The landscape of news driven content is changing – and the fallout is reverberating across the news gathering industry in ways many are finding unsettling.
The antiquated narrow world view of TV video journalism is witnessing a wave of shooters coming into the fold that for many is a threat to a way of doing business as usual – and they are beginning to gather content that is as good, if not better, than the established way of doing things.
Newspapers are laying off staff, requiring many of its photo staff to take up video – even writers due to loss in ad revenue and readership. With this urgent push by print news media to try and stave off this decline in readership and with it – ad revenue – many are being asked to take up the video journalism mantra without proper training – even at the basic level.
TV shooters pontificate ad nauseum about how they are the keepers of the profession and that anyone outside of their closed society is a wannabe.
Says who?
Newspapers are far superior at gathering news that is important to the community it serves better than TV. The Solo VJ paradigm provides more cameras on the street to provide content that viewers want to see and hear. But as YouTube content quality shows – anyone can shoot video and upload it – even horrendously bad subject mater – and people will watch it.
So the bar for content quality needs to be raised. To raise that bar, there is a need for instruction to be affordable and effective. I will be attending one such instructional venue – an advanced web video journalism workshop in May through Visual Editors is being taught by my cyber-mentor David Dunkley-Gyimah. In addition, Angela Grant, multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Express-News is teaching an intro web video journalism workshop for those who have never picked up a video camera before.
“Visual Editors is the online classroom and meeting hall where student and working journalists from newsrooms around the world come to study the latest reporting, editing and design techniques, story forms, media trends, and interactive strategies.” according to the VizEd website. They are a non-profit organization dedicated to pushing newspaper content creators into the forefront of news gathering.
From my perspective, I just don’t see the old school TV shooters providing the same kind of resource given the detractors position on the matter. The web is changing the way news is consumed and used. Shooting video for the web does take a slightly different skill set and what VizEds is doing is reaching out to visual content creators and providing, for a nominal fee, the tools necessary to go back and begin moving print news publications into the 21sth century by utilizing the tools needed to take news to a new level.
There are going to be mistakes made, there will be bumps in the road as shooters refine how to utilize video in a cost effective, yet money making way.
I foresee 2008 being a year of changes in the video news gathering profession – good and not so good for many out there. If one is unwilling to adapt to the coming changes, they will go the way of the Dodo bird – adapt or perish – either way, news video on the web is happening and those who take up the mantle of the Solo VJ paradigm will be on the forefront of the new visual journalism profession.
