Daniel Sato

It has been about a month since we were given the iPhone 4S here at The News Journal. In that time, we have launched a new digital subscription model and Gannett offered buyouts to some of our senior staffers. I thought I would take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of how our smartphones are being utilized by reporters and photographers.

The Good

It has been the reporters that have been the most enthusiastic to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. Reporters have been sending in images from events where we don’t have a photographer and from breaking news. In some cases, even when with a photographer, a reporter will send in an image from a breaking news event and have it up online long before anything is transmitted by the photographer. Reporters have also not been shy about shooting video. Embedded below is a video shot by Chad Livengood, who has since moved back home to work at the Detroit News, for a story on medical marijuana use in Delaware. While there definitely could have been more b-roll, I think it looks pretty damn good. Having Chad shoot the video on his iPhone also freed up the photographer to do what she does best, take pictures.

Aside from it’s obvious use as a visual tool (I have about 10 different photo/video apps), I have used it to keep track of my assignments by VPN’ing into our server and have synced my Entourage calender with the calendar in my phone. I also ditched my Tom Tom GPS for the free turn-by-turn navigation app Waze, and linked my Google Reader account to Feeddler RSS to keep up on any news when I have time between assignments.

The Bad

The most glaring shortcoming of the iPhone has been data transfer speeds. Before the phones arrived, editors salivated over the prospect of shooting and transmitting video from the field. A handful of OWLE rigs were purchased with this in mind. When we started testing the phones, any dream of HD video from the field was quickly dashed. Even when uploading at lower resolutions, files stalled or crept along at a snail’s pace. Granted, our office can be somewhat of a black hole when it comes to Sprint reception, but rare is the case when we are working in ideal conditions. Similar problems have been discussed on SportsShooter, and several workarounds were tried (tethering via USB or transferring files directly to the iPhone and FTP’ing from it) with mixed results.

When I was down in North Carolina on a recent assignment, I found myself in a similar situation. For some reason, my personal hotspot option was not available (it has come and gone a few times now, currently it is back), and so I transferred my photos directly to my iPhone through the sync option in iTunes. I then attempted to transfer my files via FTP, first through PhotoSync and then through Transfer Big Files, but both times the images that ended up in our photo server were very pixelated. It was as if iPhone specific versions were transferred onto the phone as opposed to full-resolution images, which very well may be the case. I also tried to sync the photos with PhotoSync through the File Sharing section of the Apps tab in iTunes, but the photos never appeared in any library that I could find.

The Ugly

As with any new skill, it takes practice to gain a certain level of technical ability. So of course, I can’t hate on any reporters who are motivated enough to use their iPhone to take pictures. Far from it, I love it when they do so! I do wonder, though, when I see an image like this as the main image with a link to a gallery filled with images of similar quality. But perhaps that’s just a sign of the times…

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…

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.

This past week marked one year at The News Journal. For most, that wouldn’t be anything worth celebrating, but for me, someone who has constantly been on the move, my time at The News Journal is the longest I have spent at one job. One the the biggest reasons that I am still here one year later, without a doubt, is the team I am a part of. The people on the new media team come from such a varied background, and have such diverse skill sets, that we can take on almost any project that we want to without having to coordinate an entire newsroom.

Some highlights from my first year:

• Photographing NASCAR (I had no idea just how loud it would be)
• Shooting both stills and video for a three-part series on crime in Wilmington
• The opportunity to cover the president and vice president
• Phillies opening day
• Covering Hurricane Irene … editing in the field and racing from place to place to try and cover as many locations as we could (I ended up putting up 10 videos in three days).

Some stats I learned during a recent visit from corporate:

• We averaged around 30 videos a week
• The News Journal ranked in the top three among Gannett newspapers for video plays
• Our video plays tripled in the past year