Old Video Journalism Storytelling Techniques

This past Sunday I was watching “Reliable Sources” with Howard Kurtz on CNN, on which Kurtz reports about journalism and how the media covers world happenings. One segment on Sunday showed a video from BBC Four’s Charlie Brooker. Brooker’s video poked fun at the old video reporting techniques that journalists continue to use to tell their stories on the web and on television.

 

Kurtz casually made comments asking what is wrong with some of the traditional video reporting techniques such as “street reporting” and pointed out the techniques that he happened to be fond of. It seemed to be just the “lighter note” for the show before Kurtz got into the shameful and embarrassing (for journalists) story of Gerald Posner’s plagiarism and resignation as chief investigative reporter at The Daily Beast.

Despite the comedy behind the video, as a student journalist I think the subject matter is far more serious. Journalism students around the world are being taught that they must begin to develop their multimedia storytelling skills immediately in order to land jobs and create work that hold audiences’ interests. However, the latter is beginning to be neglected by news organizations that I believe are finding comfort in following standard formulas in reporting news. They are probably thinking, “If it worked for us before lets continue that. Besides, who has times in this fast-paced media world to be creative?” 

When I first started watching Brooker’s video I knew exactly where he was going because I had seen it many times on local news stations and shows like 60 Minutes and 20/20. Here is a 60 minutes video that is mostly an interview, but has many of these typical video shots Brooker is talking about.

Typical video techniques in 60 Minutes video:

• Repeated shots of the UBS bank sign get old pretty fast and serve no real purpose.
• There are also shots of people using their cell phones with their heads cut out of the frame. I guess that was supposed to signify Americans communicating when the subject of communication was being talked about in the story, but it just reminded me of the headless shots of people walking around city streets that Brooker included in his video.
• There are shots of the source doing some sort of work in an office or at his computer. That is like the sequence in the Brooker video of the man opening the envelope.

The overuse of those formats never stopped me from watching news programs that use them, but like one of the people said in Brooker’s video it does make you stop listening quite often.

Here is what I understand:

• Being creative is time consuming and with video reporting audiences expect the content immediately. Standards save time.

• Many print journalists are not even used to doing video at all, so whatever video content they are able to successfully create is an achievement in itself particularly if the video does an acceptable job of copying the techniques that television reporters have been using for years.

• Standard techniques can limit error

….but these excuses can’t last for too long.

Reporters and producers may have gotten away with continuing the basic storytelling techniques shown in Brooker’s video on television, but online audiences want to see something other than the typical news formats that they saw on the local news their grandparents had playing on the T.V. when they were younger. Creativity plays a significant role in online journalism.

However, because this creativity is still developing student journalists are using these uncreative formats as models. I know I do. This will be a problem for video journalism if journalists don’t speed up the production of works that set new standards of creativity for future generations.

The creativity should also be enforced by the j-schools. In this post, “Notes on Video Journalism: Ideas and Techniques of Michael Rosenblum,” the blogger and educator, Russell Chun claims that the techniques he lists are from an expert who is thinking outside the box of j-school education. I actually think these tips do the total opposite. Not only do the “notes” in that blog enforce old video reporting styles, but it also encourages the use of traditional film structures that even movie makers are trying to get out of. Movies can get away with tradition since just attracting someone to see a movie, whether it turns out to be good or bad, can make the film maker money. Unfortunately, for journalists one-time customers don’t bring in any significant cash. You have to produce news content that makes audiences come back for more.  

As I showed in one of my past posts there are some news organizations that are doing a great job in setting the standards for creativity. I wrote about Time magazine in that past post, and here is a more recent video showing Time’s ability to tell stories in a way that breaks away from the typical news reporting styles and approaches more documentary-like techniques. It was even able to achieve that with this common and not-so-newsworthy topic of Valentine’s Day.