Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

The bad news continues to roll in for McClatchy and yet I see no signs of meaningful change from the Anchorage Daily News. Enough with the hand-wringing already!

Waiting out the economy is not a strategy.

Letting someone else figure out how to deliver the news and then copying them is not a solution (see: Craig’s List).

Editors, we know it’s bad. What are we going to do about it?

I’m on the new media ground floor, but here’s my list:

::Distribute the new media work load.

I’m not talking about multimedia but content management systems. Newsroom employees must be able to update and maintain the newspaper website 24/7. At the Daily News, we have four people (the online editor, the online producer, our programmer and me, a photographer) with enough training in the CMS to make substantive changes to the homepage. It’s not enough. We have no scheduled coverage on Sundays or after 8pm most days. Teaching key people the CMS is more important than learning to shoot well-produced video (everyone should be able to use a Flip).

::Reorganize the newsroom.

Create a proper online department in the newsroom, reporting to the online editor, complete with reporters and a copy editor. Get them out of the office and reporting live. Train them to update the website. Turn a picture editor into a multimedia editor and have them assign and edit (for quality, length and clarity) video and audio slide shows. Train them to update the website.

Examine the newsroom chain-of-command. Do the branches make sense?

::Provide us with the tools we need to do the job.

We have a good collection of relatively high-end equipment (wireless mics, Canon HV20s etc) but we need to be able to go mobile. In August we were forced to transfer our company cell phones to private accounts. The company pays us a $35/month stipend, which covers the voice plan, but we’re on our own if we want a smart phone, data plan or SMS plan. Needless to say, not many people are opting to spent an extra $30-35/month of their own money on a data plan (especially with our recently announced one year company-wide wage freeze). The Daily News should cover a data plan, at least for the online department.

And buy more Flip cameras so reporters can easily grab video while on assignment (if you think we need video on the site — and we do — the cops reporter at least should have one).

::Plan for the future, with a close eye on current content.

This is not a plea for micro management but for strategic planning.
In the fire service, the command officers manage the incident. They maintain a comprehensive view of the situation and tell their fire officers what they want done (but not how to do it!). The fire officers use their resources to execute the Incident Commander’s strategy.

The IC plans ahead while the officers and firefighters focus on the task at hand.

The same should be true of newspapers: Tell your section editors, reporters and photographers where you want us to go and we’ll figure out how to get there.

Trust us.

Colin Mulvany over at Mastering Multimedia links to what looks like a great Apple tutorial on editing news and sports footage. It’s free, but registration is required.

Found this two miles up the Reed Lakes trail in Hatcher Pass.

Website tagline:

“Quotes are for assholes and you can quote me on that.”

I shot this short video at the end of a (working!) trip to Seward for a salmon charter. I’ve never seen anyone cut fish so well so fast. I guess if you have to take care of 50+ fish a day you get pretty good at it.

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.