There’s an issue prominent in newspaper websites that is being explored by careful experimentation or rigid policymaking: should video journalism achieve a balance or strive for the polemic?
The co-founder of The Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington, maintains that balance is not necessary in a story, only “the truth” should be. In these video interviews, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/jul/08/huffington.journalism1) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2008/jul/08/huffington.journalism2), Huffington says such a policy may be naive, but she believes in the idea of one truth - even if that truth is polemic.
Later in the interviews, she says if someone from Hamas wrote a blog for publication on THP, she would ask someone to write an Israeli view to address the Hamas line of argument. So her truth-seeking approach is essentially about achieving a balance across THP website by cross-referencing two polemics. (I know she is not referring directly to video journalism, but I’ll get to that.)
However, this polemic-polemic approach needs predictable behaviour by the viewer/reader. If the viewer does not realise there is another blog or article, reading a singular post could be interpreted as promotion for a particular cause and accusations of bias may be raised.
Traditional TV news bulletins have reported two sides to a story, with both sides’ comments are usually featured, even if only in voice-over to acknowledge one party ‘declined to comment’. Crucially, online video journalism is being influenced by the users of net, who, exposed to short, sometimes unedited clip format on the likes of YouTube, become more familiar with the polemic view. With the majority of video journalism as five-minute films and under, and sometimes shot on cameras of lower quality than TV equivalent, video journalism is undoubtedly being influenced by what formats the web viewer is familar. But this web content, too, must be carefully considered by newspaper websites.
The Guardian website does video blogging, or vlogs. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/09/uselections2008-sarahpalin) This is a quirky angle on traditional reporter-to-camera TV news because vlogs can be more emotional and biased. Otherwise could it be called a vlog? It’s quick to produce, making it useful for any reasons, particularly for fast reaction to a breaking story. Are vlogs video journalism? Technically, yes. Essentially, they are a newspaper column - a polemic - on video.
Looking at filmically-creative video journalism - which the Guardian also produces - The Washington Post has interestingly categorised its video, making this balance-polemic issue more digestible for the viewer. We hope. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/) If you scroll down the front, there’s a grey box with a choice of ‘Documentary Video’ or ‘News Video’.
‘News Video’ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/10/10/VI2008101002244.html) has clips. This one (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/10/07/VI2008100701145.html), supplied by Associated Press, has raw video of tear gas being fired at Thai protestors. Balanced or polemic? Technically, it is balanced because there is no opinion given in the footage and filming appears to take place among both police and protestors.
Clicking on ‘Documentary Video’, you visit a haven of the polemic. One video I randomly viewed (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/09/25/VI2008092503575.html) was called Feeding Others Through Fasting. It covered a Muslim Student Association event about Ramadan and the tradition of fasting. It’s a video with all contributions being positive about fasting. So that’s polemic. Does it raise a debate? No - there are few doubts cast over fasting. But does it make the viewer think about the issue? Yes.
What is the viewer, before they watched, was opposed fasting? Would they be happy about the video? I doubt it. Would they be justified to complain about biased reporting? That’s for the relevant press complaints organisation to judge.
Returning to The Huffington Post, I happened to randomly select one of its video pages (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/11/free-marketeers-rally-on_n_133883.html)
The page read: “Two new videos, presenting an interesting juxtaposition of reactions to the current financial crisis, from the American News Project”. This seems a good illustration of Ariana Huffington’s claim of balance on her website.
The first video, Free Marketeers Rally on Capitol Hill, is about a rally to support free markets and deregulation. The second video, Fallout on Main Street: Mailman Speaks His Mind, is about a mailman who talks about the impact of the financial crisis on his family life.
They are quite different points of view that converge on the same theme. So placing the videos on the same web page appears to justify the polemic - so long as the viewer realises there is a second video further down the page. Unless wielding some office power, the video journalist has little to do with page design. So it could be argued that senior newspaper staff have responsibility to present balance on the newspaper website - not for the video journalist to incorporate in their individual video. I’m not sure if this is deliberate by THP, but both videos play when you enter the page. So the viewer - ironically - has to turn off the balance in order to view the polemic.
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.
You’re in a remote Russia village. Your camera fingers are starting to freeze. Your interpretator has an American accent, but he’s Russian. The English reporter asking the questions and scribbling away for his text-based article, but there’s not much time to spare.
The interview fixer, who sweet-talks village subjects, is now also acting as an interpretator having wrapped up her duties for the moment. She may think she’s helping, but she’s another voice on the soundtrack, in addition to the subject who the viewer’s supposed to be hearing.
Your plan to get a nice pause after the non-English village resident stops speaking and before the interpretator says their translation is frankly up the spout (ie not proceeding positively). What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?
