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.

The HV20 screen shouldn't look like this.

Over the summer, desire for video in the newsroom has grown dramatically (I say one a day keeps the editor at bay). But as our Canon HV20 get more use, they are breaking at an alarming rate. We have three as pool gear and one is coming back from the shop (broken screen), and the other two are waiting to go (broken screen; broken firewire jack).

I’m going out of my way to remind the staff that we’re dealing with prosumer gear — they are simply not designed for the rigors of day-to-day journalism (and Canon admits as much). And given the current state of the industry we’re going to have to get by with less-than-pro gear for quite a while.

UPDATE: Repair confirmed water damage, though still fixed under warranty. Sent broken screen #2 in for repair yesterday. Current repair estimate is about $150.

Fans line up to buy the seventh Harry Potter book last year.

It was a year ago that the final Harry Potter book came out and a number of stores in downtown Palmer celebrated with a release party. Over the weekend I dug out my audio slide show from the event and realized just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see a literary event like that again.

I used my full compliment of multimedia gear while covering the Xterra Hammerman Triathlon this morning:

I ended up spending too much time on the finished project trying to balance the audio levels between the tape and the M-Audio but I prefer that to shooting a lame stand up (probably a habit I should break — but not yet!).

Here’s the final video:

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.