Merrill on Multimedia

With all the live-blogging, tweeting and video chat taking place online during Friday’s presidential debate, who could pay attention to TV?

OK, so most folks don’t sit in front of TV with their laptops and watch other people watching television, but that’s what I did while Barack Obama and John McCain verbally sparred in Mississippi on Friday night. I wanted to see how the Internet’s live political conversation might affect my perception of the televised debate.

So while listening to the candidates talk, I was clicking around the Web, watching citizens and professional journalists use live-blogging services like CoverItLive.com, video blogging services like Seesmic and text-messaging services like Twitter to share their thoughts on what the candidates were saying.

Pictured above is Seesmic

Hardly a satisfying way to experience a big moment in American political theater, I know. But it was strangely compelling, especially the video-blogging by people in their living rooms and home offices. Even some of those annoyingly short text updates from Twitter added a new dimension to my debate experience.

I confess I’m no fan of Twitter, the real-time “micro-blogging” service that lets people write often incomprehensible text messages of up to 140 characters and zap them to anyone who “subscribes” to their updates. And on Friday, most of the political “tweets” (web jargon for Twitter’s text updates) scrolling down the service’s special election page seemed obvious and trite. For example:

stephensays one of the things that scares me about mccain: he whistles when he speaks. a sign that a man is too old: he whistles when he speaks.

SignalToNoise Obama and McCain are very catty tonight.

mimiboo McCain’s tie is giving me a headache.

But as the debate wore on, this stream-of-consciousness reaction of strangers slowly added up to more than the sum of their individual comments. I had been looking for a new view of public opinion. What I found felt more like a multimedia party–where everyone was talking and hardly anyone was listening.

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Blogging, Multimedia live-blogging, Multimedia, Twitter, video

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.”

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Multimedia Multimedia, video