Just because the Taiwanese company Next Media Animation has attracted a lot of eyeballs by turning news stories into cartoons doesn't mean it's journalism.
Movies "based on true stories" are still fictionalized re-imaginings of real events -- and not to be confused with the real thing.
Triply true for these over-the-top Asian renderings of real people in fantasy scenarios.
Despite what this Time.com video (below) and accompanying story imply, just because these are situations that weren't captured by cameras or videocameras does not forgive the bizarre distortions of reality under the guise of "news."
Next Media Animation first gained notoriety in the U.S. by animating the supposed scuffle between Tiger Woods and his wife. It depicted her bashing in his car with a golf club -- an incident which both say never happened.
It's gotten much worse since then, with truly cartoonish vignettes of characters ranging from Lindsay Lohan in the slammer to Julian Assange in the sack. To call them journalistically unreliable and unbalanced would be a massive understatement.
This is a black eye for visual journalism. When it comes to depicting truth, and not what Stephen Colbert sarcastically dubbed "truthiness," there is no substitute for cameras and videocameras. Animated news? We're not buying it.
For video gadgeteers, here are a couple new toys in search of a use that justifies their expense.
The first is the Steadicam Smoothee (top right) for your smartphone or Flip vidcam, that's bigger and more expensive than the device itself. It's a handheld mini-version of the rigs used in Hollywood to eliminate the shakes from tracking shots, for a fraction of the price -- $180 instead of $60,000. It's not available til December, so meanwhile see what the New York Times Gadgetwise blog has to say.
The second is a hands-free camcorder called the Looxcie (bottom right) that clips over your ear, and records what you see while you're walking (or rock climbing, or whatever), and then enables you to share footage via email or social network sites through your smartphone. The Times' Gadgetwise blog gave it a bemused spin around the neighborhood (see video below), and happily reported that the glowing ear appendage didn't attract the anticipated unwanted attention from passersby, but complained that the 480x320 resolution was too low to justify the $199 pricetag.
What possible scenarios would warrant posting your unedited mobile world view for the world to see? A Facebook commenter proposed strapping the device to a pet -- so brace yourself for the inevitable YouTube follies.
*****
On a far more serious note, a moving Time magazine video, Amnesia and a Camera: Photos as Memories, illustrates a useful purpose for a device attached to a person -- in this case a woman whose encephalitis robbed her of thirty years of memory. She doesn't even recognize her own husband and four kids. As the protagonist in Memento takes Polaroids to ID faces he'd otherwise forget, Claire Robertson "captures memories of daily life through thousands of images a Sensecam on her chest takes daily."
She can't recapture old memories, but can help preserve new ones. While the video doesn't provide any "big picture" assessment of how prevalent this condition is, or what her prognosis is, it does provide perspective on the impact of imagery in all our lives...
The video story is conceived and directed by Lauren Fleishman, produced by Paul Moakley, and edited by Bryan Chang.
[UPDATE:James Estrin interviews three of the Times' Emmy-winning producers of "One in 8 Million" on their Lens blog. Surprise: "In most cases we had the audio before (the photographer) even shot one frame."]
Emmys are traditionally bestowed upon meritorious television programs, but in the last few years, online videos have horned their way into the news and documentary category.
Such was the case this week at the 31st Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards ceremony, when videojournalism by Time.com and NYTimes.com was recognized alongside programs broadcast by the major TV networks.
The New York Times' Emmy was awarded in the category of "New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Documentaries" for "One in 8 Million," its 2009 series of 54 video profiles of "ordinary people telling extraordinary stories -- of passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions."
Time's Emmy was awarded in the category of "New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Arts, Lifestyle & Culture," for its Iconic Photo Series. Specifically, the video backstories behind three images were cited: Robert Capa’s most famous photo of D-Day, Anthony Suau’s picture of a young man sledgehammering the Berlin Wall, and the widely recognized candid portrait of FDR at ease in Hyde Park on July 4, 1937.
It’s an idea I came up with as a way to feature the incredible history of photography at TIME, as well as its sister publication Life Magazine. I love photography and photographers and how they can tell a powerful story in a single frame. There are so many amazing pictures that speak to us collectively as a culture, and the stories behind them are rich. ...
I also wanted to create an editing challenge for myself: how could I bring these still images to life in a new way, on the modern platform of the web? I do it with interviews with people who know the images and their back stories well. Then I layer it with sound, using our ears — what a radio professor in college called ”the theater of the mind” — to bring the moment to life again. To draw attention to details, rather than using fancy effects, I simply isolate a part of the photograph, then dissolve in the rest.
