Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley

One of our photographers came to work this week with one of these, a Pure Digital Point and Shoot videocamera. It’s $100 at Target. And it could be the way we start getting reporters to shoot video. The advantages, aside from the price:

• It’s reporter-proof (a big red “record” button on the back and not much else)

• The video quality is decent, even in low light

• The audio quality seems passable

• A flip-out USB jack, which means no cords to lose or fumble with

• AA batteries mean no charging or cords

Disadvanatges:

• It’s audio is only passable, and bad audio can ruin otherwise good video
• Its .avi video format doesn’t play nice with Macs out of the box. But a quick export out of Quicktime seems to solve the problem

• It’s feels a little cheap. I’m not sure how much banging around it could take

• You need special software to get the video off the camera

• No image stabilization

The camera is being discussed a bit on the Newspaper Video Yahoo Group. Here’s some video we shot yesterday (admittedly with no real compression, which affects the video quality). And here’s a clip shot by the Racine Times in Wisconsin. Some folks think the quality is fine. Others do not. I guess it depends on your standards and what you’re using it for. I can see reporters whippping out one of these in the field at a crime or accident scene, or for quick video of a subject not already being shot by the photo staff. Bear in mind that this video would likely be scaled down in size to 300 pixels or less and embedded in a story. And while we get reporters used to the idea of shooting, you can bet that new versions of these cameras will get better and better.

Newspaper web sites are scrambling to become more community oriented. Anyone thinking of building an online community would do well to listen to this podcast from Boagworld.com, a UK site devoted to advice on building and managing web sites. Hosts Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington cover the basic dos and don’ts of community building. It’s all common sense. But it’s worth repeating and hearing over and over again.

Paul also explains the underpinnings of social participation - why people get involved in online communities in the first place. Again, it’s common sense, but important. Because the better you understand why people like to particpate, the better service you can build for them.

“We’re social animals, we require a sense of belonging,” Paul says. “We like to be associated with a group. And to some extent we gain our identity from being associated with a group. There is a degree of ‘cool-by-association.’ It’s about a feeling of contributing and perceived to be of worth. We’re looking for approval of our peers.”

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I’m making available the modified version of the Photopress plugin that we use at the Merc for any WordPress users who want it. It adds the ability for users to rotate images before they insert them in blog posts. This is handy for those images that come in sideways. I’m calling this version 0.9.4-r, since it’s a modification of version 0.9.4. I’ll also notify the original developer, so he can incorporate the modifications into his versions, if he wishes. Since we did not write the bulk of the plugin, I can’t really offer any support for this version. To get the latest Photopress version from the original source, go here. Download the rotate version below.

(Note: I just discovered that Photopress has a bug that prevents you from editing your sidebar widgets if you are using the widgets plugin. The bug has been discussed here. The workaround is to disable the Photopress plugin, edit your sidebar, then re-enable Photopress.)

Download Photopress

We’re launching three new blogs this weekend, so I’ll take a moment to shamelessly give them a little Google juice (not that this blog has any authority in the Google Page Rank system). Our CES blog will offer coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. That’ll be complemented by columnist Dean Takahashi’s blog (memo to Dean: start blogging, buddy!). And we’re capitalizing on the huge success our reality TV blogging on our main entertainment blog by launching a seperate reality TV blog.

But the main point of this post is to extol the virtues of WordPress as a blogging platform. Our previous corporate parent had set us up on Typepad’s hosted system. And while hosted systems have their virtues, Six Apart’s enterprise plan was costly, and Typepad’s sluggish performance and network downtime is just too much of hassle.

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I tweaked some sensibilities with my measley one-paragraph post about audio slideshows yesterday, and my longer video post. The comments I received online and off deserve a follow-up.

1. First of all, I’m impressed (and perplexed) that so many people seem to care about my piddling little opinions.

2. I’m not devaluing still photography. I started in college as an aspiring photojournalist, and I have boxes of photos, an internship, cannisters of rotting film and an insignificant award or two to show for it. It’s only because of a quirk of fate that I chose the writing track. I’ve always valued visuals, and always will. Still photos obviously are key to news and storytelling, online and off.

