There’s nothing quite like the excitement of getting a story. It’s a feeling I’m missing a bit right now. But I read this post from the awesome Reuters Photographers blog with a sense of knowing acknowledgement. Scrambling to action for a big story — you can’t beat it:
It took about a minute for the plane to drift behind a building. I only shot about 30 frames before it disappeared from sight again. At that point I ingested the images, made a selection, blew one up huge to confirm it was a US Airways plane and sent the first picture to our picture desk in Singapore for transmission to the wire.
Within minutes it seemed Brendan was back in front of me with pictures from ground level. He was able to shoot some pictures of passengers and grabbed a pedicab to take him back to Times Sq. His pictures kept the flow of fresh images flowing.
Eric Thayer arrived at the river and saw a group of firemen running to a big ferry boat. He asked if he could go aboard and was told yes, as long as he stayed out of the way. Eric was able to get up close to the plane and take some of the most dramatic photos of the day, of passengers in life rafts waiting to be rescued.
Wonderful!
MEN goes mojo and wins
January 9th, 2009Three reasons why this is great.
1) It’s an embedded player — many more people will watch it as a result.
2) It’s unedited and raw — no need to waste time in post-production. Get this out there!
3) It was shot with an N95 — meaning it was probably sent back to the newsroom instantly.
Watch:
Now, if we leave aside the fact the video is a little boring, the newsgathering here has proven to be very effective. The reporter — Nicola Dowling — has clearly rushed to the scene, whipped out here n95, and shot a quick clip. Not much thought has gone into it — because there was no need.
Imagine if Ronaldo had have still been there. She would have had an exclusive video interview. The WORLD would have watched. Sadly, I guess she was a little too late, but she’s probably got at least an hour on the local TV crew, if not more.
The point is, Nicola’s use of mobile journalism (oh, okay then, I’ll call it mojo. Sheesh) demonstrates how easy it is. How many old timers (sorry guys) say “I’m not going to go around filming too” ? Too many. But this is so easy, it would be silly not to.
After all, most reporters hold dictaphones under the face of their interviewee. Why not hold a cameraphone? Easy peasy — jobs a good’un.
That’s not to say that all newspaper video should be as rough and ready as the Ronaldo clip, though. Here the MEN get the higher quality equipment out to do some more traditional TV-style reporting. And what a damn good job they’ve made of it too.
[via Journalism.co.uk and the Manchester Evening News]
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Posted in Comment, Multimedia, Newspapers, Regional, The Web
Tags: crash manchester evening news n95 nicola dowling ronaldo video