Daniel Sato

The new year will bring about a lot of changes to many Gannett properties, not the least of which will be outfitting our reporters and photographers with iPhones, iPads and other accessories. Of course, this move has been met with mixed reactions within newsrooms, mine included. The usual qualms about being asked to do too much with too little … fear of the unknown for those that are less tech-savvy (will Gannett be able to read all of my personal communications seems to be the most prevalent concern).

Even a digital-first journalist such as myself has a few reservations, such as if the money used for the accompanying iPhone rig could have been better spent elsewhere. The allure of the iPhone is its portable, do-it-all nature … but hand a reporter the OWLE and a cheap tripod and suddenly the iPhone doesn’t feel like the freedom inspiring tool it is, and more like a ball-and-chain dragging slowing them down from the work they feel they should be doing.

In general though, I am all for our staff having smartphones. Reporters (hopefully) can begin to treat their Twitter account like their notepad, adding observations on the scene and returning to their stream when writing their stories (one of our reporters, Beth Miller, is already adept at this, and I hope that she can spread her knowledge to some of the more skeptical members of our newsroom). As a photographer/videographer, I can use the phone as a hotspot to send both video and photos back to the office wirelessly (currently I think we have two working wifi cards to spread among both reporters and photographers). And, as the main emphasis for this push seems to be a focus on breaking news, everyone can shoot video and upload it directly to our Brightcove account via a related app.

I have no idea just how this experiment will end … On it’s face, it seems like a no-brainer … replacing pen and paper with something smaller that can also act as a camera, video camera, audio recorder, radio scanner, etc. But perhaps it will end up as Gannett’s previous video initiative did, with only a few properties actively using smartphones. Follow-up to come in a few months…

As a photographer turned videographer, I have read with interest about the rise and decline of video in the newsroom … and it has been no secret that Gannett (the company that I work for) is once again making a push for more video content. In general, the reaction seems to be one of been there, done that. Former Gannett employee turned instructor Wasim Ahmad called that first push misguided and wrote:

“The reason it didn’t succeed was not for poor training. The training was very good. I wouldn’t be a multimedia journalism professor today without that first workshop from Lane and Harvey. They did a fine job, and taught us all of the best practices for video journalism.

But after Lane and Harvey packed up and left my newspaper, the message got muddled. It wasn’t a conscious muddling; more of a gradual decline. One photographer let go here, a writer there. Soon, all we had time for was run-and-gun junk.?”

Ahmad also wrote that only 5 to 10 Gannett papers stuck with video, and I happen to be working for one of those. Why does video work here when it has proven unsuccessful elsewhere. For starters, it doesn’t hurt that there is no Delaware-based television station. Aside from that though (because I run into news crews from Philly and Maryland all of the time), I think we do a good job of recognizing what videos play well and focusing on those. Sports, crime and weather … Those have always been the bread and butter of our video offerings and they continue to be what we push. That’s not to say that we don’t give 100% to in-depth reporting that we assume won’t get the type of traffic that it deserves. My own sleep-deprived face following two three-day investigative series (along with Hurricane Irene coverage) serves as proof that we focus on what we should be covering as well.

The mistake that photographers make most often when shooting video is that they try to be filmmakers. I hate to break it to you, but 99.99% of the time, you are a news videographer. Ahmad writes that “even the best editors spend about one hour on a polished minute of video.” Other photographers complain of spending hours to days editing and exporting a video piece. We can turn a crime video around in fifteen minutes, twenty if it needs a voiceover. During our hurricane coverage, I turned out ten videos in three days while editing on a laptop and sending through a cell phone.

We aren’t doing any Vincent Laforet stuff here, we are recording a scene and getting interviews, then turning around and laying that interview down and putting the b-roll over it. Working on a project for three days should serve as a sign that you need practice, not that the task itself is impossible. This seems to be most frustrating to photographers because the amount of post-production with their photographs is usually nowhere near the amount of work needed to edit a video (as opposed to writers, who perhaps are more used to sitting down after the fact and spending time crafting a piece).

Of course, video will always be better if shot and produced by someone whose sole job was to focus on that. When I shoot both stills and video (which has become more and more frequent) one or the other suffers … but the more you do both, the easier it is to recognize which moments are best suited for which medium. In the end, it is about meeting readers’ needs and expectations. As Miami Herald Managing Editor Rick Hirsch said in this Poynter article on video traffic, “This isn’t rocket science, but do video on the things that people come to your site for,” he said by phone. “You may think, ‘This would be a really great thing to do video on,’ but if it’s not on a topic or area where people are already consuming content, then it’s going to be hard to draw an audience.”

For what it’s worth, our highest video last year had just under 14,000 plays. This year, we have nine videos with play totals higher than that, with the most viewed having just under 100,000 plays in Brightcove. If you take into account Youtube plays, our most viewed video of this year has just over 500,000 views.

In the past, I would always struggle to learn new languages (programming or spoken). It would start out well enough … I’d dive in head first, scouring the internet and the bookstore for any information that I could find. I would take in the basics easily enough … I can probably print “Hello World” in more languages than I can count on my hand … but soon enough, something will come up that requires my attention, and learning actionscript/python/javascript/php/etc gets placed on the shelf.

For me, the best way to learn something has been to find a project to work on. I learned html/css first through customizing my Blogger blog, and then by building my own website (the iteration before the current one). Most recently, I wanted to build something to help readers navigate our recently created financial literacy page. As it is now, stories are sorted based on the date they were published, even though they can be written for very distinct age-based audiences. I had recently read a tutorial on using jquery to show and hide content and utilize hover effects, and thought it could easily be translated to an interactive that allowed users to show and hide content after selecting a particular age range.

My advice if you want to learn a new skill. First, find a project that you know you want to work on and that will hold your attention through the distractions that are bound to come up. Then, determine what skills will be needed to complete that project and go from there. It has been much easier for myself to address a need that already exists as opposed to trying to create a need because someone has said this is a skill I should have.

Finally catching up on some blog posts that I have had sitting as drafts for a few months now…

The day after Hurricane Irene passed through Delaware, my photo editor and I went up to Lewes to survey homes damaged by a tornado and cover a press conference by Governor Markell. The event went as you would expect, a few quick interviews, shoot some b-roll, etc. Forty-five minutes later and we were back in the car, hopes of sleeping in my own bed for the first time in a week floating through my head. Just as I was about to drive off, I caught a cameraman walking up the street towards the damaged homes. “Poor guy,” was all I could think as he approached the governor’s SUV (just about to drive of as well).

What I saw next amazed me. Charlie, the cameraman, later told me that he asked if the governor had any time to jump out and say a quick sound bite. Instead, I saw Governor Markell and Senator (and former Governor) Tom Carper jump out of the vehicle and make their way back to the most damaged home.

The icing on the cake? Senator Carper was carrying Charlie’s tripod. Only in Delaware…