Stunt Journalism
I’m off on a blogging adventure. Check out Unlikely Passage .
The video on the blog is mostly from a Canon S3is which makes great pictures but produces really unuseable sound. This trip is a test of technology — I’m testing a Sprint Rev A USB modem which works great for sending video.
Good Newspaper Web Video
“Where’s the good newspaper web video?” I’m asked.
Some of the best newspaper video is not just video but a mix of video, stills, graphics and words. Some of the best is narrative; some not. Here’s are links to some cool stuff:
The Dallas News is doing some great work and is well along in converting all its still shooters into video shooters. They do good stuff almost every day. But their Katrina anniversary package is very moving: A Year after the Heartbreak shows that David Leeson understands that video – even when done with stills – is an emotional medium. Also check out Yolanda’s Crossing . Dallas’ Leeson has some of their good stuff on iTunes podcasts: Best Of, which includes Moments 2006, which is still on their site along with Leeson’s blog, which lists a bunch of good video. Whew!
Tom Van Dyke at the Chicago Tribune did this weather feature on one of his first outings with a new video camera – and instead of trying to do TV, he found a great character:
(And why can’t I embed video from any newspaper sites?)
Everyone knows about Travis Fox at the Washington Post, but they’ve got some other great talent: Drumline by Preston Keres has the rhythm. And Justin’s Got Game is a good hoops story by Pierre Kattar.
Stephen Crowley at the New York Times (who’s only been at it a year) has done some cool stuff with reporter Charlie LeDuff on their series American Album .
Roger Richards at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot edited and produced My Favorite Child, a moving story about the lasting effects of institutionalizing a child with Down Syndrome.
And some newspaper video doesn’t have a frame of video in it: Train Jumping from Gary Coronado and writer Christine Evans at the Palm Beach Post isn’t video but has nat-sound driven narrative.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Richard Koci Hernandez and Dai Sugano and the rest of the staff over at the San Jose Mercury News are pushing the envelope with their interpretive video, and though there are sometimes rough edges it’s always fresh: Friday Night: 7 Bamboo, a karaoke bar story by Dai Sugano is very different from what we’re used to and Richard’s solo production of Red Hot Rails, a Flash/video/still examination of the explosion of railroad traffic due to increasing imports, is great. And The Extreme Southwest is art, as is Richard’s essay on the the Seasons.
Lest we forget our friends up north, the National Post produced Eastside Blues as their very first attempt at video. The Toronto Star’s Bernard Weil has a little more experience and has a good Skating video.
UPDATE:
The Detroit Free Press is also doing some good work covering the military and Iraq: The Christmas from Fallujah video by Dave Gilkey . And the first Michigan Band of Brothers video of their training in the Mojave Desert before their deployment to Iraq. They also covered a Marine funeral, covered by two shooters (in the same video) in Iraq and Michigan. (Needs Firefox on a Mac.)
Sonya Doctorian at the Rocky Mountain News has done a lot of good stuff, including A Sister’s Gift .
Please, dive into the comments and add some more!
What standards should newspaper video have?
The judges’ decision to withhold awards from some web video categories in the NPPA Best of TV Photojournalism contest has caused a lot of discussion about what we’re doing in the industry and what standards we should have.
Looking beyond the abrasive tone (TV photog/blogger ‘Lenslinger’ and new media guru Howard Owens are having a Jerry Springer moment over on Howard’s blog ) the point that Stewart Lenslinger Pittman is making is not that TV and still SHOOTERS are different, but rather that video and still SHOOTING is different.
The actual points that Lenslinger brings up are valid: He says that the contest judges’ decision to withhold awards in some online categories “seeks to establish a standard of visual storytelling that transcends outlet, medium or format…. (consumers) don’t want to struggle to understand anything – not in a 500 channel, infinite website world.” And he says “With fewer time restrictions and a ubiquitous delivery method, the newspaper industry can indeed rewrite the book on video news. No one’s demanding your fare be as slick (and vapid) as what we churn out on the evening news, but it must be clear, clean and easy to follow.” Howard Owens generally argues that video can be used as a facet of a story — and it doesn’t have be THE story. Once you edit out the vitriol, both sides are perfectly reasonable positions.
Contests always represent lofty ideals. The contest winners, still or video, are what we should aspire to. Reality is always different. No one can produce contest-winning work on every assignment if they’re doing it daily.
Very few people at newspapers have a grasp of how vastly different narrative video is from what they’re used to doing. Good video storytelling is emotional and temporal. Newspaper editors try to avoid emotion and seek to capture information at a particular point in time. Newspapers’ stock-in-trade is providing facts and figures — something video is ill-suited to provide.
The web is a great publishing platform because story telling can take almost any form. Words, graphics, tables and charts, videos, stills, and who knows what else. But most newspapers have not yet learned how to choose which format to use with which stories. Video is new and novel for newspapers. But stock market tables, after-the-fact police blotter items, and check-passing banquets shouldn’t be covered in video. We shouldn’t be focusing on doing the video equivalents of 1/2-column mugshots.
There is plenty of room on our websites for both narrative storytelling video and for ten-second clips that show what something looks like. The problem comes when we turn what should have been a ten-second clip into a two-minute story. We need to develop an institutional knowledge of what stories make good video. Contests can point us toward that goal.
Who says web video has to be short?
Ya gotta love the internet.
On Google Video, a minute :43 of Anna Nicole being sleazy is trailing in page views to conspiracy theories at an hour and 49 minutes.
Of course the anti-immigration folks have 14 minutes of numbers.
All three have over a million and half views.
And here I thought 90 seconds was the key to web video…..
