Mar

4

When video makes the news

Posted by Vera Haller on Mar 4, 2008 under: foreign news, online news, television, video | 3 Comments

 Anyone who has followed the news on television knows that decisions can be influenced by the type and quality of video that reporters bring back to the newsroom. For example, dramatic footage of a car accident or a police chase might make the air even if there is not much of a story to back up the video.The Web is no different. Yesterday, any number of news sites with a national reach had links on their homepages to video that an amateur videographer took of a near plane crash at Germany’s Hamburg airport.

Fox News and The New York Times in its blog, “The Lede,” were among those with stories and links to the video. When I looked on Google News for the story today, I found 247 links.

While the video is dramatic (it shows the plane wobbling and almost crashing right near the runway and then swooping up again), the incident would never have made news if that person with the video camera hadn’t been taping the landing.

The plane ultimately landed safely. No one was injured. So was it news? This story illustrates how – in the digital age — a good video clip can make news, not just on a local TV news station but on news outlets around the world.

Feb

28

Baghdad blogs

Posted by Vera Haller on Feb 28, 2008 under: blogs, foreign news, newspapers, online news, television | 2 Comments

Blogs are good for many things, among them giving journalists a forum to focus on a particular subject. This blog is an example. It gives me the opportunity to write about changes in the news business.

Blogs also allow journalists to tell the story behind the story, to go into detail or to shoot off on a tangent in ways traditional news stories wouldn’t allow. The Iraq story has spawned many a journalist blog – most of them offering up painful stories of life behind the headlines. The New York Times is the latest to launch such a blog, Baghdad Bureau. The item I read, about a platoon of U.S. soldiers about to go home, provided vivid reporting with photos and audio clips from individual soldiers.

In another such blog, Baghdad Observer, McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel recently posted a poignant item about the isolation felt by the 13-year-old son of an Iraqi  colleague. The NBC News bureau also blogs at Blogging Baghdad.

The war also has inspired non-journalists to write. Take a look here at a directory of blogs and diaries from Iraq compiled by Yahoo.

Feb

12

Bringing the story home

Posted by Vera Haller on Feb 12, 2008 under: blogs, foreign news, multimedia, online news, video | 1 Comment

What is sometimes lost in discussions about the current state of the news industry is how the shift to the Web has created opportunities for powerful storytelling. The ability to report using words, images, video and audio means news organizations can draw people into a story like never before.

To find compelling coverage on the Web, take the story in Kenya. For many people in the United States, a news story from Africa may seem remote and, perhaps, not of the highest interest. But spend time on the YouTube channel created by NTVKenya, a television news station, and the importance of the story will be driven home. There are heartbreaking reports such as this one about children being separated from their families because of the violence.

Other interesting Web coverage is being done by a young photographer/blogger, Lameck Nyagudi, whose photos are featured on the BBC’s Web site.  Nyagudi also has a blog and supplies photos to africanews.com.