My video showreel from 2010-11. It contains a whole range of clips from various editorial projects.
In 2008 Canon released its 5D mkii camera and almost by accident turned a new page in photo-journalism. The mkii turned photographers into film makers overnight, enabling photojournalists to produce cinema quality content in full HD for a reasonable price. The 5D has now spawned a hundred different imitators with similar HD features and the proportion of journalists with the physical capability to produce a regular stream of captivating “multimedia” has sky rocketed.
The trend hasn’t gone unnoticed and this year the World Press Photo awards recognised the global shift away from still photography’s visual dominance in newspapers. The Amsterdam based organisation created new categories for two multimedia prizes, one for traditional linear productions and secondly an award for non-linear interactive multimedia productions.
Still grab from The Home Front, a winner in the ‘linear production’ category made for (surprise, surprise!) the New York Times.
The decisions made by the WPP’s judging panel have not been met with universal approval; there is a quiet army of producers churning out an awesome range of content on the web, some of which seems to trump the US-centric work featured by the awards.
Regardless of the eventual winners, what the awards have made clear is that multimedia journalism is a serious new force to be reckoned with and isn’t simply the ugly child of television news. It is a whole new hybrid genre of story telling, tailored specifically for an online readership and is very much here to stay.
The decision for the newspaper industry to buy into this whole grey area of content has not been only been driven by advances in camera equipment, but by changes in the way people consume news-media. I won’t bother boring you with a crystal ball prophecy about the future of the hard printed newspaper, nor can I tell you whether or not the production of printed newspapers will ever cease altogether, but what is obvious is that traditional papers will continue to shrink as more and more people migrate to reading on ipads, kindles and their internet browsers.
The problem is that trying to generate revenue from online content is much more difficult than the general public seem to understand; online advertising is nowhere near as lucrative as most people are convinced. Some British newspapers like the Times have opted for a pay wall to combat this decline in revenue, whereas other newspapers like the Guardian still operate their hugely popular free websites at a massive loss whilst seeking to limit the damage to their haemorrhaging balance books. The problem both the paywallists and the non-paywallists have is that the market for news around the world is extremely saturated. News in it’s rawest sense is free. Nobody reads newspapers any more to find the breaking stories or the football scores, because world events are carried round the globe instantly on the winds of social media, satellite TV and email (I’m sorry about my market chat here; I’ll get back to multimedia in a moment). That means that consumers want something extra from newspapers which twitter trends can’t offer them (and more still to pay to access content from behind a pay wall) and papers have to be able to offer something beyond breaking headlines. Which brings us back to multimedia news production.
Video based, multimedia content seems to be one of the answers to this problem. It is bright, captivating, adds depth to coverage and often context to offer a wonderful story telling tool; and this seems to have been widely accepted by most broadsheet newspapers.
This presents a real conundrum for the newspaper bosses. They are being encouraged to tighten their belts because they are not selling newspapers. They are being encouraged to cut freelance rates (or even freelancers), yet at the same time they are being encouraged to invest money into paying for multimedia journalists to produce content which can only be enjoyed by a non-paying public (unless the content is protected by a pay-wall).
In real terms it means that newspapers in the UK are very very confused about the value of multimedia content and what they should pay for it or who should pay for it. You have to consider that the time and therefore cost of producing a short three minute package to accompany even to accompany a printed article is extremely expensive; especially when you consider the throwaway value of all content on the web. The production of a world beating package is probably a solid two days work for a multi skilled journalist and World class journalism, requires world class people and at the moment Fleet Street’s budgets simply won’t stretch.
One of my earlier projects for the Times. It’s fun, but does it offer newspapers value for money?
Lets take my short “Jack Cagney” video which was supplied to the Times as an example. It’s a simple three minute feature video which was designed to add character and reinforce a feature written by the journalist Kaya Burgess. It’s an extremely simple, linear project even by the most basic standards – there aren’t any subtitles, no special filters were applied or any funny colour tricks. It took me a long day to produce from start to finish; probably a 10 hour day including travel time. Perhaps in a future multimedia savvy world Kaya could have filmed Jack himself and dropped the footage at the Times for editing by a third party, cutting me out the equation and saving the paper some cash. He could have gone further and photographed the geriatric fitness junky, saved the photo desk some more money and finished the whole feature himself, but in reality it’s an awful lot of work for a single person. You then have to consider what is a fair price to pay a professional producer (with all his own gear and equipment) to travel to Essex (never mind Benghazi or Kabul) and then spend ten hours working on a production, to provide you with a video or even still photos on top of what you are already paying someone for a 1500 word article for print.
The current situation has lead many newspapers to try and gain multimedia content from already stretched reporters and freelance journalists as simply value added. That means for no additional cost. (that’s free to those of you sitting at home…yes free…that’s no money.) Free isn’t an awful lot of money when you need to do things like get the tube to work or eat breakfast and even more frustrating considering that a professional video set up requires a lot of gear; probably a good £2000 more than a still photographer’s kit, much of which is heavy and cumbersome to carry around on the off chance of wanting to film something to simply “add-value” to your story. Paying people negligibly or simply not at all also doesn’t lend itself to people working very hard on their content – video becomes an after thought for a journalist, who is really focusing on the article he is being paid to produce and innovation all but comes to a standstill.
