Utilizing video by a local newspaper? It doesn’t make much sense, does it? Print is print – and video is video. You can’t combine them, you might be implied to say. The reality is, exactly that is happening at newspapers all over the world. How come?
First of all, newspapers are losing ground to their electronic competition. Print media organizations must be competitive and innovative in order to survive. Of course, you cannot “print” a video on the front page of your favorite newspaper, but they all have their web sites nowadays, and they are exploiting the new media market extensively.
Print Media’s Survival Kit
Print media’s web sites are pretty much the only major “survival kit” they believe in. They are poised to make these web sites as attractive as possible for their readers and advertisers. And what’s better than some attractive video clips as an addition to the printed story in the hard copy of the paper delivered to you at your breakfast table?
They usually embed small video clips into their “printed” text on their web sites, and by simply clicking on the underlined key word you see and hear a video! Some people still consider this a “gimmick”, but in reality it is a fully integrated and extremely user friendly, interactive multi-media presentation.
From Digital Photo to Digital Video
Many photo journalists working for print media see video as a part of the “natural evolution of video”, similar to the addition of color to the formerly just black and white newspaper photos.
How do they do this practically? Many newspaper publishers as well as photo journalists think that a professional news photographer should be able to shoot video and collect audio in addition to taking still pictures. To a particular extent, this is already happening at many conventional, non-electronic media corporations.
With Photo Camera and Camcorder
Many news photographers carry today not just their usual still cameras, but also a mostly fully automated, camcorder-style digital video camera also their employers bought for less than one thousand dollars. The investment factor is minimal. The picture quality of the uploaded video clips is mostly acceptable. However, the quality of the sound is not the primary focus of this “video news gathering” technique and is mostly still sub-standard.
High Definition Video Helps
The workload of these “multimedia photographers” increased dramatically. They must shoot twice, and they must upload and edit their footage twice. This is often too much to demand from a busy newspaper photographer who is normally already very busy catching up from one assignment to another. The high-definition video technology, however, offers meanwhile such a good quality that many newspapers decided to go just with digital HD video and just to “extract” single-frame pictures from the video for their print edition. The quality is not excellent, but “good enough” for many newspapers. Of course, the quality of HD video is going to increase further, making single-frame pictures at least as good as an average digital still camera today.
High-End Photo Cameras With HD Video
Several high-end, professional digital cameras many news photographers use today also offer a “video clip mode” with an excellent quality. If the newspapers continue just to use short clips, this is probably going to be the way to go. Even an old-style editorial office of a newspaper is slowly but surely becoming more
 |
