Telling stories with simple tools

A suburban Indianapolis fire captain talks about what motivates people to join the fire department. Shot this to test video with a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 point-and-shoot.




A former airline pilot who's now a flight instructor at Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport talks about his love of flying. This is a test of video storytelling techniques using inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras, in this case a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 ($238).


News video cost and quality

I love the emotion and detail that video can help bring to a news story online.

When I went through Gannett’s “MoJo” video journalism training in 2007 the idea was to equip newspaper reporters and photographers with the skills to add video content to the Web.

Two years later, there’s so much more video on newspaper Web sites. Users, including the 100 million YouTube viewers (as of spring 2008), expect video.

So it’s no surprise that Nielsen Online research for the Newspaper Association of America found newspaper Web sites attracted more than 74 million monthly unique visitors in the third quarter of 2009.

The NAA points to other research in 2009 showing Internet users viewed 16.8 billion videos in April, a 52 percent increase over April 2008.

And the NAA points out that newspaper Web site visitors are 76 percent more likely to have downloaded video or audio the previous day than Internet users as a whole.

Not all video is created equal, of course: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was watched 28 million times in the first week after his death.

Page views on a local newspaper site for video about school test scores or other routine stories won’t do nearly as well.

Good video shows something unusual or compelling, introduces an interesting character or provokes emotion in some way.

Good video doesn’t have to be complex. Tom Van Dyke of The Chicago Tribune did this weather feature and found two good characters to tell a slice of life in the big city:



Van Dyke was testing out a piece of new gear when he shot that. From the quality of the audio, he probably had a wireless mic on the woman.

The question of gear always comes up when talking about Web video. How much equipment is needed and what does it cost?

The Poynter blog has an excellent look at some of the high-end video options for still photographers.

Independent filmmaker Danfung Dennis, who is finishing a documentary on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, uses what may be the top of the line in custom-made rigs.

He uses a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70 f/2.8 L lens, Sennheiser ME-66 microphone and a Glidecam 2000 mount, for starters. That equipment cost more than $5,000 – not exorbitant by photo equipment standards, and probably half of what equivalent quality would have cost a few years ago, but beyond the reach of many newsrooms.

It’s also a lot to carry. Dennis’ rig would be too much to carry for typical domestic assignments.



The question is whether that level matters to online users primarily interested in vivid moments from local news – a dramatic fire, wreck, emotional moment with people at the scene of a local news event.

For that coverage, it’s more important that as many reporters and local contributors as possible have access to useable video of some kind, not that it be documentary-grade.

I’m intrigued by the possible equipment choices when we’re thinking of Web video more as social media - video shot by people who are primarily reporters and writers

Here’s an example – an interview with a technology expert at a digital media conference. The quality is poor, but the content is meaningful to people with a strong interest in the conference.

You can guess how it was shot. The video came from the onboard camera on a Mac laptop. The reporter, because he had nothing else to shoot with, grabbed his laptop, cradled it in his arm and asked some questions. It’s not what you would plan to do, but for users with a strong interest, it was fine. In other words – newsworthiness can trump technical quality.

If the goal is to be ready when news breaks, to train more people in the newsroom to produce video and to think more in multimedia terms when planning stories, then we’ll need more equipment at less cost. More people in the newsroom have to get their hands on gear.

For limited uses, I’m a fan of the Panasonic Lumix TZ-5, a pocket-size, 10X zoom point-and-shoot that delivers 720 HD video. The two video examples at the top of this post were shot with a TZ-5. In news video as in golf, I think the swing is actually more important than the club. Here are the specs on that camera.

Panasonic’s latest model is actually the TZ-7, for about $350. It’s got a 12X lens and can also zoom out a little wider, but I’m not a big fan of the AVCHD codec it uses. If I were going out to buy something now, I’d probably pick up a TZ-5, for $238 (in November 2009).

I think we’ll see more compromises in video cost and quality. In community journalism, small, low-cost Web operations are beginning to take root. We’ll likely see them devise more ways to offer more content at less cost.

To meet that competition, we need to find cameras that produce decent video at low cost and in a way that is easy to learn. Finding stories is still the first job of reporters, but telling them well – with video when it’s helpful – is critical to keeping and building audiences for local news.