Cameras like the Canon 5D mk2 have without doubt hugely reduced the cost of producing multimedia films which have a professional feel and finish, but the cost is still not insubstantial to an individual – especially considering that although this new generation of cameras produce video which might look like it could be used on conventional television, they are not terribly suited for producing the vast majority of normal television work.
The whole debacle is compounded by an industry which still treats multimedia journalists with a degree of suspicion and as the lowest animals in the hierarchy of news gatherers. Multimedia types tend not to be proper story sniffing reporters, nor truly fearsome scoop-grabbing photographers, but some kind of hybrid bastard who has no real place in the newsroom which is focused on primarily producing the best newspaper they can for tomorrow morning’s streets. Any multimedia work which can be produced to decorate or reinforce a print journalists is often viewed as exactly that – for the sake of reinforcing the main story in the hard newspaper.
Us video types perhaps haven’t helped ourselves. A few paragraphs above I described my line of work as “bright, captivating, adds depth to coverage and often context to offer a wonderful story telling tool”. You only have to look at the work of industry leading producers like the Guardian’s Dan Chung to see how technically excellent and beautiful it is. Chung comes from a photography background and his skill shows, the problem is that his work in terms of news value it isn’t particularly groundbreaking nor important (nor is it meant to be).
Dan Chung’s work for the Guardian is often stunning and North Korea is interesting, but does it really offer any serious news value to a newspaper or is it just art?
What multimedia journalists must do in order to move their discipline forward and up their credibility is to work more as journalists; cutting cinematic news clips over moving music clips is beautiful and was fine early in 2008 when the 5D mk2 was first released to test the cameras capacity – but three years have gone by and cinematic image banks are pretty pointless in a credible story telling capaity. The multimedia man must remember that first and foremost he is a journalist and secondarily a photographer, videographer, writer, producer and editor. Our content must be technically excellent, but also groundbreaking in terms of its news value. There’s no point just adding decoration to other people’s words – we need to try and make sure that someone in the newsroom is adding words for tomorrow morning’s paper to decorate our videos.
Khalid Mohtaseb was one of the first cinematographers to try the a new generation of cameras in a journalistic capacity. His work has spawned a thousand immitations and is beginning to look a little cliched. Some have also questioned whether it is suitably journalistic to be used in a news situation.
Worse than producing what amount to pretty pictures are the newspapers (all of whom are guilty in some regards) who are trying to cut corners and address their media shortcomings by encouraging their staff to chop up random clips of agency newsreel to accompany stories on their site. The images don’t even have the credit of being visually pleasing, provide very little context and the content adds no value to the newspaper apart from the fact it is cheap to produce; it’s the multimedia equivalent of flat earth news churnalism. If people want to watch grainy, shaky live video pictures then they simply have to flick over to the 24 hour news channels – they generally (that’s not an absolute) don’t have a place in newspapers. Quickly rehashed newsreel is certainly not the future of our broadsheets.
Yet even if a magic formula is found to solve the fact that multimedia journalists are still struggling to prove their pedigrees in the newsroom and fill their battered wallets with anything more than pennies, there is a final more fundamental barrier which needs to be addressed before multimedia content can really grow some legs and begin to dominate mainstream newspaper coverage.
At present none of the UK newspaper websites have a capacity to embed videos in HD and some including the Times have an extremely limited capacity to host multimedia as standalone content without an accompanying story. The infrastructure for hosting multimedia content simply doesn’t exist at the moment. The simple fact is that none of the papers have managed to pinch, borrow (Vimeo seems to have mastered HD compression) or invent a suitable way of offering their content in HD is probably a reflection of the real levels of investment in video and multimedia across the industry to date and a real stunting hormone which has maintained the relative infancy of multimedia as a real journalistic discipline.
It’s worth considering the levels of investment which foreign market leading newspapers like the New York Times are making in multimedia content to make sure that we aren’t left behind in the UK. In an interview with Nancy Donaldson who lead the team at the NYT who were represented at the World Press Photo awards she described her team as consisting of “producers, of visual narratives and animations, designers and programmers. Technically we’re all multimedia producers, but the skill set is very diverse.” As a freelancer and a journalist in the UK, this means as usual that I’m going to have to be able to offer at least some of all of the above skills; but what is clear that simply lending journalists video cameras to produce content just isn’t enough and the production of in depth, interactive productions is simply not a job for an individual or a freelancer. It’s another clear reason for why cash needs to pour into this part of the industry, despite the recession and despite falling paper revenues.
Jonah Kessel is fast becoming one of the new stars of a multimedia age. His series for the New York Times is excellent, original work which we should aspire towards.
