Convergence can be very messy and take up a lot of minutes on your cell phone.

This semester the photo staff of the Daily Kent Stater combined skills with Black Squirrel Radio to create audio slideshows. In prior year, the photo staff tried to create audio slideshows, but the photographers found themselves overwhelmed and unskilled to create them.

It was hard for the photographers to try to shoot photos, gather information for cutlines and gather audio all at the same time. The audio slideshows that were created had poor audio quality and were haphazardly thrown together.

Even with training sessions on how to capture audio, photographers still found it difficult to do both.

Instead of putting extra strain and producing poor slideshows, we decided it would be much better to use the skills of the Black Squirrel radio station.

Check out the radio station’s web site. Their staff knew how to gather audio and edit it. Why not use their skills and learn from them instead of stressing ourselves out and producing poor multimedia? So this semester we began to combine our talents to produce higher quality slideshows.

The first audio slideshow was a mess of mismatched audio and photos and uncommunicative staff members. After several tries at producing an audio slideshow, the news editor, Amanda Kelley, and I decided we had to make a plan.

Communication was the main thing missing. Without communication between photographers and audio gatherers the slideshows had mismatched photos and audio. In addition, although the audio quality was great, the audio gatherers had no idea of audio slideshows and how to tell a story with photos and audio together.

After addressing the problems in a meeting we were able to produce efficient and effective audio slideshows. Check out this link for the slideshows.

In the job field there is pressure for photographers to do everything – photography, audio, video and writing. I think it’s possible for a photographer to know how to do everything, but I don’t think it’s possible for a photographer to always do everything at good quality.

It’s impossible to take great photos, get great audio and get great video. At best a photographer could produce a good quality multimedia project, but not a high quality project.

For a long term photo story package a photographer should be able to do the audio and photos; the photographer knows her own story the best and should do the audio to portray the point of the story across. Check out my own photo story audio slideshow here.

Without specialization we will lose high quality parts to the project, but by using the talents provided through other media outlets we will be able to maintain specialization and high quality productions.

Photographers should be able to focus on their photography.

By forcing photographers to do all multimedia, the quality of photos will decrease. Although I believe a knowledge and ability to do multimedia is vital to photographers, a total focus on multimedia will diminish photography in the future.

Chindu Sreedharan, a Poynter columnist, said convergence is about layering. Even though he agrees some convergence is good, he still says that a total convergence will lead to second rated journalism.

Instead of forcing all the future journalists to do everything, we should collaborate and use everyone’s talents and skills together to create a multimedia package.

The future Mo Jo’s of journalism will burn out if required to do photos, audio, slideshows, video and stories. However, if a group of journalists created a package of photos, slideshows, videos and stories then the specialization would still be there and the packages would be of a higher quality then if one stressedout over worked journalist put it together.