Hey, it’s M-m-m-max H-H-Headroom!
Posted in Comment on 07/26/2005 09:38 pm by OrthoclaseWell, not really. Edison Carter had Theora and Max, of course. But over at the Online Journalism Review, they’re using a wiki to discuss the advent and promotion of Video Journalists, “‘one-man bands’ who report, film and edit their own video stories.”
It’s just starting out, but so far looks interesting. The primary promoter of the idea is Michael Rosenblum (with a not very pretty black, red and white site, but who am I to say? since I liked green and orange and now am stuck in the blues), who has “trained nearly 4,000 video journalists worldwide.”
The discussion is so far focusing on the merits of a single person doing the newsgathering vs. a two-person team (the most common TV newsgathering form). Given my total ignorance of the subject, I’ll just be reading it rather than posting. But I do have to wonder if the local news outlets see this as a move simply to cut costs, and ignore the opportunity to bring local news back to the local station. That’s one of the reasons I don’t watch local news shows — they’re rife with clips from events outside of the state, let alone outside of driving distance.
The discussion lasts for two days. Read it if you get the chance.
(via The Lenslinger — one of the participants)
07/27/2005 at 7:53 am
You know, they don’t mention Ananova once in that piece. Makes me think they just now started paying attention, even though that avatar has been reading news since the Bubble Days [though I see she's stopped recently].
07/27/2005 at 8:16 am
off-topic, but… nice new place you got here! I’ve just noticed the transition today, so I’ll leave my questions here…
Since I’m still kinda dumb about these sorts of things… I see you’ve started using WordPress. How hard was the transition? Are you going to try to move over old posts from blog-spot, or is that pretty much a hopeless proposition? Are you much happier that you’ve moved?
I’ve been feeling like I’ve wanted to move QoW to a better platform for a *long* time. I’ve been half-heartedly writing my own little publishing platform to accomplish some organizational tasks that I don’t see on many other blogs (I want less of a “traditional blog”, and more of a “multi-threaded record of the thoughts of five different people simultaneously, complete with automatically-added links and a platform for searching and computer-based text-analysis,” although that might be kind of ambitious). But I’ve also considered a third-party platform like WordPress.
Thoughts? Just wondering….
07/27/2005 at 9:42 am
P: You’re much more the media hound than I — but I would consider Ananova to be more like a wire service (at least after my very brief look). As far as I can tell, this VJ stuff is primarily aimed at creating the feeling of “being right there at the exact moment” for as little cost as possible.
son1: I haven’t decided whether to move the old stuff over from blogspot. There is a procedure one can use to import the posts, but I was not able to get it to go easily — though I have a short tolerance for working some things out. I may just leave everything there, wrapped in plastic.
The advantage to using something “off the shelf” like WordPress is that you don’t have to take time to develop it (though it can still suck up lots of time customizing it). And whether you roll your own or use a third party setup, the hardest part of hosting your own site is the back end stuff. At least for me it is. Luckily, my host took care of most of that, but I still had to decide which robots could go where, and did I want htaccess stuff and cetera. (I speak pidgin UNIX)
But so far I like it much better. I have control over my pictures, for instance. (I think the idea of Flickr is cool, but I find their interface really hard to grasp.) And setting up multiple users is darned easy. And there are a zillion plugins that’ll handle things you never knew you needed handling. And you can do things like have random tag lines (see footer) and store files to feed the random tag line generator….
This you get from nearly any blog (or CMS) software that you have on a server you pay for. And that’s the question, really: is the control worth the cost? For me it is. So far. I’ll let you know in a month or so
And feel free to email me if you want some details or free (ya’ get what ya’ pay for) advice. o.clase at gmail