Evan Milberg: Comm 361

This chapter focuses on telling a story with video. Your audience does not just want to read the story, but also see it. In Chapter 8, Briggs talks about the different sects within video journalism, its impact on the news industry, and specifically what tools needed to shoot video.

The Impact of Digital Video

The overarching theme in this textbook is the news media’s shift to more interactive stories. A common way of doing this is through video. With the advent of YouTube, everyone can view and produce video. This applies to any kind of journalist. Because of this, some TV stations are now video journalists – a team of two people who act as both a reporter and a videographer on assignment.

The expected quality of video over time has changed. Unlike the early days of video journalism, all levels of quality are accepted. An example comes when comparing David Pogue’s videos for the New York Times to Walter Mossberg’s videos for the Wall Street Journal. Pogue’s videos, which appear on CNBC, are painstakefully edited in order to be appealing to the eye on TV, while Mossberg’s material is comprised of a guy sitting a computer talking, often shot in one take. These two media can compete because all levels of quality are accepted.

Surprisingly, the less polished video content on news sites attracts a larger audience. This has caused newspaper to change their approaches to video journalism.

Planning Your Shoot

The key question to ask yourself when shooting for a story is to ask how will video help tell the story?

There are two types of video assignments – the documentary-style video and the breaking news and highlight clips approach. Documentary-style clips give you more control because you decide on what the content is, as opposed to breaking news, which cannot be manipulated due to the need to portray it accurately.

Some strategies to use when shooting (or even before a shoot) are storyboarding and mixing your shots. While storyboarding allows you to plan out the sequence of your shots, it does not mean you are confined to those shots while on location. In order to make the video visually appealing, it’s good to shoot from different angles – specifically wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups.

Briggs mentions that a video should have five different type of shots, known as the five shot sequence:

1. Close-up on the hands
2. Close-up on the face
3. Wide shot
4. Over-the-shoulder shot
5. Creative shot

Interviews

One of the most basic forms of video journalism is the interview. The first step in planning an interview is selecting the right location. The person you interview must be comftorable in the surrounding. Additionally, the environment needs to have the proper lighting and no ambient sounds. A good tip when interviewing is to focus on the content, not your own individual personality. However, this does not mean you should not be personable and engaging. Also, be prepared by having a script written and rehearsing it.

Equipment

Now, while all levels of quality are accepted in the field, it’s important to at least have high-quality equipment to produce your videos. Before a shoot, you should have all of the following

• Tapes and batteries
• Microphones
• A tripod
• Headphones
• Good lighting

Journalists have to know the technique of shooting video as well. Some good tips when shooting are to be selective in your shots, avoid panning and zooming (let the action in front of the camera determine where the camera goes), hold your shots, and be silent when shooting.

Many people forget that in video content, the audio is just as important as the video iteslf. You can use built-in mics, wireless mics, and shotgun mics. Built-in mics are good for sporting events and capturing the natural sounds on an environment. Wireless mics are better for sit-down interviews. Shotgun mics are best used when capturing audio among multiple people.

This chapter covers the fundamentals of building an online audience, specifically tracking content, web analytics, search enginge optimization, writing good headlines, and distribution through social media.

Track Everything

It’s important to track everything that you publish, inclduing daily statistics that covers how many posts you get per week, the type of things that are being written about, social networking feedback, and other user-generated content.

It’s important to track your audience as well by using Web analytics software. Services like Omniture, Hitbox, and Google Analytics are great ways to track how your Web site is doing and how it performs daily.

The things to be looking for are pageviews, unique visitors, and the amount of time each user spends on your Web site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The way marketing has been traditionally done in the past is currently being supplemented by viral marketing. Everything is found through a search engine nowadays, so in order to garner attention to your Web site, you have to know how search engines work.

