viewmagazine.tv and video journaism - what's on

On viewmagazine.tv, coming up a raft of video journalism features and changes. e.g.

• widget to incorporate blog
• soon reposting (archive) videos with controls*

Buzzmachine and associate professor Jeff Jarvis* is a fan of viewmagazine. We have a laugh, but this year with a new multimedia studio at my uni I'm looking forward to swapping ideas with Jeff and his students.

Scaling down
The menu listing has been scaled down.That gives more scope at categorising video features, which will soon broadly fall into VJ and Media and Culture and Arts. In the latter, a couple of things that could illustrate VJ Arts styles coming up soon.

More archive and contemporary features.
There are several archive features I intend to post, and equally exciting some new long formats - there aren't enough hours in the day frankly. Watch out for more archive radio podcast features interviews along the lines of the late Godfather of Soul James Brown's sidekick Maceo Parker

Advanced Video Journalism
If you havn't submitted your film to the VJAwards2008, do hurry and if you are planning to be in Mainz Germany for the awards, look forward to seeing you there, where I'll be delivering a perfomance lecture n advanced video journaism techniques.

video journalism - Lost advocates, techniques and some.

Channel One TV was a 24 hour video journalism driven station. 30 VJs drove the station, 12 working on any one day making a host of programmes from cars, cookery, fashion, politics, travel and it was done rather well.

I found some archive and you'll be hard pressed to determine whether its crew-made or VJ- made.

On the news desk, 6 VJs per day, like Rachel Ellison ( now an MBE) filed stories, sometimes two/three times a day.

Each had a pool car, a beta 100, vinten tripod, senheiser, lapel, night spot lights (deedos), scrim and an assortment of gadgets in the back.

The beauty of the betas back then compared to the not so resolution-ready hi-8s is that you learnt everything you needed to know about bending light, back focus, blacks and whites, to get a good image off.

Bad thing, they weighed a ton.

Often the newsdesk rang in otherwise you had your own feature you'd convinced your editor you were working on.

The station ran a revolutionary video jukebox, which a producer had access to build a programme and news wheel.

Though as a viewer you thought you were watching a live show, presenter links were made minutes, sometime seconds, before the wheel's timing caught up with real time.

This gave the producer greater flexibility in creating a programme schedule. It also meant you'd never see a clanger (mother of all mistakes) on Channel One.

Because we were NOT scheduled to hit specific news hours, we introduced some novel, in fact innovatory ways of working.


How a news package was worked
Take a new item on hospital bugs at the time - a salmonella outbreak.

The news desk were looking for a news package - anything from 2-5 minutes.

• I'd go to the hospital for an interview with the Chief Executive. This would be a Qand A with me IV (in-vision). Remember one of the basic element of a news package is the interview, but it's also the news package in itself, but will only visually sustain interest if the mis en scene changes ie cuts between you and your interviewee, with where appropriate drop-in shots.
  

• e.g. this is an interview with blogger/ journalist Rachel North. There are 3 basic angle shots from here and six if you're a VJ you can work through. And there's a host of shots you could float in.

• Rule 17 working network news, know when to float pictures over GVs to lift the package.
  

• Given the plethora of news stations it was important to have you, the reporter, in shot. Effectively you were branding your item.
  

• NB: if you're going out and out with VJism and you abandon this, you're cutting your nose off to spite your new media face. This technique works well and there's a contemporary way of doing this like "Bourne" in the edit to make it look really slick, particularly when you shoot loose.
  

• I'd then do a "Track and Rushes". From the interview I knew my entry point using GVs/b-roll from my interviewee and had an outro as well, so I could put my voice over on tape. If you're writing to pictures, rather than the other way around, you'll get a stronger intro/package. The newsroom would then send a bike, or we'd go to a parked sat truck park or in the latter stages of C1 head for a designated T1 and ASDL ports. Today its the Net and a sat pack.

• I'd continue with the package, finding an affected party, a pressure group and a department of health interviewee.

• The newsdesk would put my initial Q and A on air. Today you'd be looking to prompt greater viewer comments than we did.

• As I'm pulling elements of the package I'm gauging how much info it adds to the next cut i'm planning. If a government spokesman gave me an interview, that gets added to the Q and A. Sometimes I could ring into the show to break the pre-recorded news cycle. Today we'd use a any number of software to go live.
  

• Because I had an idea of some of the packages my colleagues were doing, I could call one or two up working on the other side of London for them to work an answer for me. A package looks much better if there are a broad range of voices and locations.

• I'd be back at the office for around 11 and within 40 mins to an hour and a half the package would be ready for air and I'd be getting ready to go out again.

• Most often if it were a running story, I might still be looking to see how I can build on the morning package, whilst working on a new subject entirely.

In one year it was not uncommon to clock up 500 news packages.

