S.P. Sullivan, multimedia producer, shares insight

Sean “S.P.” Sullivan is the Associate Producer at for masslive.com, a Massachusetts-based website dedicated to news. Sullivan is also the multimedia manager, spending most of his time programming the site to work, filming and editing videos, as well as putting together any other multimedia pieces. When it comes down to it, his strongest advice is to network, as one's skills will go wasted if there isn't a network with which to share.

Sullivan only graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2010, yet already has a respectable position in the journalism field, and shared his insight on how he works, how he got where he is, and how a journalist's responsibilities are changing with the time.

Previous to his job with Mass Live, Sullivan was a writer and multimedia editor for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, as well as a contributor for the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Amherst Media. Sullivan's primary focus is on political coverage in the Western Mass. area, which he applies crowd sourcing to. Rather than putting up a basic story, he integrates a level of interactivity through video as well as actively engages the audience to present their questions and insights. This has met with varying success and candidates have responded to such questions with their own answers.

When it comes to blogging and his own personal agenda, Sullivan said, “Linking, I'm kinda religious about it.” In addition to being able to film and edit a video, he suggests that any aspiring journalist checks out Dreamweaver or Textwrangler to improve their HTML and CSS coding skills, as having basic knowledge of them can help vastly. He said that he learned more about building websites by breaking them often.

As far as his own success, he owes it to the work he did while still in college, but also to the people he knew. He seriously recommended networking and reaching out to the people in the business to get one's name out there and on the right track.

Over this past Summer, when a tornado wiped out Springfield, Monson and other nearby towns and cities, Sullivan immediately began work on the website to reflect the reporting.”I watched Twitter and Facebook during the disaster for audience feedback,” he said. His final product was a five-minute video that compiled images of the wreckage from both the ground and the air, as well as interviews from some reporters who were on the scene and citizens who experienced it.

Sullivan noted several tools he used to his disposal. One of which included the use of music. He actually warns against using music in a video because it can give a very specific feel to the story and tell the reader how to feel before beginning. But he made the exception to the tornado video because he felt as if it was fitting to the situation.

“When you only have a minute and a half, you don't want to tell people what to think,” Sullivan said.

He also noted a narrative arc, in which the beginning focused on the wreckage and deaths to draw the audience in, and then the eventual decline into a more hopeful vibe, where testimonies of being able to move on and rebuild life ended the video.

As far as equipment, he said that mobile is obviously important. While he has gotten use out of the multi-thousand dollar camera equipment he has purchases, having quick tools like a Smartphone has made things considerably easier for him in the field.

As for one final piece of advice, he said that while the internet is great to find out information and sources, journalists actually need to get off their asses and talk to people. The fundamentals never die.