Capturing News picks up on the theme of the film Capturing Reality, an inspiring work that explores the documentary genre through on-camera conversations with acclaimed directors. Like those filmmakers, video journalists are also in pursuit of documentary truth, trying to capture that subset of reality known as news. This film is about their stories.
I’m an adjunct professor at American University, where I’ve taught digital skills and documentary video production, including the capstone broadcast course for graduate journalism students. Previously, I was the video team lead at USA TODAY, working with an award-winning group of video journalists and helping to develop the company’s digital video strategy. More of my background.
Video journalism is spreading across newsrooms, including ones that traditionally dealt solely with print or audio media. Because of declining costs and rapidly improving capabilities of cameras and editing systems, many reporters are becoming “backpack journalists” capable of reporting for multiple publishing platforms.
There are a variety of reasons for this transformation, ranging from the hope that video’s relatively high ad-revenue potential might help lift a financially troubled industry to the need to maintain editorial competitiveness on the digital playing field of websites, tablet devices and smart phones.
The purpose of this blog is to follow the state of video journalism—to highlight notable examples of visual storytelling, emerging technologies and equipment, training resources and best practices being used in pioneering newsrooms and places of learning.
Last but not least, the coolest thing about the Web is its interactivity. So feel free to join in the conversation.
PS: This blog is not affiliated with anyone or anything else. For better or worse, whatever I say here is merely my own opinion.
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