Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis (Part 2)

Himself a photographer for 17 years, Colin Mulvany, the resident multimedia guru at The Spokesman-Review, favors using still photographers to capture video news. He says that when he speaks at conferences, he stresses that "your best storytelling is going to come out of your photo departments. You need the visual part of it. Still photographers make great video photographers. They understand the basics of composition and movement and sequencing. Those kinds of things come easily to photographers. For reporters it’s different. Reporters see the world as words, and so making the transition is a little more uncomfortable for them, I think.

"But newspapers are just beginning to learn, and you have to jump in somewhere," Mulvany continues. "Right now we’re going through the Video 101 stage, and we have a long way to go. Even I do, and I’ve been doing this for three years. And that’s not to say that the reporters can’t do it, but they need the proper training. And they need somebody back at the paper who can help them edit, can help them develop their story and style and give them feedback. If you don’t have feedback, you keep producing the same kind of video over and over."

Mulvany doesn’t recommend that newspapers just throw video cameras into the hands of their reporters. You can see the results of that (bad newspaper-generated videos) all over the internet, he says. "You must have the fundamentals of how to tell a story with video—things like learning to sequence your video; shooting wide, medium, and tight; shooting action-reaction; shooting lots of details and understanding screen direction. The basic things. If you don’t have them pounded into your head, the video just doesn’t work. And the viewer will reject it. You bolt; it doesn’t hold your interest."

The Roanoke Times also tends to favor the use of still photographers. "Our reporters will shoot video, and we give them training on how to do that and on what kind of things we need," says Seth Gitner, now the newspaper’s multimedia editor and formerly a photographer of 10 years. "But if you give a video camera to a still photographer, they might come back with a beautifully shot video with good sequencing and visual storytelling. There’s a different thought process among still photographers. And if you give a video camera to a trained TV person, they will come back with a product different from that of either a still photographer or from a word-person reporter. So there are differences, and these decisions about who does what are things the industry is going through."

Clearly, the infusion of multimedia into newspaper operations is altering staffs, says Glaser. "Our notions of who can do what or who should be in which roles is changing. No matter what a person’s background (magazine, newspaper, TV, programming, still photography) people are going to have to become more nimble and able to cross boundaries of expertise at learning new skills. Everyone will have to be much more of a media generalist. And people with interactive experience are already moving up the chain at these organizations."

Can Newspapers Make Any Money from Video?
When you visit the websites of the nation’s many newspapers, it’s difficult to see how they are making money from their multimedia efforts. Some of them are embedding pre-roll ads on their video clips, but many of them aren’t.

When it comes to monetizations the difference between small and large newspapers appears to be stark, with smaller papers making little or no money directly from their video clips.

Both Seth Gitner at The Roanoke Times (circulation 97,000) and Colin Mulvany at The Spokesman-Review (circulation 92,000) report that they are not currently using pre-roll ads. Both men pass the buck for monetization to their advertising departments, with comments about the traditional hard-line separation between editorial and advertising departments. "That really comes down to our sales team being able to sell it and for us to re-evaluate what the product is and then move on to the next thing," says Gitner, who adds that the whole multimedia thrust there at The Roanoke Times is still considered by most to be "an experiment."