Last week I attended the National Press Photographers Association's Flying Short Course. This was a two day course for members of the NPPA to help educate photojournalist and was held in several cities around the country. The multi city tour started in Washington DC and was hosted by USA Today / Gannett Publishing in their beautiful facility in McLean Virginia. There were some amazingly talented photographers who spoke on their experiences and shared some of their most well known work. A couple of the most noted photographers where Mary F. Calvert from the Washington Times, Renee C. Byer from the Sacramento Bee and Carolyn Cole from the Los Angles Times

The theme of this years course was multimedia story telling which is the technique of combining images and audio or video to tell the story of a person or event. There are multiple techniques but most photojournalist use the voice of the subject themselves to tell their own story. Most of the larger newspapers and now many of the smaller market papers are developing more of this type of content as a way to give their on-line readers a more engaging experence than what is available via print.