P.S. The Emmy program booklet includes an illuminating Q&A with documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who was awarded a lifetime achievement award. Wiseman, who has produced more than three dozen documentaries in the past half century, is fabled for his lack of narration or on-camera interviews with subjects, prefering instead to immerse his viewers in a scene as it naturally unfolds. Download the program here (pdf).
Photojournalist Jodi Bieber traveled to Afghanistan for Time magazine to shoot portraits of women there, from an Olympic athlete to politicians to a woman severely burned in a suicide attempt.
In the first video below, Bieber discusses how and why she photographed Aisha, the Afghan teen whose ears and nose were cut off by the Taliban, for the cover.
Here's what Time managing editor Richard Stengel has to say about the controversial cover picture:
Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.
I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME...
The Time.com multimedia team has leveraged its toolkit to create an impactful time-lapse video of the first day of Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. It compresses the entire session into a fast-forward two-and-a-half minutes.
What could have been a facile visual stunt has been laboriously executed to give viewers a memorable and meaningful summary of the day's events.
Producer Craig Duff reveals that he and Mark Rykoff used more than 2,000 images by photographer Brooks Kraft, who locked down the camera in a corner of the room (though the piece is artfully punctuated by closeups as well). The video is bookended by the participants and observers assembling and recessing -- so before and after the main event, we see the room quickly fill and then empty.
The soundtrack consists of highlights of Kagan's inquisitors, both laudatory and adversarial, and her responses -- with slight audio overlap that quickens the pace without sacrificing content. Note how background music is subtly and selectively used to draw and keep your attention. What sounds like a solo cello adds urgency, dropping out to accentuate Kagan's concluding statement, and then returning for a brisk finale.
For part of the sequence, a zooming effect was created by progressively enlarging each individual image in post-production. "Labor intensive," Duff reveals (on his Facebook Wall!). "But I got into a kind of Zen rhythm."
If you've seen other meritorious examples of time-lapse photography used for videojournalism stories, please share them with us.
Highly recommended weekend read: Reset, by Kurt Andersen
It's a slim volume, but stuffed with original and provocative ideas -- you'll spend as much time ruminating about each page as reading it.
It asks: What succeeds the wretched age of excess that defined the past quarter century (starting with Reagan, and ending last year)?
Now that the unthinkable has happened -- the bubble has burst, the economy is in the toilet, our careers and lives have been irreversibly disrupted and derailed -- what's next?
Andersen's title reflects his optimism that, instead of picking up the pieces and trying to restore what we once had -- which arguably was "too much" and ultimately unsustainable -- we will get back to our roots, so to speak, and rethink things from the ground up.
We'll refocus on our needs, not just our wants.
And we should look at the economic meltdown as an opportunity not to get back on track, but to create a new and improved track.
"Necessity," he writes, "is the mother of re-invention."
For journalists (and photojournalists and videojournalists), that means creatively re-positioning yourself and your talents, and finding a way to make a living that does not rely on dying institutions such as newspapers and magazines and TV news.
Time Magazine, which calls Andersen the "poet laureate of the recession," devoted a weeklong blog to his book.
And it excerpted four meaty chunks of the book itself:
No, it's not the end of the world, says Andersen. But it's the end of the world as we've known it (to paraphrase REM). The smart and industrious among us will stop wallowing in nostalgia, and start building a new world. 'Reset' shows us how.
MSNBC celebrates the tenth anniversary of its creation of an entire subgenre of photojournalism, the "Week in Pictures" online slideshow feature, with this behind-the-scenes video, below (6:23).
The concept was originated by former MSNBC multimedia director Brian Storm (now founding president of MediaStorm).
"It wasn't an effort to recap the news," he explains. "It wasn't the week in review. We were much more focused on showing people the diversity of the world we live in."
A decade ago, MSNBC editors picked through only a couple thousand images each week. Today they look at more than 65,000 weekly -- or 3 million per year.
Ten MSNBC editors select 150 finalists each week; then 3 editors (in case of ties) debate which are the best, finding the right balance between tragic and lighthearted.
When online readers were eventually allowed to start voting on their favorites, they consistently cast their ballots in favor of lighter fare. But Brian Storm says that those images only helped heighten the gravitas of the more newsworthy images. Also, the sunnier images hooked viewers, exposing them to darker issue-oriented images that they might not otherwise have searched for.
