Video strategies in the online newsroom
If you want to know why Colin Mulvany’s blog has become one of my must-reads, look at this post. Mulvany is on the front line in the newsroom at The Spokesman-Review, and he’s sharing his day-to-day strategies and decision-making for multimedia journalism.
I come from a still [photojournalism] background and have lots of experience shooting picture stories. Because of that, I am able to quickly identify whether video would work as a story. Word people don’t always approach video the same way I do. They see the sum of all the facts they’ve gathered as being the story. What they fail to understand is without strong visual components, you can’t tell a video story very well. I tell them: “If there is nothing to show, it is not a video.”
Right there he’s given us a world of wisdom. Here’s another:
I have a self imposed “No Epics” rule. That means when I am out shooting, I try not to go off on tangents. I force myself to define my story by distilling it down to its simplest form. At the Platypus Video Workshop, before we could start shooting our final projects, we were forced to state what our story was in one sentence. It is an exercise I use to this day.
In just one post, he’s identified almost all the antidotes to bad online video.
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