The traditions of video for the communication of news and information – where do they come from and how have they evolved?

The most obvious use of video and image for communicating news and information has obviously come through your TV sets.

Television arrived in Australia in 1956 and like most other developed nations, dominated the media landscape up until the introduction of the internet.

Colour TV came to Australia in 1975, followed by cable and satellite in the 1980s.

We traditionally think of television and video in two separate ‘strands’ of production; commercial and public television and use of video on the internet. Of course those boundaries are collapsing now – but let’s separate them to think about the development of video and image in a historic context.

When we think historically about video in Australia, we generally think about television news and then online—but the production and dissemination of image has gone through a lot of changes in between!

In the mid-1950s making television news was an expensive business—and it still is.

To create a single television story for news, you needed to send a reporter out with a camera crew –sometimes that would be three or four people, who shoot the story, then the reporter would sit with an editor, a graphics person would put the any animated aspects into the story like titles, then the crew will put the story into the bulletin for a news presenter to read.

So if you were (or are) producing video news as a journalist within a newsroom:

•                First: the Vision has to be shot on location and most newsrooms run with separate camera people (unless you’re a video journalist)

•                Second: The material has to be edited into the final package which often involves working with an editor.

•                Lastly: The story has to be placed within a bulletin by a producer and read by a presenter, working with editorial staff to put the bulletin to air.

 That’s a lot of people for just one story.

The structure of the newsroom that you are working in is a little different too:

•                At the top of the newsroom hierarchy is the News editor (or news director) who is really the management end of the newsroom. Editorial decisions and overall responsibility comes to them. They also deal with the owners and executives of the organisation

•                The chief of staff and the executive producer are really the work horses of the newsroom. They organise the entire newsroom is terms of what individual reporters are doing, sort through story information and put the bulletin together.

•                In TV the producer is the editorial side of production and provide technical expertise and support to journos and oversee their stories. This will involve preparing the rundown of stories, depending on the size of the organisation.

•                A TV director is usually responsible for the smooth running of the bulletin when its on air.

•                The technical team includes audio operators, technical producers and a floor manager who are all ensuring that the stories go to air perfectly.

•                Then there are a raft of other jobs including administration and archiving of stories and resources, editors, technical operators and graphic designers that also help put a story together.

       

So as you can see, producing a news story in a television news room is not just all about you and your story—you are working in a very large team.

So what this meant in Australia was that the potential big players in TV had to be pretty flush with cash—and in Australia it was the newspaper barons that became pioneers in building the television networks.

 Nowadays Australian television stations are owned by consortiums, but still very much driven by ratings and the advertising dollar.

 There was and still is concern about how this would affect media diversity and you can see that certain elements of this debate continue today.

News however, is still considered the flagship of everyday ratings on Australian TV—because it is programmed at a time when generally most people would think to be watching television—after work, at dinner making or dinner eating time.

 There was -- and still is -- concern about how this would affect media diversity and you can see that certain elements of this debate continue today.

 Other technological changes have also caused debate and development in the industry such as:

-the introduction of colour TV in 1975

-the arrival of cable and satellite technology in the mid-1980s

-the advent of digital technology in the 1990s

-and the new delivery options available via broadband in the 2000s

-the diversification of news and information products available to audiences online now

-the ease of making and distributing indvidual video news content without official affiliation now

Activity One - watch

Let's do an interactive, comparative activity:

Here is a live transmission by the ABC’s Talbot Duckmanton on VP Day in 1945 - the end of the war for Australians and her allies.

This recording offers listeners a special sense of what all that celebrating really sounded like, out on George St that day.

http://www.abc.net.au/archives/80days/stories/2012/01/19/3417190.htm

Now compare to the use of images in the story that was later broadcast:

http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/movietone-special-peace/clip2/

Compare this sort of story telling, to the kind of news and information we might access today on  television and on its web counterparts:

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/story/italys-human-tide-where-next. Also have a look at the clicakble interactives and the 'where to now' follow on stories.

