JANE ELLEN STEVENS is a freelance multimedia journalist, specializing in science and technology. A journalist for 26 years, Stevens left her studies in marine biology for a career in journalism. She began working at the Boston Globe as a copy editor, and then moved on to the San Francisco Examiner, where she worked as assistant foreign-national editor, marketing columnist, magazine writer, and science and technology reporter. Beginning in 1986, she wrote one of the first consumer technology columns in the country.

In 1988, she founded GlobalQuest Feature Service, a syndicated science and technology feature service. The service provided articles to twenty newspapers around the world. These included the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Portland Oregonian, the Atlanta Constitution, the Orlando Sentinel, Detroit Free Press, the San Francisco Examiner, the Singapore Straits Times, the London Times, and AERA, Asahi Shimbun's weekly magazine in Japan.

For four years, she lived and worked in Kenya and Indonesia, where she continued reporting on science and technology, and expanded the feature service to include two science writers in the United States. She has traveled extensively, doing science reporting in Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Russia. She has been to Antarctica three times.

She has written for magazines, including BioScience, Computer Graphics World, Discover, Earth, International Wildlife, Longevity, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic, National Wildlife, Science, The Sciences, Technology Review and Vogue. From 1996 to 1998, she worked as a videojournalist for the Science Times unit of New York Times Television. Her video credits include: "Deep Freeze," National Geographic Explorer, November 1996; "Hot Guns," Frontline, June 3, 1997; and several science and technology segments on Science Times, an hour-long television series for The Learning Channel. While she was at NYT-TV, she turned the TV stories she was doing for the Science Times video unit into stories for the newspaper's Science Times section, and did the first multimedia reporting on the newspaper's Web site.

Some of her magazine and newspaper articles include: "Antarctic Ice," National Geographic Magazine, May 1996, "It's All In Your Mouth," Washington Post, August 6, 1996 (similar articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, BioScience and Technology Review); "New Project Investigates Mystery Deaths and Illnesses," New York Times Science Times section, March 25, 1997; "French Discover Unusual Vent Field in Atlantic," New York Times Science Times section, July 15, 1997; "Data Every 2 Minutes Are Fast Dispelling Mystery of Giant Tuna," New York Times Science Times section, October 21, 1997; "Burn Mask," New York Times Science Times section, August 4, 1998.

For several years, she has specialized in violence epidemiology. She wrote several stories for the clients of her newspaper feature service, and for magazines. She co-founded the Violence Reporting Project, which encourages news organizations to modernize crime reporting by adding a scientific and prevention, or public health, perspective. She wrote a book, "Reporting on Violence: A Handbook for Journalists," for California newspaper journalists in June 1997. An update of the book, which has been expanded to provide a national scope and includes information for television reporters, was published this year.

Most of her current science-reporting efforts appear in multimedia format. Her Web site credits include the New York Times, Discovery Channel, MSNBC.com, and OJR (Online Journalism Review). She is teaching the first multimedia reporting classes offered at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She has also taught multimedia reporting workshops for mid-career journalists, and does consulting for news and science organizations.

During her career, Stevens has received several awards, including the Associated Press Spot News (First Place), and United Press International Best Sports Story. In the last several years, she has received six fellowships: In 1990, a Knight Fellowship for Specialized Journalism in Biotechnology; in 1991, a U.S. Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Latin America Fellowship; in 1994 and 1995, National Science Foundation two-month journalism fellowships to Antarctica; in 1995, a mini-fellowship from the Kaiser Media Fellowships in Health; in 1998, an Australian Antarctic Division Antarctic Humanities Program Fellowship to Antarctica. In December 1997, she was Science Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Graduate School of Journalism. She is past president of the Northern California Science Writers Association, and an active member of the National Association of Science Writers and Online News Association. As part of her NASW work, she wrote a chapter on successful freelance writing in "A Field Guide for Science Writers," published in February 1997 by Oxford University Press. (Stevens' bylines before 1991 were Jane Carroll and Jane Ferrell.)

-- April 2002

ONLINE INTERVIEW WITH EPN World Reporter, April 2002

1. How long have you been a journalist?
Full-time since 1976. Part-time since 1970.

2. Where did you train?
I received my undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of Kentucky (with a year at the University of Miami, where I specialized in marine biology, and did research in that field). My master's degree in journalism is from the University of Georgia.

3. Where do you work mainly?
My career began in newspapers, beginning with the Boston Globe in 1976, moving on to the San Francisco Examiner in 1978, and then into freelancing in 1988. I worked for New York Times Television for two years (1996-1997) to learn video, so that I could make the transition to multimedia reporting, or backpack journalism.

