Why the New Name?

Did you notice we changed our Website name? It used to be "KobreGuide to the Web's best multimedia & video journalism." Now it's "KobreGuide to the Web's best videojournalism." For this blog title, we've also removed "multimedia" and made "videojournalism" one word. Why?

When we started this project more than a year ago, there was very little quality video journalism, and audio slideshows were just starting to come into their own. We needed a way to describe these hybrid productions of still images, moving images, audio (nat sound), audio interviews, and photog voiceovers. "Multimedia" seemed to fit the bill. But two things happened.

One, multimedia became an increasingly vague term. Ask ten people what it means, you'll get ten different responses. Interactive clickable calenders are considered multimedia. Bottom line: it's become meaningless.

Two, the quality of online nonfiction video has taken a quantum leap, as media organizations allocate more resources to it.

Three, in the same spirit that news photography evolved to photo journalism, and then morphed to "photojournalism" (which I first used as the title of my textbook nearly 30 years ago), we decided to stake our flag on this brave new planet and declare it for the kingdom of Videojournalism (one word). And, yes, good videos can still incorporate still images within them.

A year ago there wouldn't have been enough videojournalism to fill our Website. Now there is. And it's worthy of its own textbook -- so stay tuned for more news about that!