Well, in this case, just think ‘Leave it until the edit’. Get the shots, get the quotes, get out and bring ‘em back alive. And here’s the edit: www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/feb/11/women.of.slyozi I went to Pskov for the Guardian with Russia print correspondent Luke Harding to investigate dying rural Russian life. It became a lesson about subtitles.
We had an original plan to stop briefly when the subject had said something, so I could record only her voice and subtitle her nicely below. But when you had literally grabbed a granny in the snow, they’re not particularly up for hanging around when they’ve got a pot of brew on the hearth inside. So we had a few minutes with some women outside their houses, but it was rushed and there was no time for these sought-after pauses. The questions were fast and the answers, after the words came out, quickly led onto the next question (or a clarification from our Russia fixer and/or interpretator).
In the edit, I was putting down the subtitles as the person said them. Someone says something, you see subtitles as they say it. Fine, you might expect. No one in the office commented otherwise and the foreign desk bubbled that the film was fantastic. But away from journalism, my family and in particular my mother - we’ll call her J.R. - complained that some of the subtitles were on screen and off again before she had read them. Even with her glasses on. I had edited around the subject’s sentences pretty quickly to avoid the interpretator’s words (he was usually still saying the subject’s preceding sentence, which is fair enough, being interpretator isn’t a breeze).
So for multiple viewer comprehension, should I have kept the subtitles on screen longer and extended the editing cut? This would mean the viewer could read them entirely without question and they’d understand what is being said. However, this would mean 1) the viewer may hear the interpretator blathering on again, relaying a sentence we saw on subtitles ten seconds ago, or 2) the subject may start talking again so we would have subtitles over the subject’s next sentence - NOT the original sentence being subtitled. Agh! So then - would the viewer feel they want to hear that next sentence? ‘Why is the subject’s next sentence after the original sentence not subtitled?’ …Then the issue of selection of quotes becomes very apparent and further questions are raised about constructing a story (that’s another post).
An editor friend of mine, Jake Finbow, thought confusion arose because sometimes as you can clearly hear the interpretator saying what was being shown on screen, albeit a few seconds later. Jake thought I should have dropped the subtitles for the moments when our American/Russia interpretator friend said them on camera. But that would mean hanging onscreen for our American to finish speaking. Tricky if you’re trying to achieve some sort of timing for poignancy or drama in the dialogue or shots.
Top Guardian photographer/videographer Dan Chung, currently filming the troubles in China, gets the interpretator to wait until after the subject finishes, as he did in this video (www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/mar/13/wutai.shan).
Having no one actually speak over what the subject is saying makes for a more observational experience, more intimate and the viewer may consequently feel closer to the subject. However, there is something, strangely honest about seeing and hearing the interpretator on film, ie, that it shows exactly the way it was filmed with the reporter, interpretator, fixer. It presents an air of deconstruction to the video/filmmaking process and that interpretators are a vital element to journalism in foreign climates. (Luke does speak conversational Russian, but he correctly wanted no mistakes in the translations. Give him a break, he’s only been in the country six months.)
As a footnote, it amazes me that British documentary maker Kim Longinotto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Longinotto), whose films are usually non-English with subtitles, asks her collaborator (often a native speaker of where she films) to tap her on the shoulder as a signal to start and stop filming. Now that’s trust. Here’s one of her films, Divorce Iranian Style (www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/divorce_iranian_style.html).
But Longinotto spends months with her collaborator, gaining Visas, discussing the film, so they’re on the same wavelength and know what each other wants from the film and their working methods. (Many times in video journalism you meet the interpretator an hour, if you’re lucky, before shooting.) So their communication is silent, or at least Longinotto is briefed as to what is happening by quiet whispers between moments the collaborator regards as not worth filming. Then subtitles can be dropped on the edit without English-speaking voices being heard. Longinotto doesn’t keep subtitles much longer on the screen than after someone has said them, either.
Thanks for tuning in. Here I plan to write about aspects of documentary-making, whether that is online journalistic-led doc-video along the lines of www.guardian.co.uk/video and www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/special/4/?hpid=mmindex, or more ‘traditional’ documentary-making, for cinematic or TV screenings.
It might also touch on fiction film, what may be learned from it, and how it could be used in documentary. (Yes I know it has already, eg Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, but it could perhaps take other elements of fiction to present documentary. This is clearly a future blog post.)
In any case, what I don’t plan to talk about is how Final Cut Pro can’t do a certain kind of correction or how the focus ring on the Sony Z-1 camera can be a bit tricky. The idea is to write more about issues, ethics, things that face the video journalist/doc maker on the job and in the cutting room. And maybe afterwards, if there are repercussions. At least that’s the plan.
When I thought of doing a blog, it was January 2008 when I was Scarpa-deep in snow filming in a rural village near Pskov, Russia. So it’s pretty likely the first ‘real’ post should be something on subtitles.