Innovatory working practice
Why was this working practice innovatory?

Because a small team could keep the news ticking over and had developed a system that enabled them to build up a story during the day, whilst releasing elements as the day matured.

The year was 1994. The Internet had just arrived carrying data at the sonic speed of 28k/s

And whilst it was easy to hurumph stating well Satellite TV was doing that. Channel One TV operated below any margins any station could work on, with smaller staff.

Later today I'll be posting on viewmagazine.tv some of the working habits of the lost records of Channel One TV.

In today's broadband environment the blue print of Channel One would be unquestionable.

Here's a piece from 1994, which was worked through the day and then picked up at night. This final piece for the day is a feature, the day stuff which I have not ben able to locate was the Q and As package with different parties.

Health and Safety:
This is the night shoot. Though it's not mentioned much night shoots come with particular risks for VJs and as I recall I had a stand off with youths unconnected to this scheme wanting my gear on returning to my car.

Channel One swiftly abandoned night shoots ( 8 pm - 9 am) when it was deemed too much of a risk particularly for women video journalists.



p.s reason it's so dark in places, compression messes with your gammas

Positive attractors - The game changers

Matteo who is spearheading live TV on the Net at high resolution

The conclusion to the day's previous posts to follow, but a few issues to juggle in the air.

One of the nicest things to come out from Viewmagazine.tv has been the chance to meet innovative individuals; people with this aura which leads you to steal glances at them, whilst they're not looking.

They ignite a spark, a passion, a something often undefinable around themselves and others.

The very nature of the web means ever so often a link will come in which I'll drill through to find an incredible person or organisation at the end.

There are countless; you know that yourself.

A sight detour first: my younger sister, an incredibly innovative children's teacher is one of them, a Patch Adams.

Once when inspectors came around her school to monitor her work, she left the classroom only to appear minutes later with a swimming mask, wig, flippers and a cape.

Hahahahah. Absolutely barking mad, but genius.

A couple of weeks later, one of the examiners reappeared as a teaching assistant and was so keen for my sister to do something out of the ordinary again, BUT this tme he wanted to be part of it.

The children in her class, just fall to bits, then she goes into her teaching plan.

Late in her career, she decided it was time to go to university. Whilst there one of her friends complained bitterly at trying to keep up with studying and looking after a child.

Joyce, teen-looking, who did not miss classes, leaned over and whispered: "I have got five!@%£^&*&"

That was the last time, she says her now best friend every brought up the subject.

I can't help but weep through joy and laughter when I talk about my sister Joyce, even now.


The gift of Inspiration
Being inspired is a gift, having someone inspire you is transaction no amount of money can buy. Being inspired is a positive attractor.

The three people featured on viewmagazine's front page are inspiring in what they're doing in different ways, but the end sight looks the same - something that little bit or a lot out of the ordinary.

Matteo's live television on the Net (Pic Top)

Duncan's software application which rolls several broadcast apps together.

Rania, a young editor of one of Egypt's English dailies, distributed within the pages of The International Herald.




Inspiring

p.s Listen to why Rania prefers to hire women - a good debate here

p.ss This piece on viewmagazine.tv is an example of a low level IMVJ piece. That is integrated multimedia video journalism, though a better example would be this video journalism timeline piece

The workflow is video journalism - FCP - After Effects - photoshop - Dreamweaver/ CSS
Flash CS3 and action scripting. Then Blog/facebook/ et al
I'm using three macs; I don't have to but each of them is performing a function just to cut down on the time.

One's fairly old an imac from early 2000, but it's a good workhorse. My laptop's doing all the design and css, whilst my tower's doing some heavy lifting in FCP and After Effects, which requires lost of RAM.

The new new media video thingy journalism !

A rewrite of an earlier post from way back when
I'd like to be involved in building a school for media makers; irrational ones who insanely believe they can make a difference.

To some extent they would be journalists, but I feel that's a redundant albeit necessary legacy term we're stuck with for a while.

Journalists ~ writing for a journal.. seems rather dated, just as we no longer rely exclusively on teleporting pictures - as in television.

Media makers are platform agnostic, they deliver to the journal, the TV, online, and all manner of sub constituents.

The advert would read: Only those with an absurdely irrational passion, who believe they can affect change need apply. Your purpose is to inform and interact. Anything goes. A petri dish of ideas which we'll use to push synchronous dialogue. Communities speaking to communities, countries speaking to countries, world speaking to worlds.

See told you it was cookie.

In the course of their growth, we would foolishly make them privy (electronically or otherwise) to that we feel uncomfortable, even shy away from reporting; poverty, abuse in families, racism, death, murder - all the while pushing them, testing to see where there is a higher sense of ethics that we could develop.

A fatally wounded coalition soldier, would you show the close up picture?

No?

Ok, does that need to be applied above the board?

