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Tuesday night, I showed up at MU’s Hillel center to cover an event. A group of Jewish community members were going to make their own shofar, a ram’s horn that the rabbi blows on Rosh Hoshanah

Earlier that afternoon, I requested a photographer for the event, but ten minutes or so into the Rabbi’s mini-history lesson, it became clear I wasn’t going to get one.

So I pulled out my iPhone and started snapping as the attendees began sawing off the tips of their horns to make a mouthpiece. When the rabbi held a finished shofar to his lips and blew, I recorded the sound on my phone.

I returned to the newsroom, and the multimedia frenzy really began. I told the photo editor that the photographer hadn’t shown up.When she was done sorting out who dropped the ball, she uploaded my iPhone photos to the server and I gave them some captions.

Finally, I headed over to the interactive copy desk and we all tried to figure out how to upload audio. Once I emailed the file to myself, changed it from an .m4a to an .mp3 file, and emailed it back to the copy editor. He added the sound  and a gallery of my photos to the story page, and we had ourselves a trifecta: text, photo and sound.

I only wish I’d taken some video!

Anyway, it’s one thing to read about the necessity of “backpack journalists” who can drop in and decide on the fly which medium best tells a story. It’s another thing entirely to get out there and do it yourself. Several second-year grad students have told me it’s a bad idea to take multimedia journalism and report at the Missourian in the same semester. Both classes are so time-consuming, they argue, you end up doing lots of things poorly and nothing well.

That may still turn out to be true. What I know for sure is that I wouldn’t have known how to position myself to get the best angle for those photos if I hadn’t just done the same thing for class a couple of days before. I also wouldn’t have known that AP style for photo captions dictates including the person’s age and location.

But most  importantly, I wouldn’t have known that my notebook isn’t the only tool I should use to capture the details that make a story come alive.