3. Photographers reacted to my post about boring audio slideshows as if I were attacking the profession. That’s unfortunate. Because a defensive, snarky, head-in-the-sand attitude is not the way forward. Imagine if the newspaper industry reacted this way when people started telling us that newspapers were boring. We’d be in big trouble. Oh. Wait. Nevermind. That’s already happened.

I’ll clairfy what I meant about slideshows. From my perspective as a viewer, I’m seeing a lot of slideshows out there that are starting to look and sound the same to me. They have the same tone and pacing and look. And it’s getting old. It’s as if a lot of folks are drawing from the same audio slideshow textbook. In some cases, the subject matter doesn’t seem to warrant an audio slideshow. My sense is that some papers are starting to produce slideshows just because they can. Do regular readers share my opinion? I don’t know. Are my views skewed because I consume a disproportionate amount of media? Perhaps. Is video a better alternative? In some cases, yes. Like Howard, I personally tend to favor video. But in many cases, video doesn’t work or isn’t worth the time.

I’m not indicting all slideshows or multimedia. Far from it. There is great — even truly exceptional — stuff out there. My colleague Richard Hernandez points us to some of it. And I’m proud to work with the people who built and contribute to this site. I want to see more of it. And I want to see more variety. As I told a colleague, “I just think that in general, the industry needs to get more creative with slideshows and not let them become a crutch.”

As for my blog post imploring photographers to embrace video, I’ve had a slight change of heart. There are clearly a number of still photographers who are wholly dedicated to still photography and want nothing to do with video. So be it. While I still think photographers have a lot to offer newspapers as they embrace video — be it advice, encouragement or active involvement — it’s also apparent that many papers are doing just fine without the photogs being involved. Whatever works.

OK, maybe that’s an overstatement. There are still some good ones out there every once in a while. But audio slideshows have always felt sort of like poor man’s video to me, trying to create movement and energy out of something static. Now that video tools are so cheap and ubiquitous, and the delivery so easy, why not just use video?

Roanoke’s Seth Gitner is surveying the members of the Newspaper Video Yahoo Group about their newspapers’ use of video and training. The good news is that a lot of them are diving enthusiastically into video. The bad news, in my opinion, is that in some cases, it’s not coming out of the photo departments.

I’m puzzled by this. The visuals people at papers should be leading the charge into video. They are the visual experts in the organizations. The leap from still images to video is far shorter for them than for a reporter or someone else. They have the smarts and the political capital in newsrooms to make video a priority.

Instead, though, we are getting some responses such as this:

Is your newspaper cross training its still photogs to do video?

Not really. There’s been talk of it but the photocracy* isn’t really interested. … They aren’t even interested in helping out with Soundslides (all that production is done by web staffers, except for a few rare cases where a photographer stood over someone’s shoulder)!”

The Oregonian is not cross-training its photographers. And at the Bakersfield Californian, long considered in the digital media vanguard, just “(t)hree of our six photographers have each made one video,” reports multimedia editor Jennifer Baldwin. There, she says. “photographers have not been interested in doing video.” (Although that may be changing.)

Bakersfield is especially interesting because the site is swimming in video. The paper produces two to three video pieces a day. But it’s coming from reporters, not photographers.

On the one hand, it’s fantastic that the Californian has taught so many reporters to see the value of video, and that they are willing to learn and use new skills. For run-of-the-mill daily news video, it seems to be working great. But without the participation of the photo staff, you’re likely missing out on some really exceptional video storytelling possibilities. Many of the photographers at the Californian were there during my internship 20(!) years ago, and they are a talented bunch. It’s a crime — and a waste of resources — that they aren’t applying their talents to this richer, more engaging visual medium. And it’s a shame that they aren’t a resource for the other staffers who could use help with composition, framing, lighting and other shooting techniques.

We’re fortunate at the Mercury News in that our photo staff has embraced video and is using it to do interesting things such as this and this and compelling storytelling such as this. They, and other newspaper staffs, see the way forward. It’s high time for all newspaper photo staffs to see the light.