Elephant Cams and Picture Podcasts, Oh My
Here come the elephants, video cams and cell phones dangling from their trunks.
Images of multimedia elephants popped into my head as I sat listening to washingtonpost.com’s video guru conduct a workshop at the Online News Association annual conference this month. Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor for news video at the Post’s Web site, got me thinking about what news might be like if newspaper staffs not only survive, but start doing live video from urban streets all over the U.S.
Newspapers are the elephants of American news, with reporting staffs that vastly outnumber their TV and radio rivals. Even though the elephants have been put on a panic diet–with newspapers slashing staff and expenses to stay alive–the surviving herd is lumbering into video and other multimedia news formats. Rhodes, for example, has trained more than 200 Washington Post print reporters to shoot basic video, typically for 90-second visual sidebars to text stories. He’s planning to boost that output by teaching reporters the basics of editing so they can pre-edit in the field.
Radio Pictures – Oxymoron?
Yesterday I laughed when I got an e-mail from a videographer (and former colleague at washingtonpost.com) who now works at NPR, John Poole. He included a copy of the infamous New Yorker cartoon of a dog sitting in front of a computer, with “dog” crossed out in the caption. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a radio network,” it said. Poole included a link to his company’s new videos on iTunes, which led to this logo: “NPR’s Radio Pictures Podcast.” The tag line said NPR was offering “radio with a vision.”
I don’t know about the name, but the work of NPR’s small but growing team of videographers and Web designers is impressive. These “pictures podcasts” range from two to 26 minutes and take you into NPR’s studios to see what you normally just hear–songwriter Vic Chesnutt, for example, singing from behind the desk of “All Songs Considered” host Bob Boilen. My favorite was five minutes of Chinese pianist Lang Lang playing Beethoven at NPR; the visuals were downright mesmerizing.
I was equally impressed when I visited NPR this summer and learned how much multimedia training it’s giving its large editorial team–five full-time weeks. For most news outfits, that would be an unaffordable luxury. It was fascinating to hear NPR’s growing Web team muse about adding imagery and motion to NPR’s distinctive sound while trying to preserve its identity online. Once trained, who knows what a large radio news team might do online.
Both NPR and washingtonpost.com (Ok, I confess to some bias here as a former Washington Post staffer) offer extraordinary longer-form news video shot by professionals, but it’s the low-quality, short news video that intrigues me most. Why? Because it’s a new form of journalism likely to be offered in mass quantities.
And I suspect if these visual snippets become a staple of text news stories on the Web, they’ll affect how we perceive many kinds of people and events.