Some conclusions about how video for news and information has changed

What we can say is that the history of broadcast and video journalism in Australia has seen some important video news story-telling traditions come about:

•                Firstly: the ‘bulletin’ as the way in which we can hear or see the news of the day

We can see  how the television bulletin has changed over time, but the tradition remains the same; we can still tune in to a station or log in online to get an update of the day’s events in a shorter time frame than a newspaper would require.

•                Secondly: the use of image as journalistic evidence

That is, that the image and the sound of something happening is used as the more engaging and evocative evidence of the news really happening. And there are some really great examples of the use of image to prove the truth of a particular story.

•                Thirdly: the video narrative as a particular story telling device; one that is evocative and important.

We can see that the different uses of image and video especially, have changed over time, from passive to interactive.

The development of online video news has been a little more blurred than television—this is mostly because video was not a very popular component of online news story telling at first.

While most of the commercial news organisations who were going online did create video components to their story telling, it was not found to be popular and more importantly, they could not figure out how to make money from video!

Although streaming had happened in the past, video became an important part of online spaces when Microsoft developed the ActiveMovie media player in 1996-- this allowed streaming media. In 1997 RealPlayer released their own streaming application.

The problem was that despite the technology being available to stream video, the old dial-up connection speeds made video still too slow to actually make any impact on news and information communication.

This of course changed quite rapidly, with the adoption of QuickTime and Flash—and of course faster broadband speeds.

Once internet speeds got faster, video started to become a popular method of communicating news and information. YouTube which launched in 2005, has popularized the use of citizen journalism, vlogging and video news.

Of course, the introduction of YouTube and social media has changed the fortunes of video news content online.

 But we need to remember that we are still in the infancy of video—we are still kind of learning the ropes of making effective online video—and there are plenty of examples of people getting it right online—and wrong.

The characteristics of video for news and information

Audio and image bring their own special qualities to the news story.

• Audio is immediate, intimate and personally engaging.
• Image is emotive, evocative and descriptive.

These traditions have meant that each medium has a specialty, so to speak, within journalistic production.

•  Newspapers are able to convey complex stories with in-depth analysis.
• Radio is best at delivering breaking news and spot stories.
• Television and video does great action stories and dramatic footage

Video is best and delivering action through dramatic images. So while radio was thinking about writing for the ear. TV is about writing for the eye.

 As the videographer you are thinking about the kind of vision you have and how your words can tell that story.

Your interviews are still very important but they are working in tandem with your script, your images and your physical self through the piece to camera—and all of these components are very important to telling a story effectively.

·      Video needs words to give its pictures meaning, but without pictures it is nothing.

·      

A good reporter writes to the pictures, they look at what the pictures say and tease this out.

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In Video, the eye dominates – pictures have a more instant impact than words, they capture the imagination.

·      In television, the script controls both what is said and what is seen. So it’s a juggling act, and it must be perfect every time. Mistakes are unforgivable on Video and especially TV because they are so noticeable and hard to correct.

But when we think about the changes that online have brought to the media, it also means differences in the way both audio and video are being accessed and distributed and produced.

While we might think of broadcast as TV and radio stations broadcasting out the news that we see or hear, actually online technologies make use of all three modes of story telling—text, video and audio—as well as the increased communicative potential of social media.

So we understand the use of Online as interactive and mixing mediums, for immediate effect and analysis and audience engagement.

What's important about video news?

How you tell a video news story depends on the medium you are using.

 The concept of news and what makes the news also depends on the audience and type of institutional culture the medium has. For example, SBS, ABC and Channel 9 run very different news programs.

News is also very ephemeral. A car crash could lead to a piece in the afternoon bulletin while traffic is jammed, but the story might disappear by the next bulletin.

So time is an important aspect of the news day and what makes news in broadcast.

So what is news and how you produce it in broadcast depends on:

• the nature of the medium itself;
• the nature of the organisation you’re working for
• the timing of the news

In this class you will be learning how to make content for news—both shorter and longer news pieces. The decisions you will make will be about what sounds, image and content will most effectively tell a news story in the time that you have.

 We will be thinking about story telling; we will think about the components of a broadcast news story and where you find them; we will be thinking about the story telling constraints you will be faced with.

