The Video Explosion
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under Uncategorized
This might be the beefiest article I’ve read on video in the newspaper world.
A few notables:
Many photographers are especially eager to master the new field. Video offers them the prospect of deliverance from print-centric thinking, and perhaps a more prominent role to play in newsrooms.
The fact is no one is more vital to the survival of the newspaper than these new visual journalists. They are not entering a field such as television news with an established hierarchy that has been there for years.
“People are listening to music through really high quality headphones now,” she says, “and they’re used to good sound.” Even if the visuals are poor, she says, good audio can often save the day.
Video requires roughly 10 times more work on an assignment as [still photography] and then 100 times more work as you’re editing it. Imagine filling a 16-page special section with a hundred pictures–out of a routine city hall meeting assignment. That’s shooting video. You have to shoot every detail in the room, every angle, every expression–just to get a few seconds of video to put on top of the few seconds of audio that you’ve edited down from two hours of tape.
It’s a time-consuming job, one that keeps Contreras at his computer from 8:30 a.m. until 10 some nights. In addition, he and several colleagues update the Web site each morning, on a rotating basis, from 4:30 to 7. “I go home, take a nap, then come back,” he says.
Good to see my co-worker from the summer, Evelio Contreras, getting mention in the article as he is a print reporter turned multimedia producer down in Roanoke.
Hopefully editors will get the idea from this article that producing storytelling video takes time. Good storytelling no matter the medium takes time. Melissa Worden blogged about the time commitment yesterday.
Further Reading:
Tags: journalism, video
