Good Reputation Sleeping

Best of Photojournalism 2008

Best of Photojournalism 2008
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

Just got back from a long week of judging the Best of Photojournalism contest. We were, again the guests of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and again, we hardly had opportunity to take advantage of the Florida spring.

What we did see was more wonderful online journalism, over 900 unique urls this time around!

In case any of you have been under a rock for the last two years, web video is big and about to 'blow up'. And lest anyone be confused - the best web video bears little resemblance to spot news photography - it is film making, plain and simple.

Check out the top winners at BOP.

The New iMovie

Apple - iLife - iMovie - New in iMovie ’08.

Brilliant!
This is a touch screen video editing program, end of story.

Camjos Across Africa

Link: AfricaNews - Mobile reporters in Africa.

"The ultimate goal is to select, in each African country, a number of skilful (young) men and women (with the help of a local coordinator) and to equip these people with high-technology mobile phones (with a small foldable keyboard) where a special piece of software is installed to permit direct uploads of photos, texts and videos to the Skoeps server, from where they are transferred to the Africa Interactive website for publication. Once online, those stories and images are meant to trigger reactions from users and community members. The project's selection policy gives a bigger chance to skilful women in an effort not only to have diversified contents but above all to contribute to their emancipation efforts through media.

The Africans who take part in this project are known as ‘camjos’, a short combination of ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’. A camjo writes, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa, on subjects that s/he finds newsworthy. Each camjo receives a training on the use of the phone and is coached during the first six months. With this initiative, Africans, whether in cities or in the countryside, will have the opportunity to have their voice heard all over the world.If the camjos perform well, they will generate incomes for themselves as they will be paid based on the number of visitors viewing or reading their contributions."

Lights, Camera, Action!

My first Lumiere!

Download thekite2_s.mp4

Pistols at Dawn

Dueling web video projects from two of the old/new media powerhouses, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Both attempt to take a fresh approach to what we call 'journalism'. Both succeed in different ways.

First, earlier in the week, was 'onBeing' from the Post. Clean, simple and personal. Short stories of Washingtonians by Washingtonians courtesy great video interviews by Jenn Crandall and great interface design by Rob Curley and crew. It has proven to be one of the most successful pieces ever posted on washingtonpost.com.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine online features director Jake Paltrow's commissioned piece, 'The First Ones', interviewing some of Hollywood's finest. The format is again, very simple - one question, "what was the first film that made an impression on you?" The answers are short and sweet and artfully filmed (almost painfully so), and it works. The interface is nice also, allowing you to watch the whole thing or pick where to enter.

These two projects are not quite YouTube, but are also a nice step away from the TV-derivative stuff we are used to seeing from MSM. Hopefully we will see more like this; video journalism that starts to feel like the web is truly its home.

More Signal, Less Noise

More Signal, Less Noise
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

Every once in while something neat breaks through the corporate creativity firewall.

Washington Post videographer Jenn Crandall's onBeing takes a simple idea and brings it to the people in the Washington, D.C. community. Rob Curley and his posse provide an interface and user experience that is both familiar (can you say iTunes?) and fun!

Web video, done right!

Information

Lawrie Mifflin -- Talk to the Newsroom -- The New York Times -- Reader Questions and Answers.

Will Times Reader Include Video?

Q. I have been using the Times Reader for a while now and like it as a great, alternate way to read something that feels more like the paper. Are there any plans to incorporate multimedia (audio or video) into the product?

-- Keith Jenkins

A. Yes, we do plan to offer video and multimedia. Because the files are so large, video will only be available to be played when the reader knows you are online. (It allows you to download articles and photos for reading offline). We hope to have this integrated by January.

Many, many more great questions about multimedia at The New York Times. Open and insightful answers which help us get a handle on at least one media organization's attempts to swim in the online waters.

YouTube Nation

The New Yorker: It Should Happen To You.

The New Yorker tracks the YouTube phenom via the video posts of litlleloca.

"The Oscar was delivered rather unceremoniously—not in March, at the Academy Awards, but in August, three and a half minutes into a sketch Ryan was filming, while she was still in character as Cynthia, an eighteen-year-old Latina from East L.A. who is better known as Little Loca, after the handle Ryan uses when she uploads some of her homemade sketches onto the video-sharing site YouTube. This was about the fortieth in a series of short Little Loca videos that had by then attracted over a million viewings, thanks to Loca’s “big old mouth” (both literally—her heavily outlined lips command attention—and figuratively) and her irreverent putdowns (“You better watch out, fool, because God’s gonna come around and strike you down with some lightning if you don’t be careful”). Loca was wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings, and sitting on a sofa, against a plain white wall, between two women who were known to regular viewers as Smiley (a friend of Ryan’s) and Silent Girl (Ryan’s cousin). Rap music was playing in the background."

“Damn, this shit is heavy,” Loca said, in a pronounced Hispanic accent, after accepting the gold statuette from Smiley and waving it around. “I could knock somebody out with this.” Then she launched into an earnest acceptance speech. “I want to thank YouTube,” she said. “You’re so important in my life right now. And without YouTube there’s no way in hell Loca could have, you know, got something like this.” - Ben McGrath, The New Yorker

To see how life imitates art, check out 2003's William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition. Viral video as uber-marketing tool. Sound familiar?

Evan at the Summit. - This is a Test!

My nephew's 11th birthday party was at the Earth Trek Climbing Center in Columbia, MD.
A very neat way to entertain; physical activity and no video games!
Here's my son Evan reaching for the top of the adult wall!

Published with one of the many new online video services.
The movie was shot with a Canon digital still camera,
compressed in Quicktime and then uploaded to VideoEgg.

More testing to follow.

Mommy Wars - The Video

Another experiment.
This one is from a book party for Leslie Morgan Steiner's 'Mommy Wars'.
I shot Leslie reading from the intro with a Canon SD500, not exactly high-end,
and then uploaded to Google Video which offers code to paste the video into a web page.
Here it is!