4. What led you into the kind of multimedia journalism you practice now?
I went on a six-week expedition to Antarctica in 1994, specifically on a research icebreaker into the winter sea-ice ecosystem around the continent. No journalist had ventured into the sea-ice on such an expedition, and it was only the twelfth time scientists had explored that ecosystem. (It's a very wonderful place all its own -- it grows at a rate of 20 square miles per minute in the Antarctic autumn and serves as rich winter feeding grounds for everything from krill to whales -- but strange because it exists only five or six months a year.) I did print stories (Discover Magazine, Dallas Morning News science section, Washington Post, BioScience), and took a few photos. I went again in 1995, and took a video camera. Out of that trip, I wrote a story for National Geographic Magazine and did a short television piece for National Geographic Explorer. But neither print nor TV satisfied my storytelling desires. TV goes by too quickly, and can't capture the depth of a subject, nor does it address the parts of the story that don't work well to video. Print doesn't have video or animated graphics. The sea-ice ecosystem is such an amazing place that I wanted people to be able to explore it the way I had, and I figured that multimedia reporting would be about the closest you could come to being there and exploring the place yourself.

5. Do you encounter any resistance from old style hacks?
Alway, always, always. But I've learned to keep talking, thank the old style hacks for listening, and latch on to other early adopters.

6. Was there a moment in your career when you thought to yourself, wow, I'm a multimedia journalist, this is something new?
Yes. It was while I was working for New York Times Television. I had gone on a month-long expedition with scientists who were exploring every deep-sea volcanic vent site along the Mid-Atlantic ridge. These are breathtaking places where millions of shrimp live in total darkness on the sides of small volcanoes and gingerly claw after their food - stringy clumps of bacteria that spew from smoke- filled streams of 700-degree water erupting from beneath the sea floor. The researchers were making one- to two-mile dives to these sites aboard the submersible Alvin.

My main job was to gather video for a segment on Science Times, a TV show that ran on The Learning Channel. But I also filed stories -- text and still photos -- every couple of days to the New York Times Web site. (It was too slow and expensive to send video via INMARSAT then, so we put short video clips on the site after I returned.) And when researchers discovered a new vent, a rare event, I filed a story for the Science Times section of the Times print edition.

Sometime during the trip, a light bulb went on: my videocamera was my reporter's notebook, and I could put together multimedia, print and TV stories while gathering information about a subject. It also taught me that multimedia reporting had no formula. In fact, it had a wide range of characteristics that I was just beginning to understand. Those were the days when people said you had to write short for the Web, that no one would read anything longer than a couple hundred words. But the 2,500-word piece I wrote about going down a mile to the bottom of the ocean in Alvin, a six- foot diameter ball stuffed with three people and a bunch of electronic equipment was read by lots of people, as were the stories that were mostly photos with captions. We also made the site interactive, in that we arranged for readers to send in questions that I fielded to the researchers, who answered them.

As the expedition progressed, the stories became the No. 1 on the Times' site, not because they were better stories than anything else in the Times, but because they were true multimedia storytelling.

7. Can you give me an example of a successful story you covered in a variety of media?
The example above is a good one. I was so won over by multimedia storytelling with that story that I never looked back. I didn't want to do ONLY television, so I went freelance again, about the time that Discovery Channel's Web site was expanding, and I spent the next few years working mostly for them on a wide variety of projects.

8. What sort of kit do you carry with you on an assignment? Is any one item indispensable, and what is it?
The contents of my ordinary-size backpack, that allow me to send a story from anyplace on the globe that has a phone line are:

Sony PD150 videocamera with wide angle adapter
Sennheiser on-camera shotgun mic (the mic that's sold with the Sony isn't great)
Remote lav mic
Tripod
Apple iMac computer equipped with iMovie2 (for editing video clips), Photoshop (for sizing still photos), Dreamweaver (for throwing together a storyboard, if necessary), Illustrator (for simple graphics), and Microsoft Word (for text editing).
A couple of reporter's notebooks and pens, for old times' sake
Credit card
Add a satellite phone, and I can file text, still photos, video, audio and information for graphics from anywhere.
Hey, it's multimedia. The whole kit is indispensable.

9. What changes do you predict for the next ten years of newsgathering - at least from a reporter's point of view?
For beat, feature or investigative reporters, they'll have to be able to do what I'm doing. Daily reporters will have to be able to work with a team to produce stories across all media platforms.

Remember that TV series, Max Headroom? We're all turning into reporters like Max. Just call me Maxine.