Search engines do three things:

1. Spiders and robots are programmed to scavenger the Internet for new pages or new information on existing pages for search engine indexing.
2. The indexing itself takes all of the information gather from the spiders and robots and compiles them into a database.
3. Queries take keywords entered into search engines and look into the index for the most relevant results and then presents those results to the media consumer.

Journalists use SEO to grow their audiences. The fastest way the online robots can pick up your material and index it is by assisting them by creating links that link directly to your published content. Tags are another catalyst. The same methods can be applied to video content.

Headlines

The best way to attract hits is by writing effective headlines. To attract readers, your headlines must stand out, but be simple at the same time. For the robots indexing information, it is important that you select the right text, preferably  text that is repeated in the story. These keywords need to include who, what, and where.

It’s also important that while you are trying to attract robots to not SOUND like a robot. Use conversational language that occasionally has a bit of attitude. An article can be well-written, but no one will read it if the headline is boring.

Social Distribution

As noted earlier, the way to go now is through viral marketing. The way to achieve viral success is by targeting specifics outlets on the Web so your content is featured on every type of channel possible to maximize your audience. Make sure your content links to social networks, blogs, video and photo sites like YouTube and Flickr, and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.

This chapter focuses on the interactivity of news that has been touched upon in previous chapters. The challenge in making journalism interactive is balancing objectivity and journalistic credibility with informality of conversation. There are also legal and ethical issues that come with people publishing anything they want and ignoring copyright laws. Finally, how do you attract an audience that is too apathetic to participate?

News as a Conversation

Most journalists would rather speak AT their audience as opposed to WITH their audience. However, due to the growth of journalism in accordance with Web 2.0 technology, stories must come in the form of conversations so the audience feels actively involved. It is no longer enough to simply make comments on blog postings anymore. Journalist must also communicate through social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogs like Twitter. The benefits of news as a conversation are:

• The stories become transparent
• You can manage feedback and communicate in real time
• You can spread awareness through word-of-mouth advertising

As mentioned in a previous chapter, beatblogging sites like NowPublic are already doing this.

Building an Online Community

In order to get an audience involved, journalists themselves must be committed to interactive media. Among things journalists can do to maximize the effects of their interactive web sites are:

• Asking for content from the audience, allowing them to become a part of the journalistic process
• Moderating feedback on stories and other types of user submissions
• Assisting your audience with the Web 2.0 technology
• Create contests which give the audience an incentive to participate
• ADVERSTISE!!

Some of your audience members can also prove to be valueable sources when creating content for the Web. Many of these sources can come through social networks like MySpace or LinkedIn. Journalists can also create their own niche social network and use pro-am journalism to collaborate with their community.

Maintain Accuracy and Ethics within the Web

There are some potential risks to collaborative journalism. The Web is anonymous, and anyone can post an offensive post that could do more harm than benefit. The journalist is responsible for monitoring all content that is published and making sure it isn’t offensive. The journalist also has legal responsibilities to make sure he or she is not breaking any copyright laws.

It is also important to note when errors have been made and to correct them as soon as you can. Journalism, regardless of its medium, is obligated to be accurate.

This chapter focuses on visual storytelling with photographs. Journalism without photographs is like writing without verbs. Your audience doesn’t just want to read the story, they want to see it too. This chapter covers the basics of digital photography, editing and publishing photos, and how to tell a story with those photos.

Digital Photography

Most disciplines have units of measurement. For photography, the unit is pixels. A pixel is essentially a small square on a matrix that makes a computer image. A picture is comprised of hundreds or thousands of pixels.

The second major concept to understand is resolution. Resolution is the number of pixels in an image. The higher the resolution, the better the picture will look. However, the larger the resoultion, the longer the picture takes to download. This is why some newspaper who post online use low-resolution pictures. Those same newspapers, however, run into trouble when a certain image looks blurry when altered because it is low-resolution.

