition, I will conduct a number of sessions on how to shoot and edit videos for the Web as well as how to produce soundslides.

I will measure my success by sending my colleagues out on practice assignments to ensure I have been able to effectively impart my learning experiences. Afterwards, based on the best multimedia/video material my colleagues produced, we will conduct critique sessions and analyze which techniques work and which don’t. But the true measure of my success will be when my colleagues and I successfully complement our text stories with multimedia materials and post them online.

I plan to start conducting these sessions in November and keep the training going over the span of three months. During these three months, we will post good multimedia material on YouTube and Facebook to get feedback from our readers and to know how we are doing.

Undoubtedly, the AFPF/Daniel Pearl Fellowship is a lifetime experience that will shape my career from now going forward. From business writing, to blogging and opinion writing and multimedia reporting, the lessons I have learned are plentiful. And at this point my goals are to impart these lessons to my colleagues so that the fellowship thrill stretches to more than just to me.

My stay with the LA Times has been an eye-opening experience where I’ve learned new journalistic skills from some of the nation’s best journalists. While I’ve been here during hard times for the LA Times when several journalists got laid-off, I’ve seen how the Times is grappling with the recession and coming up with new multimedia techniques that will attract more readers and thus generate advertisement revenues. If newspapers in Egypt want to avoid stumbling into a similar situation, these rough times at U.S. newspapers provide lessons and basic tools for survival in the digital age.