How the smaller media organizations compete

Add comment March 11th, 2008

The Web is certainly the future of journalism. And shooting videos is just one component of having a robust news site. We shoot a couple video with three different types of equipment.

We have what we call the big-boy equipment (the stuff much like what our TV counterparts use) that include an HD camera, light kit, mics and more. And we have point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders. We use the big-boy stuff when we’re working with a lot of audio because the sound quality is much better. For down-and-dirty, quick video, we use the smaller cameras.

While video quality is important, we also know that quantity and timeliness also are important. Some of our most popular videos are of breaking news. Those are usually are shot, edited and posted within two hours. In the beginning, it used to take us about four hours to produce videos.

On Friday, we published seven videos. We used the camcorder to shoot five videos of the Golden Apple winners. And we used the big-boy camera to shoot the Chrysler videos. See all the Golden Apple videos here. See the Chrysler videos here and here.

We’re a medium-size newsroom, and we’ve been shooting video for about 15 months. We get better at it every day. The YouTube video below talks about how smaller newsrooms can stay competitive by embracing video, even if it’s shot with a point-and-shoot and never wins an award.