Jeff Jarvis is professor of journalism at City University, New York. He writes for Media Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media) and he’s been speaking at the Future of Journalism conference in Sydney.
I don’t know Jeff, but he’s been raising many points about online journalism.
He is quoted as saying: “I’m going to start with an existential question. It’s a fairly ridiculous one, but I don’t think any newspaper has really decided what they are.”
And:
“How do we do experiments, how do we do pilot projects? We should have an expectation to fail and have failure built into the system.”
(http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/future_of_journalism_jeff_jarv.html)
The first quote is spot on. In the UK, certainly, online journalism is evolving. For my particular interest in video, it is one area that newspaper owners wish to embrace (for greater advertising revenues thus continued existence of the ‘paper and their jobs, but also some owners probably like to say “We’ve got video/film/movies/pictures that move”.). Every newspaper website that has a video department would ideally like to expand, year-on-year, its video output, number of in-house staff and freelance commissions (ok, perhaps at least over the next 5-10 years). In order to do this, it naturally has to have an inflatable budget or very deep pockets.
How is the budget beefed up? Well, providing content that attract readers/viewers. There are quick solutions to attract advertising and appear to be in the newspaper website video realm. One example would be the Daily Telegraph, the UK newspaper. It struck a deal with Independent Television News (ITN) - also a supplier to British TV - to provide news reports, dubbed ‘Telegraph TV’ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/telegraphtv/?ID=News).
The positive aspect is that it provides a fast turnaround of news footage. The negative side is that it’s very similar in coverage to what a viewer sees on British TV, or the ITN website (http://itn.co.uk/). What’s the difference? So it begs the question to which website, or TV, should the viewer turn for its preferred coverage?
I am sure the decision brings more advertising to the Telegraph operation, but if it decides to alter its content after securing a stronger budget, and enlists more in-house content by video journalists, it may alienate the viewership it has established.
It leads me to Jeff’s second quote. I am absolutely delighted with his proclamation to experiment, something I am going to pressurise myself to do (hopefully) with future projects.
This is a very new embryonic period for online video journalism and it should be exactly what viewers see on 24 hour TV news channels that newspaper websites should avoid replicating. So long as the basic message of the story is not being distracted, newspapers should allow for failure of projects. What ‘failure’ actually means to Jeff, I am unsure: possibly a failure to tell a story to its optimum way, communicating to the reader/viewer.
One friend, an editor, said I should have tried to shoot this video on a Halloween mask maker and his ghost tour in a mock-horror style (http://cameronrobertson.co.uk/films/halloween-bawl/). My feeble excuse is that I wanted to produce a decent film, and I played it safe, by more conventional shooting and editing, to do so. Certainly, the interview sections could have been crafted with more imagination.
In order for video journalism to progress, new ways of storytelling must be attempted, also through new technologies. I am using a headcamera on a story, for film that features only Point of View. It may work, it may not. It depends on how well this technology can be used to tell the story and not be simply a gimmick that loses its novelty after 60 seconds. But the more innovative newspaper video departments can be - and avoiding TV news styles - the more refreshing newspaper websites will be to the reader/viewer and consequently advertising, theoretically should, increase.
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