We also want you to think critically about the role that you have as a professional journalist.

You may have been exposed to media law or journalism ethics in previous classes –and my opinion is that a journalist needs to be completely transparent about the decisions that you made to come to the story that you are telling.

 In this class we don’t talk about being entirely objective—that’s impossible.

The things that you report will be coloured by your own perspective. But it is important to obey regulations and law, and to be transparent about the way you got your story, especially in the digital age where audiences can follow your story online.

 The first thing you need to think about in that process is how you tell stories ethically.

Why?

 Because the distribution of news comes with obligations and responsibilities about how that information was provided.

Video production and the ethics of image

Video needs exciting pictures. The strongest shots are given prominence. But image and sound can be easily and subtly manipulated to distort what was said or seen.

This is problematic when making video for news and information – nothing that you shoot or say on a video or news and information should be untrue. But I’m sure you have seen many examples of manipulated, distorted or untrue images masquerading as news and information.

However, it is more often the issue of sensationalist, overly emotive or intrusive action that sullies the reputation of video news producers – the subtle actions or manipulations that sensationalise or distort the real content or meaning of a video news piece.

The media theorist Denis McQuail gives four common causes of sensationalism:

• Emphasis on action, conflict and personalities

• Selection of particular events for coverage, especially disorder or upheaval

• Labelling or stereotyping in reporting of sections of the community, like women or race

• The snowball effect where the media covers a story because the media is covering the story

The issue of particular emphasis on action, conflict and personalities especially resonates with video news because it is so easy to get emotive or affecting imagery.

So how do we avoid making unethical, sensationalist or distorted videos?

The first point is that in Australia, journalism, and the media itself is regulated by codes of practice, government regulation bodies and of course, the law.

Professional video content creators generally adhere to a code of practice pertaining to journalism, and the codes of practice required by the particular media they work for.

The union body, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance lays out the Regulations for journalists reporting the news, which you can access here:

https://www.alliance.org.au/media_alliance_code_of_ethics/

Furthermore, broadcast (television, radio and online) is actually meant to be a bit more tightly regulated than print and online counterparts.

Broadcast Journalism and the practices of the media industry are co-regulated by the industry itself, and a governmental regulatory body. This means that media organisations generally have their own code of practice and if you feel that these have been breached by unethical reporting, your first step is to complain to the organisation itself.

You’ve probably seen the advertisements telling you to write in if you feel that a TV station has breached a code of practice.

If you feel that the complaint has not been dealt with reasonably, you then go the overarching regulator. Broadcast and video journalists act under The Australian Communications and Media Authority, which is a governmental authority. They regulate Internet, Radio and TV Broadcast and mobile phone content, though it is more concerned often with access and ownership so they don’t often deal with audience complaints.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is the Australian regulator with the scope for:

• planning the radiofrequency spectrum that radio and television services use
•  issuing and renewing licences to broadcasters
• administering commercial ownership and control rules to maintain media diversity
• regulating broadcasting content, developing program standards or licence conditions on specific issue
• supporting the development of codes of practice for the industry to ensure community safeguards

As we have already discussed the industry regulates itself and has its own codes of practice. If an audience member wants to complain they must do it through the station first and then go to the over-arching authority.

In broadcast media there is a specific code of practice for radio and the television industry. They basically say the same thing. That is:

·      The news be presented in an accurate, fair and balanced manner

·      Opinion or comments should be clearly distinguished from facts

·      The news should not be presented in such a way as to alarm the public or cause unnecessary distress

·      People who are bereaved or who have been subjected to trauma should be treated with sensitivity

·      Personal privacy should be respected unless there is a clear public interest in specific material

·      Members of particular groups should not be reported on in a negative way

·      Significant errors of fact should be corrected as soon as possible.

So ACMA actually has the right to cancel broadcast licenses if a serious enough breach has been made, but they have been known to be light-on in regulating news media.

Generally speaking, if you have a complaint about something you saw on TV, complain to the media organisation (or radio or TV station) and do not get a satisfactory response, you complain to ACMA. They might investigate the claim and then make findings.