The right tool, the right approach, for video
Chuck Fadely, who shoots video for the Miami Herald, posted a long rant about boneheaded attitudes toward video:
The internet audience is growing and you want your staff — from the janitor all the way up to the M.E. — to contribute to the web product. Video! Let’s do lots of video! There was some guy at the publisher’s association meeting who said all you need is a point-n-shoot; let’s get ‘em for everyone. How ’bout the photogs? Nahhh, they care about silly quality…. we won’t ask them about doing video… We’ll get the web people and reporters to do video.
So the reporters start doing video. All of a sudden the story they used to be able to write blindfolded, in five minutes while doing the office football pool, takes ‘em six hours of work to get the video into their computers, figure out why Movie Maker keeps crashing — I’ve got 128 megs of ram, fer krissake! — and finally re-compress the file into the right size on the third try.
Now, to be fair about this, Chuck is a newspaper photographer. And he’s got a lot of experience, so you ought to listen to what he says. But he’s also lumping all those reporters who shoot video into one mushy basket. And that’s NOT fair.
The truth here is that video has a heck of a lot of facets. It’s like TV — you gotcher Planet Earth (pure awesomeness) on one channel, and on another channel, you have Cops, from that bastion of quality journalism, Fox.
Newspaper publishers, editors and owners who think video online has one easy solution are totally kidding themselves. Wishful thinking — that’s all it is. And simplistic. Fatally simplistic.
It’s exactly the same mistake so many newspapers made on the Internet when they started out, whether that was in 1993 or 2003. Looking for a cheap fix, a turnkey solution, listening to some consultant who’s just blowing smoke out of a place far south of his mouth.
Link via Angela Grant at News Videographer.
Technorati tags: video | storytelling | reporting | newspapers | journalism | online journalism | online media
I agree with Chuck when I’m thinking about the types of videos that I produce at work.
But for reporters who are shooting companion clips that complement their stories … They still need good training, but I think they should skip the $10,000 in equipment.
June 20, 2007 at 11:07 pmThanks for the plug.
I want to make clear that I’m not advocating expensive equipment for casual use by reporters.
I’m advocating something even more radical: expensive employees who know what they’re doing.
And if a paper is going to devote an employee’s time to doing video, the additional cost of semi-professional gear is a minor issue.
With increasing bandwidth and more living room appliances like AppleTV, quality will become increasingly important. Already YouTube and other online portals are making efforts to increase the quality of content because that’s what consumers want.
Quality is irrelevant when novelty is the driving force. But for long-term, repeat audiences we have to do better than most papers are now. That doesn’t mean doing TV. That means doing story-telling.
June 21, 2007 at 1:07 amGood points, Chuck. I have found that some people — and here I am really thinking of the longtime TV news people — think it’s not even worth it to try shooting video (or doing audio) with anything less than the high-end gear.
I butted heads over that attitude for years at my university because the TV and radio faculty were shocked, shocked, that I would even consider teaching students to use any equipment that was not “broadcast quality.” The result of such an attitude is that no gear is purchased, and people do not learn the techniques, and the organization suffers.
In my post about Jerry Wolford’s Ku Klux Klan story, I repeated his hope that someday he’ll get “a real camera.” But in my opinion, the footage he shot with a $1,500 Sony HDR-SR1 looks absolutely great.
I hear you about the living room devices, though. I don’t know if Jerry’s video would look good on my big TV. Maybe not!
June 21, 2007 at 2:08 pm