Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Last Tuesday, just as the Ted Stevens indictment story was breaking, a woman called the newsroom saying she had video of a bear attacking a moose calf in her front yard. I didn’t make it out to Jennifer’s house until Wednesday morning, but by then she had shot more footage, this time of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game responding to the area.

Technically the footage could be better — the camera work is shaky, lots of panning and zooming, poor audio — but what an amazing moment to get on camera! It’s a rare event to see, let alone capture, and it was obvious immediately that she had a great story to tell.

After copying the files, I asked Jennifer to describe what happened in an audio piece (one take, two minutes. She totally nailed it) and then shot some b-roll of the area. The finished product took about four hours to produce, in large part because of file conversion problems (VOB to AVI to MOV), but in three days it’s received nearly 30,000 views on adn.com, making it one of our most popular videos of the year.

I frequently hear newsroom staffers (to be honest, usually photographers) ask why we have to shoot video when the views don’t justify the effort. I think this experience provides an answer: By producing video we redefine people’s understanding of the newspaper to include video. When we own online video in our local market users look to us (and not just TV) to distribute their content and, more importantly, they’ll visit our site first to see news video.

An aside: like many long-time Alaskans I’d gotten a little blase about bears. Not stupid, but I certainly didn’t understand what a bear attack looked like. The bear in the video throws that moose around like it’s nothing at all — which is all that’s left at the end.

UPDATE: CNN called the office today looking to run the video. I got this information second hand, so I don’t know if it’s just the website or for broadcast (quality seems suspect for broadcast).

UPDATE 2: The video is now posted to CNN’s homepage. I’m a little disappointed they gave the Daily News a “courtesy” credit instead of a “produced by” credit.

A few random links I ran across in my audio research. They’re getting a little old now, but consider them notebook items:

:: I’ll probably be setting up something like this in the near future, either at home or at the office.

:: Long, three-part piece with a lively discussion at the end.

:: A 32-page comic book covers how to make a radio story, $5. It’s the last item on the page.

Another 4th of July, another holiday in Seward at the Mount Marathon race. Thousands turn out to cheer racers up the 3,022-foot peak and one lucky Anchorage Daily News photographer gets to climb the mountain to get pictures from the trail. Marc Lester always gets to go (I have to maintain race results on adn.com — honest!) and this year he shot some video with his Canon G9 to go with the video project I was working on.

I shot with a Canon HV20 and, despite some minor problems with the sizes, the clips blend fairly well. If the G9 had a a mic jack for my Sennheiser wireless, I don’t think I’d use anything else (some of Marc’s mountain clips suffered from wind noise — we’ll have to work out some sort of wind screen).

Way back when, January of 1996 to be precise, I did a short phone interview with George Carlin for the Anchorage Press to preview one of his shows at the Atwood Concert Hall. It’s a nothing piece and now, after twelve years and a dead comic, I realize that I didn’t put the one true George Carlin personality detail I gleaned into the article.

The Jan 25-31 issue was my first as Managing Editor of the Press and I was making a one hour commute from Wasilla (some things haven’t changed). I was late, can’t remember why, and I missed Carlin’s call to the office.

I’m still embarrassed about it but the guy called me back (I did grovel to his publicist). So either he was a great guy, willing to give a not-at-all-together reporter/editor a second chance, or he really need to sell some more tickets.

Either way he was classy about it.

The spoken word as weapon

George Carlin has spent a lifetime in the stand-up comedy business. Since his radio days nearly 40 years ago, Carlin has evolved into one of the premier comics in the business with his combination of spoken word performance and social commentary.

Now, at age 59, the devilish comedian has claimed a new title, that of artist.

“It’s a reinterpretation of the world. It’s not high art, it’s not fine art. But I believe an artist needs to go from here to there,” Carlin said in a phone interview last week.

“I don’t know that all [comics] qualify. I am trying to set myself apart. Some people are entertainers. I have entered into another level. It qualifies more as art than entertainment.”

Initially Carlin didn’t plan on being a comic for very long. At age 11 he had his plan laid out: first disk jockey, then move to sit-coms, before graduating to movies in the tradition of Danny Kaye and Bob Hope.

“But fate in various forms conspired against that,” he said. “I had no technique for acting. I was forced to be a stand-up comic for far longer than I thought I would.”

Now Carlin has a new game plan, one that keeps the focus on his spoken word work. He still finds time for acting however, regularly playing the character Mister Conductor on “Shining Time Station,” a children’s show on PBS for which he was earned two Emmy Award nominations, as well as appearing in several films, including Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequel.

“My main line is stand-up comedy. Acting, of any kind, is an important sub-set,” he said.

Carlin discovered that his routine was shifting direction after his 1990 HBO special. By 1992 he had found a new voice to express his disassociation.

“I’m not doing jokes about my relationships, the mall, the guy at the 7-11.” Instead, Carlin said, he is doing more trenchant observation about the world. “Not having a stake in the outcome emotionally I can cut all this stuff loose and drift out by Jupiter” and provide a more coherent commentary on the circus Earth.

Though his Fox television show disturbed his cable-special-every-two-years schedule, Carlin has another HBO concert planned for March 30, his ninth broadcast special.

“I’m going to continue to do an HBO show as long as they’ll have me,” he said.

Carlin still enjoys taking his act on the road, determined to reach as many people as possible through touring and television. Live performance is still his main thing, he said. HBO merely takes the pictures and allows a larger audience to enter Carlin’s head.

“I’m in here. My filter is different. All I know is that I’m free of the society’s and the species’ ties. Ties that make you feel part of the local group. I never have identified with the local group,” said Carlin.

“I’m kind of a floating free agent. That aspect of my personality has been accentuated in the last eight to ten years. I don’t care what happens to this country or the species.”

Stephen Nowers, Anchorage Press, Vol 5 Ed 4 (January 25-31, 1996)

Twitter is one of those web 2.0 services that gets mentioned when technologically minded newspaper types talk about the future of the industry. I signed up a month ago and it’s both better and worse than I expected (let’s not get into Twitter’s chronic downtime issues). It’s essentially blogging in 140 characters or less but the real draw, at least for information publishers, is that an organization can push headlines to mobile devices thereby driving traffic to their main site.

The problem with this concept? Organizations are trying to push headlines to mobile devices thereby driving traffic to their main sites … burying the stuff I actually care about under a wave of inane links. I’ve stopped following the Seattle PI and the New York Times, which is painful because I need some journalism content to justify connecting at work, but the updates got to be too much (careful APRN, you might be next).

At any rate, even in a tech hub like Seattle, the PI can only manage 142 followers. A search on ‘Anchorage’ shows 155 total users listing the city as their location so Twitter is not likely to do much for us back at adn.com. It’s certainly not worth the effort, at least not yet.

But Twitter does work as a social network — I’ve ‘met’ local media professionals via the service and have been able to keep in touch with colleagues in other states — and it can work as a news service if there’s a strong voice delivering the tweets (unfortunate term, but what can you do?). I am completely hooked on NASA’s Mars Phoenix feed. Their Phoenix Twitter updates managed to capture the entry, descent and landing of the lander in something like real time (side note: my new dream job is making videos for NASA.

So my best friend turns out to be a robot. On another planet.