Page 161 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Multimedia Journalism: Putting It All Together

people have worked on an investigation or major project over many
months. Sometimes the situation involves an individual working in
an isolated region or embedded with troops during a war. “It may be
an international reporter who works alone, or it may be a team of
reporters comprising videographers, computer graphics specialists and
top writers who work on a series that’s designed for different platforms
from the start,” Stevens explained. “The series may be delivered as one-
minute videos on a news roundup that teases to a longer multimedia
package.” The format may vary, but the process remains the same:
The reporter is given significant individual responsibility. Reporters
use multimedia tools to produce a new form of journalism, but it is
still journalism. It is necessary here to note the increasing importance
of teams. In some situations a story becomes so big it requires a team of
journalists. Part of the multimedia mind-set is the willingness to work
with others and to share resources and knowledge.
BBC Television introduced a variation of Stevens’s second concept
at the start of the new century via their Video Journalist (VJ) program.
This consists of a single person in the field who reports, shoots, writes,
edits, and transmits stories. The program, known as PDP or Personal 151
Digital Production, began in September 2001. The BBC established a
training center at Newcastle in the north of England and planned to
train about 600 of its more than 2,400 television journalists by early
2005. The VJ concept was the brainchild of Michael Rosenblum, a
former NBC producer turned consultant. He convinced the BBC that it
could boost newsgathering efficiency by using VJs. The idea was not to
replace teams of traditional television crews, but to supplement them
with mobile individuals. Rosenblum said the scheme was an attempt to
“build television along the lines of a newspaper” operation. “We want
to take them [reporters] out of the newsroom and put them in the
field where they can gather news,” he said. Rosenblum told Broadcast
Engineering magazine that his idea would cut the cost of production by
20 to 70 percent (2004).
Paul Myles (2004), the PDP center coordinator based at the
BBC’s Newcastle office, said video journalists mostly used Avid DV
Express 3.5.4 nonlinear editing software, though some offices operated
Macintosh-based systems and edited with Apple Computer’s Final Cut
Pro. Each course in the VJ program lasted 3 weeks. During the course,
VJs were supplied with a digital video camera. Initially, they received
the Sony PD150, but starting in 2004, attendees received a later model,
the PD170. “It’s a lightweight camera that records in DVCAM and