If you've never seen death, strife, injustice at play, does that make you a lesser journalist?

Do you need to experience pain to understand pain? "Act my dear boy, act" the late lawrence Olivier told his co-actor Dustin Hoffman in the Running Man.

But there's no doubt, Walter Cronkite and many other journalists before and since have had their senses smacked when in Cronkite's case he returned from Vietnam.

We would also want to re-evaluate our relationship with the story. As a journalists we tell hundreds of stories.

Some stick, some don't some indeed are mediocre.

The Uptake.org's townhall weekend debate highlights more than any other event I have seen the schism between mainstreet journalism and grassroot, or as one mainstream producer claimed: "the far left".

It was journalist ambushing journalist: heaven's what's going on?

I asked Scott Rensberger - a 32 awards winning journalist, photographer, and possibly the first contemporary video journalist with a 20 year track record, what his favourite stories were.

Not supprisingly, he had many, and they were strewn across a wide geographical plate. There's something in that.

Bono and Geldoff ludicriously believed they could make a difference with music being a vehicle for change and change agents.

Financiers deluded themeselves many years back with The Marshall Plan and how we might rebuild a crippled dejected democracy and Europe.

Al Gore, we thought must have been barking mad when earlier in his environmental career he preached the mantra of global doom.

Of course I'm not any of the above, but there is an irrationality about how the media works.

It's unfathomable but every story they publish will have a banking purpose.

The net does that now with linking. So if I said this in 1994 I'd be even more deluded.

But our feat is to redefine the database for news and its agenda of hit and misses. I onced asked a delegate at one of my talks how many times she checked her stocks and shares. At least once a day, she replied.

It meant something to her, I concluded. It had value. But I added, today's news: Hurricane Katrina, The Tsunami, the Virginia shootings will soon fall of the agenda of our present "custodians" of the news. It may be inportant but something of more significance has come along to shift its from its temporal location. Never mind that. Someone's now saying, there's no possible way you can keep showing the same news every day.

No I didn't say that, but how do we pick and choose our news is something to look at and should we be blaming the news hosts for their lack of our choice?

The news would not be a showcase of us; perhaps there's no helping that, but the purpose would be seek a new discourse in how we tell it.

Concludes tomorrow....

Video journalism Timeline and World Newspaper Association

On viewmagazine.tv, with the help of Sav, a friend, I've placed a number of key videos from 1994 to present marking a personal take on video journalism.

I'll be adding some .swf files, effects and short descriptions which link to longer articles over the coming days, plus the doc on Channel One TV I mentioned in earlier posts.

Lots of photoshop comping...

The more I play with LiveStation.com, the more its appeal as one facet of future TV seems so abundantly clear.

It opens the prospect for uni-casting. ie everyone becoming a live broadcast outfit.

Also this week I'll be at the World Association of Newspaper gathering in Goteborg, from where I hope to be posting a series of reports on the newspaper industry and presenting at one of the forums on the video journalism digital newsrooms.

In a year where there's been an onslaught on the industry from many sides, what's the state of health of the industry?

Is the decline in sales, you've probably read about elsewhere symptomatic of a real trend?

Is it the overall downturn in the economy which is exacerbating the squeeze felt by the industry.

These are big questions, nay impossible to find answers to, but Goteborg should provide plenty of scope to examine the causes.

In the meantime, settling down to watch a stunning documentary: In the shadow of the moon - quite simply an outstanding film on the space race.

What the news would look like ?

The Delphi principle, Trend extrapolation and Simulation modeling provide some clues.

Then there's the unexpected.

What would news or video look like beyond 2012 is a mug's game many will deride, for no one knows with any degree of certainty, but there are some visual clues from which a whole slew of interested parties are crunching ideas and figures.

In an article for viewmagazine.tv, I'll be pulling together an array of interviews and material I have gleaned from talking to many people, combined with my media and academic career which includes more recently research notes from my Phd and a feedback survey.

Apple, very kindly featured some of these views on their site: the Outernet and public digital displays for calling up the news.

The notion of accelerated news or even video hyperlinking which had a wee shout in The Economist gives more control to users: deep linking video in real time deconstructing the idea of the self contained news package.

Much of the video journalism paradigm today played out 14 years ago with the launch of the UK's first and only dedicated videojournalism channel, and the rare footage I have located gives some perspective for media and academics.

And in the vaults of the BBC from the 60s, more interesting stuff.

What the news and media will look like - I'm just finishing off before the World Association of Newspapers congress

Video journalism's anti-aesthetism short

Video journalism's anti-aesthetism short from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Here's the one minute short cum motion promo from my morning run in Chicago.
I shot about 7 mins, in a shoot to edit form, on my Sony A1.

List of related links

More from two days ago posts.

Images from shoot

Video journalists cookbook

The other side of the Video journalism manifesto