The month’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Andrew Pergam, asked what the role of online video would be in the newsroom of the future. The answer offered here started from a distinction newsrooms had been slow to make: video on the web is not video on television, and handing every reporter a Flip cam is not a video strategy.
Five working modes were set out. Experiential video puts the viewer inside a situation and conveys a sense of being there, immediate and raw without being badly shot; C. J. Chivers’s report for the New York Times on a firefight in Helmand province was the example. Direct video simply shows the action, often captured on a phone by whoever was present, on the assumption that viewers already know the story and want the footage — with the attendant risk that footage divorced from context misleads. Speak hands the time over to the people in the story, edited by a journalist but with no reporter on screen. Show uses video to demonstrate what a written piece describes, as the BBC did with a short clip of a children’s programming tool. Explain walks the viewer through a process stage by stage.
The example held up as the best of the form was a CBC piece in which the son of a Canadian killed in the Haiti earthquake paid tribute to his father. The broadcast version was narrated by reporter Nahlah Ayed; the online version carried only the son’s recollections, and hit considerably harder for it.