Charles Apple

Normally, I fly out of the SND workshop on Sunday. However, this year, my buddy Robb Montgomery, asked me to stay a few hours to teach a begining infographics session to a group of Egyptian editors.

It was the first time I had worked with a translator. That was interesting. I had never worked with a translator before. It slowed me down a bit.

I had originally been asked to provide 90 minutes to two hours of learning experience for the crowd. I ended up staying through the practice sketching session. I didn’t leave until well after 2 p.m.

The man leaning toward me in this photo is Tarek Atia, the media training specialist for the Media Development Program of USAID.  He ran things very smoothly Sunday.

At several points, the attendees mentioned that some of their editors didn’t place emphasis on infographics and, therefore, getting a graphic into the paper — or getting anyone to sit down and help plan a graphic package — can be tough sometimes.

“Unlike American papers,” one guy said.

I had to laugh. They just assumed that was a problem they shared only with other Egyptian papers.

They seemed to absorb most of the lessons of the day. My hat is off to them for their patience.

If I ever speak to an Egyptian crowd again, however, I’ll need to come up with another schtick to explain thinking well on your feet. These guys weren’t familar with Captain Kirk, so my joke fell flat.

Robb ended the session with a brief tie-up-loose-ends segment in which he taught the class that the simple procedures we urged them to use can be applied to other aspects of newspapering, as well: Photography and design.

The gentleman on the left in this shot is Louis Greiss, of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Journalism — kind of like APME, from the sound of it.  All the other participants deferred to him.

The attendees absorbed my lecture well and they asked good questions. These guys are most definitely seasoned journalists. They’re concerned about not only finding and hiring good visual journalists, but also how to plan and brainstorm good visual presentations.We set up a class project: Sketch an idea for a centerpiece. The subject matter fascinated them: This quaint American custom of banning smoking from buildings.

We had them decide whether they were building a soft package for their features pages or a hard-news piece for their news sections. After about 30 minutes, this is what they came up with:

That would be a photo of a man or woman at left.  Down the right side are a variety of statistics and factoids, but arranged in a way that would create “a beginning, a middle and an end,” the editor said.

I was amazed at how well these folks “got” my session.

This one would use a cartoon of Uncle Sam with a “no” slash through him as the lead art. Strung around the illo would be a timeline showing the strengthening of smoking rules in the U.S.

This one included lots of photos of people smoking. The items across the bottom would be bar charts made of cigarette butts.

This one compared the passage of smoking rules to a crossroads. Inserted between the roads in the illustrated would be vignettes of smokers or statistics about smoking.

This one struck me as most like The Virginian-Pilot. The circle in the middle would be an ash tray.

This one would be built around maps showing the strength of no-smoking laws in the U.S.  The sketch might not be as visually stimulating as the others, but it included some tough numbers in an easy-to-read, modular way.

They’re telling us that they might want us to provide further training in Cairo. That would be interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, Innovative ideas, Networking, Newspapers, SND/Boston, Visual Editors, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.