It’s been a tough 3 weeks teaching video to journalists in China – perhaps the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do. It’s not the teaching part that’s hard – it’s knowing if what I am saying is being correctly translated to my students, it’s being away from friends and family and just being away for so long that makes it tough. I have one more week to go and will take a good long rest when I return to the US.
Last week was especially difficult but yet my amazing students got me through it. They simply amazed me in how quickly they learned. They learned in 4 days what it takes most photographers to learn in 4 weeks or months.
Every week I have a new group of students and each week there are always one or two students that I know really “get it”. There was one student who I coined a nickname for “Mr. Question” because he asked more questions than most. His questions weren’t just about what settings to use on his camera or how to do something in Adobe Premiere, but more about the “big picture”. His questions always showed me he was thinking.
One question, this particular student asked me this week, really caught my attention. He asked me “How are we (new media producers) different than TV?
I had just read an article online that addressed this very question and it talked about how newspaper video journalists are now winning more Emmys than TV news journalists.
I responded to my student by telling him:
- TV news makes the reporter part of the story – sometimes even the “star”
- New media tells the story through the voice of the subjects – making them the “stars”
- TV news is delivered to us on the network channels – 3 times a day.
- Online news is 24/7 and on demand. We get the news online when we want it and wherever we want it – on our desktop computers, on our iPhones or on our iPads. We also can share the news and interact with others. We become part of the delivery chain.
- TV news journalists rush back to the studio to get the story on air by 5 o’clock. The stories are generally very short – limited to their broadcast slot.
- As new media producers we have the luxury of working longer on feature stories and delivering them online to a global audience. While print newspapers and magazines are folding – there has been a rebirth of the long documentary story that can now be delivered online. We are communicating to a wider audience around the world, no longer being restricted by time and space.
In the 1960’s newspaper executives were lamenting about the good old days and predicting that TV would kill them. I find it ironic that the shoe seems to be on the other foot now. I teach “motion” and “video journalism” to a lot of still photographers. There are some who buy their DSLR’s and aspire to make broadcast spots for TV. There are some who aspire to make feature length films for Hollywood. And then there are some who tell me that there is nothing new about video and that field is already glutted with videographers and cinematographers. Those are the old business models for video and motion.
The ones who “get it” are the hybrid creatures that recognize that there is a shift in the way we communicate. They understand that video is really just another medium in which to tell their stories – not a business model, nor a niche market.
My student in China who asked me this question- he “gets it”. He understands that he is part of the future of how Chinese journalists and others around the world, will deliver the news. That’s why they call it – new media.
Journeys of a Hybrid 