That any of these three are in the “most popular” category is scary. Notably absent from any of the video popularity lists is anything resembling journalism.
Of course, they’re way behind the five million views of another conspiracy video that’s an hour and a half long. (This one disturbingly opens with a notice that the material in the video is stolen (“contains unlicensed footage..”))
But really, we’re in a hurry after all: witness the six and half million views of a 13-second panda sneeze: I guess there’s some virtue to brevity.
Of course, while we’re on the subject of long videos, you can learn a lot about editing from watching eight minutes of crazy Russian climbers:
Pay attention to the transitions here — how they get from one scene to another. No, not the stupid pixelation thing, I’m talking about the way they let the action go out of the frame. This one’s got over 11 million views.
And finally, the sports video category is filled with long, half-hour plus videos.
So what’s better? Long or short?
Red Hots
Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Mercury News put together a great multimedia package about the resurgence of rail traffic due to increased imports. It’s a package that really breaks away from the newspaper mindset that a lot of us have. He did both the video and the Flash for “Red Hot Rails.”
Unfortunately, the newspaper mindset still rules the Mercury News web site template. A day after it was published, you can’t easily find it there.
What’s up with that?
If your staff produces something great that will draw traffic over time, make an effort and put it out there for the world to see! Many of the newspapers I look at regularly do the same thing — hide, fritter away, and lose great content. And worse, the special projects are in Flash and don’t get search engine traffic.
Shortly after “Final Salute” won the Pulitzer, it couldn’t be found on the Rocky’s site. Good stuff on our site disappears after 24 hours. At least Dallas’ Katrina and ‘Yolanda’s Crossing’ packages are still on their photo/video page.
C’mon people – the web’s not a broadcast medium!
Dream
Kurt Andersen from New York Magazine has a column about online newspaper video which succinctly sums up the possibilities of the medium and why quality is important in what we do. It is a must-read.
From “You Must Be Streaming:”
“The lessons seem obvious: Don’t do Web video if you don’t have anything interesting to show, and don’t compete with TV unless you can do something they can’t or won’t. In other words, use the medium.”
About Travis Fox, from the Post: “Fox sees himself as a sort of quiet revolutionary, eager to overthrow the ancien régime: “The possibility to replace television is in sight.”
And, “Ann Derry, the Times’ video No. 2, enthusiastically but very calmly says, “We are reinventing journalism.”
Making Content Pay, III
The New York Times, in an article “All the World’s a Stage (That Includes the Internet)” Thursday 2/15/07, gives a roundup of the video sharing sites which pay for content and traffic.
The Times article says that more than a dozen sites now pay for video.
They quote Metacafe co-founder Arik Czerniak: “A video has to grab you by the neck in about five seconds — otherwise people lose interest,” Mr. Czerniak said. “The maximum length is about 90 seconds.”
Think of me first as a person….
Roger Richards of the Virginian Pilot has done a two-part video about the subject of a father’s home movie, “Think of me First as a Person.”
Roger’s moving story combines old family footage with current video to show the life of Dwight Core, Jr., a Down syndrome man who was institutionalized by his family when he was a child. Dwight’s father recorded film and audio many years ago about the conflicting emotions of putting your own son in an institution. Now, Dwight’s sister cares for him at home.
Roger’s work shows the value of treating your subjects as persons first. Empathy and care shine through in this piece, making a video that will move you.
Great stuff!
Having a Super time
There are quite a few Newspaper Video shooters in town for the Super Bowl at Dolphins Stadium in Miami.
I had a chat with Matt Dial from the Indianapolis Star while we were standing on queue to join the Media Day zoo at the stadium Tuesday.
He is one of two shooters from the Star who were to do video from Miami for the paper. He was shooting with a Z1U and said he would have been using Firestores if the other case of gear they shipped ahead had made it to Miami. The Colts are a big draw for their website and the video (see “Fans party outside RCA Dome”) he did of fans after their playoff win drew 20,000 hits, he said.
Of the thousands of media in attendance, there were a lot more mini-dv cams than I’m used to seeing at pro sports. AP had a couple of shooters there and most papers seemed to have someone shooting video. Even Bloomberg had a vj shooter there; she was editing on top of a trash can the last I saw.
Of course, none of us will be able to shoot the game because of TV rights. This is a big problem that will have to be worked out over time. As more papers transition to using grabs from video, the restrictions on video will become a bigger problem. Even AP is experimenting with pulling stills from video. (See Evan Vucci’s post at the bottom of this Sportsshooter.com thread.)
Were you at Media Day? See if you can find yourself:
You can see Matt’s Media Day video here . (Needs Firefox on a Mac.)
You can see my Media Day video here .
Making good content pay
Interesting inteview with Brian Storm on OJR: Building a perfect storm of journalism and multimedia
MediaStorm publishes and brokers multimedia projects at a high level. They auctioned off Ed Kashi’s work from Iraqi Kurdistan as a flipbook project, with MSNBC.com debuting the novel piece.
They also produced Gail Fisher’s piece on the Navajo’s uranium contamination for the Los Angeles Times. The four-part Blighted Homeland on LATimes.com is beautifully photographed. (You have to dig a little to get to the multimedia pieces.)
MediaStorm is a popular site, featuring serious, quality photojournalism. Brian Storm from the OJR story: “There are a lot of interesting things about the way the audience is different. About 70 different countries hit our website. How do they find us? It’s all word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing. It is all viral conversation and its exact opposite of broadcast. When we launched on November 16, 2005, maybe 500 people watched our project that day. Today there are thousands of people watching those same projects who have never seen it before right so the whole time-shifting capability is really critical to this medium.”