In this video, Tom Kennedy also weighs in with his experiences building the same feature as former director of multimedia at WashingtonPost.com . The concept is now a popular staple at online publications ranging from the Boston Globe to Time Magazine to Yahoo News.
Naturally, we at KobreGuide champion these pioneering endeavours, as we think of ourselves as their video counterpart -- sifting through large quantities of videojournalism stories from diverse sources each week, so that we can cull an array of the highest-quality gems for your viewing pleasure.
American newspapers are dying fast. What can possibly rescue them?
The current stopgap remedies (layoffs, ceasing home delivery, gutting entire sections and bureaus) are only making matters worse -- destroying the product and repelling more readers (and, hence, advertisers). Desperate cost-cutting can only lead to an irreversible death spiral.
Nobody questions that our democracy demands an independent watchdog Fourth Estate, but with the advent of the Web and it's "free content" protocol, nobody's yet figured out a sustainable business model to keep newsrooms alive.
Here are three novel solutions.
First, independent journalist T.J. Sullivan proposes that all newspapers simultaneously shut down their websites for a week, so that readers will be forced to pay for the print version. ("You'll miss me when I'm gone.")
Second, in a Time cover story, former managing editor Walter Isaacson advances a micropayment model, akin to iTunes, whereby readers would pay pennies to read individual articles, and those aggregator blogs that feed off news sites will have to pay royalty-based licensing fees. ("Fair is fair.")
Third, Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing supports an NPR-based approach, whereby content remains free, but regular users are encouraged to donate to the sites they frequent most often, via a monthly subscription that's divvied among their Web destinations. ("This will only sting a little.")
...each and every daily American newspaper and The Associated Press (to) shut down their Web sites to non-paying subscribers for a period of one week -- from Saturday July 4 to Friday July 10, 2009 -- and during such time publish news only in print, or behind existing, password-protected Internet barriers accessible only by paying subscribers.
We believe such action will allow newspapers and The Associated Press to fulfill their obligations to deliver news during this time while also drawing attention to the threat posed to democracy by the loss of professionally staffed and ethically bound American newspapers.
Of course, news would still be reported daily in every newspaper's printed product. No editor, or reporter or publication would dare shirk their watchdog responsibilities. This isn't about stopping the presses.
But the Web? People can do without news on the Web for a week. They won't like it. They'll complain about it. But, that's exactly what has to happen before they can be expected to care. Pulling the plug gets their attention... This isn't about saving journalism jobs; it's about saving American democracy.
In his Time cover story, Isaacson points out the paradox underscoring the newspaper crisis:
Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. A tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense.
Isaacson appeared as a guest this week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss his micropayment scheme:
But Editor & Publisher's Outing says fooey to micropayments.
Ugh. This approach hasn't worked. It won't work. Is completely counter to the nature of the Internet. It will hasten newspapers' death spiral.
Instead, he proposes Kachingle
Ka-what?
Kachingle is an embryonic service that plans to charge subscribers a small voluntary monthly fee (starting at $5) that will be distributed among affiliated websites who wear the Kachingle badge, based on actual traffic.
Think of it this way and you'll understand the core concept behind Kachingle: Just as online users currently pay an Internet provider and perhaps a monthly fee for all the music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they'll also pay a monthly fee for all the news and blog content on the Web. Only the last fee is voluntary, and it will be up to publishers to educate the public on the importance of paying for content online. (National Public Radio has been doing this for itself for decades. Now commercial news publishers and bloggers need to do it to benefit all of them, not just one entity.)
The next important point to grasp about the Kachingle model is that it allows individuals to financially support the online content providers that they like best. So if a newspaper wants to get paid for its content when a Web site visitor clicks through to one of its articles, it should ask that the visitor support the site via Kachingle.
Unfortunately, judging from its skeletal website and blog, Kachingle seems very much in its formative stages, so it's premature to evaluate its potential merits.
Everyone's struggling to invent a new business model to rescue newspapers. Whoever succeeds will become a superhero -- and probably a very wealthy one. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Especially if your solution incorporates the power of videojournalism in the mix.
What’s in Your Bag with John Lehmann
-
John Lehmann is award winning photojournalist with the Globe and Mail in
Canada. John shares with Munetake Kayo what he carries while working, and
why he c...
Videographer job at University of Texas System
-
Matt Flores, a former colleague at the San Antonio Express-News, called me
today asking if I know anyone interested in a videographer position at the
Unive...
Here are links to Time magazine's Best Photos of 2010:
Posts
