The San Jose Mercury News is now integrating stills captured from High-Definition Video across print and web platforms.
For more than a decade now photojournalism has been redefining itself in a digital age.
Beginning in the early 1990s, former White House Photographer for TIME magazine, Dirck Halstead, began seriously re-thinking and promoting the future of photojournalism – mini-digital video.
Halstead’s Platypus Workshops have created a new way of thinking about photojournalism, but the transition from making still images to moving pictures for photojournalists has never been a simple proposition. In fact, there has been some resistence to understanding the potential of moving the old to the news. The bottom line, is of course, the bottom line and communication formats as well as platforms are market and audience driven.
Photojournalists, switching over, back in the day a la 1990s, had to wait until the time came when the technology, methods of delivery, and audience adaptation to the new formats improved.
The time may be at hand now for more radical change toward the use of multiple platforms as all of these dynamic forces are now in play.
The newspaper industry, with consistent declines in readership, economic cost-cutting measures, and competition from the Web with increased bandwidths and advertising, is just now coming around.
Still photojournalists at many newspapers are now leading the way toward producing richer ways of storytelling through video, audio, still and graphic presentation of content.
Although this has been in the works for a while now, I think that there may be just enough critical mass to accept that the era of traditional photojournalism is nearing an end.
However, for the foreseeable future, as Halstead notes, “There will continue to be a need for everyday news photographers and television cameramen.”
There are type of photojournalists – those formerly known as news photographers (still) and those formerly known as videographers (cameramen). Still photojournalists seek out decisive moments to tell stories – ones that distill what a moving sequence of images may pass over.
It is in the timing – the release of the shutter at 1/500th of a second – that the power of the still image is released and revealed to the viewer.
In order to provide more context for understanding these distinctions, Halstead observes, “The fact is that in most cases still and television moments exist in a separate time-space continuum. Still photographs must be acquired at precise moments in time . . . they are moments of interaction between subjects. Television on the other hand, is largely about sequences, the moments that lead up to and follow the still photo moment.
Anyone resisting the shift to using high definition mini-digital video cameras for use across platforms is not reading the handwriting on the wall.
The handwriting simply says, in my words, “You are now at a crossroads – adapt or wither.”
Photojournalists today have the capacity to pull high-resolution images from video for print and web content. I will even go so far to add that this trend is not some fad, but truly the future of photojournalism.
For years, MSNBC, through the hard work of people like Brian Storm, have been paving the way for integrated-interactive content. Traditional photojournalists such as Halstead, Bill Gentile, Roger Richards, and David Turnley have proven that their work is good enough for the likes of the Discovery and History channels, as well as ABC’s Nightline.
There is a market now (still in its infancy) for multi-media photojournalism and it will hopefully grow exponentially with higher speed Internet access and technological innovation.
To make this case even more abundantly clear, Richard Koci Hernandez an award-winning photojournalist for the San Jose Mercury News wrote today to share how the newspaper is making the big leap from print journalism to storytelling across platforms. The newspaper is running a multi-platform story on the Bay Area bike culture using video, audio and HDV captured stills.
This is a great example of storytelling across platforms and marks the paper’s ascension into the future of the news business.
For Richard, “Today's Merc was a big step for me as a photojournalist and I think a great innovative leap for the department.”
Richard used a Sony High Definition video camera to produce images for online video as well as stills for the print publication. “With today's publication of our preview of the Tour of California and a story on the Bay Area bike culture I exclusively used a Sony HDV video camera to gather video and frame grabs (6 megabyte stills) to provide all the content for both packages, thus creating an Online presentation and package for the paper with one tool.”
“This change is extremely exciting for me,” Richard said.
I share Richard’s enthusiasm for this medium because it will expand the boundaries of creativity and visual storytelling.
When I viewed the site, I was impressed with the newspaper’s commitment toward integrating words, graphics and images into compelling interactive storytelling – something that can be viewed over and over again. Richard sent along some snaps of the print version of the story for comparison and the overall quality of the HDV stills seems not to have hindered page designers in terms of display.
What is most interesting about new media is the potential to move across narratives non-linearly. This means, that "I", the reader, control and engage in what I am viewing on my terms to some extent. I am not forced into seeing a story as an editor has laid it out for me. I can, for now, still enjoy the print version of the narrative on “Bike Culture in the Bay Area”, but Online I can explore and shift around at whim.
I think the focus on the future for newspapers should be directed, first and foremost, to understanding and appreciating the richness of new media through visual, audio and textual experiences.
Over time, we will be all the better served for the changes that are underway today.