I agree that the actions of the ’should have done it yesterday’ brigade have put stresses on the newsroom. Some may take a different view and say that it’s resulted in the biggest investment in to newsrooms in the last 10 years - I know that’s not starting from a high base, but you get my drift.

The general neurosis in journalism tends to be the attitude that when an executive jumps (often from the surprise of reality sneaking up on them) the feeling is that journalists feel the aftershock of then landing. Whats positive is that the journalists that I have come in to contact with (and I will have finished training 100 in video by the end of this month with more to go) are not neurotic. The are very positive about the potential for their careers.

Granted, we in the U.S. do a boatload of handwringing and hemming-and-hawing. That’s more anxiety than neurosis.

By the U.K.’s neurosis, I mean the mogul (I wish I could remember his name) who declaired that the news had to be interactive on a 24/7 basis, with podcasts and video and mobile and everything all the time (although those things aren’t interactive as much as uses of new technology to shove more content at people.) As I recall, there was a giant groan of exasperation (heard clearly on Journalism.uk) over how much one reporter or understaffed newsroom would have to do in one day (remember: there’s been huge newsroom cuts over in the U.K. as in the U.S.)

Sometime the hurry-scurried “we should have done it yesterday!” attitude of some folks is just a kind of neurosis–borne out of fear that they’re losing out not because there isn’t enough news in different formats, but that the news they’re putting out is just a load of info-tainment.

Hope that clarifies it

There are all kinds of discussions that we can get in to about the relative merits of video over stills - what about the ethical impact of cutting out the before an after of an event and the re-creation of reality within a single frame. All of that discussion can be divorced from technology, as much as a tripod is technology, and would be a lot more interesting.

You can’t attack the lack of ‘art’ in video by using the tripod. It’s like trying to argue that a photograph is better at capturing an emotion than video because it has a better relative vertical resolution.

So I’m not sure a tripod is a weed in the video garden but i get your point. I agree that we should explore every angle and look for new ideas. However, looking at your post, you could be accused of “jamming old ways of working and thinking into new technologies” by citing photojournalism as a benchmark.

I’m not saying that photojournalism isn’t a good benchmark. It just seems a pretty reductionist argument.

Photography = good, video = bad. Tripods are used a lot in video therefore Tripods are bad . QED

Surely life, and art, is more complex than that.