Like all material published to the Web, newspapers and other organizations maintain ownership of the pictures they publish and put copyrights on them. The irony of this is that the new age of Web culture is all about sharing. In order to protect those who share their pictures, the Creative Commons Project was created. With this project, artists can mark their work with whatever rights they wish to reserve.

People take pictures with two types of digital cameras.

1. Point and shoot cameras: more compact, easier to use, and cheaper. Includes built-in lens and flash, and usually comes with video capabilities.
2. DSLR cameras: Usually capture better photos because its image sensor is 10 times larger. However, it’s not as user-friendly and it is expensive.

The camera has 4 basic functions:

1. Camera modes: Including action, portrait, or landscape.
2. Zoom: Either digital or optical
3. Flash: Auto flash or force flash
4. View/delete

Once you have captured your photos, the next step is editing. Some great outlets for editing photos include Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However, ethics comes into play. It is morally and legally wrong to remove objects from a photo to alter it. Improvements in technology have made it easier to not only to improve the quality of photos, but to transform a lie into reality.

Organizing your photos is important as well. You can organize photos from your computer using programs such as iPhoto for Mac or Windows Photo Gallery for PC.

Before you can publish a picture, there are a few steps one should take:

1. Edit a copy of the photo
2. Crop the photo
3. Resize the picture
4. Modify the resolution
5. Edit the color of the picture
6. Save a Web copy
7. Keep it simply

When you’re ready to publish to a blog, there’s a few things to remember: wrap your text around the photo using the align function, use intuitive alternative text, and add links and screenshots to your photos.

This chapter focuses on mobile journalism. Specifically the kinds of stories you can effectively publish with mobile reporting, the equipment needed for medium, and how news organizations use mobile to augment the platforms they already use.

What is Mobile Journalism?

With technology growing, people are becoming increasingly tech savvy. Mobile technology and computer technology overlap, with many people accessing the internet from their mobile phones. Phones are sophisticated enough now to let you surf the Web, and update your own personal Web 2.0 applications from there as well.

This growing technology allows for news organizations to start catering their stories for mobile devices. Since audiences are “going mobile,” news organizations must follow suit. This does not mean that mobile journalism replaces in-depth reporting or detract from the accuracy or compelling nature of journalism, it just means that there is a new outlet for news organizations to use as an add-on to what they already do.

Creating a Story for the Medium

Not only are audiences easier to reach with mobile journalism, but the stories themselves are becoming easier to cover on location with the growth of reporting technology.

When it comes to choosing equipment, there are a wide array of options. Between laptops, smartphones, video cameras, and live stream broadcasting, as long as you can connect to the Internet, you’re in business. However, when on location, bring only as much equipment as you need.

When deciding what your story should be for a particular location, consider whether the audience benefits from you’re taking them and if the reporting can be brief and easily summarized. This is particularly important for breaking news.

There are two ends of the eqiupment spectrum: the gearheads and the light packers. Gearheads comes fully equipped with a laptop, internet connect, a USB to hook up microphones, camera phones and digital phones, a tripod for a regular camera, and devices to record audio. Light packers can combine many of these things by packing smartphones. Smartphones come equipped with a full keyboard, a camera, and full internet capabilities.

The growth of mobile devices allow for more diversified options for publishing as well. Some may combine mobile technology with microblogging platforms like Twitter. Journalists can now kill two birds with one stone through mobile microblogging, making stories accessible through a computer or a phone. This can overlap with live blogging, with constant updates covering a particular story. Some notable live blogging services are CoveritLive and TechChrunch.

If you want an even more interactive approach, you can report live video stream to mobile devices as well. The benefit of services like Qik, Kyte, and Flixwagon is that you can use your mobile network to connect to live video without an Internet connection. However, these services only work for phones that can shoot video.

This interactivity is becoming the future of journalism. With this new technology you can share audience feedback from Twitter on your Web site and even create an RSS feed from it. Mobile journalism allows you to include your audience in your coverage of a story, and it them interested, which is the ultimate goal, right?