There is something joyful about the serendipity of trackbacks and stats. They are a great way to keep track of the debate, discover new voices and remind you of old ones.

I checked my stats today I someone had come back my way via a trackback comment I left on a post over at Andrew Grant Adamson’s Wordblog.

Andrew’s post was a really useful roundup of the what to teach journalism students debate, that flared up a while back – still worth a read.
There had been a few more comments after my trackback, which included a peach of one by Alan Hiscock, a University Lecturer at Westminster in the UK

It starts:

It brings a wry smile to my face to see how much of this tosh about the new media comes from US sources. Journalism in the US has never had much in common with that in the UK; and that is still the case, both in print and on-line. The all-round quality is much higher in the UK.

You know where this is going don’t you. But just in case:

In all the main places where jobs in journalism are advertised in the UK, there are still vastly more print jobs than those in the new media.

Only three publishing companies in the UK have so far made significant money out of web-sites.

Most web-sites show an appalling ignorance of typography and have little opportunity to make it more refined. The result is that column measures, founts and typefaces, not to mention the inordinate length of some stories, mitigate against the reader persevering with or enjoying the experience.

Which three? And column measures and founts are, in a sense, redundent terms in web-design, unless you want to enage with stylesheets.

Now the main thrust of the comment is anti-blog which Hiscock equates to columns.

Columns and blogs are high in opinion, mainly cock-eyed opinion, but low on facts; and that’s not the journalism I have come to love and practise for 38 years.

In fact, they are not just worthless in a journalistic sense…

What’s more, I work hard in a committed way to do a first-class job. Those who have the time to blog can’t have much of a life nor a demanding job.

So, blogs are crap and unprofessional. That’s his opinion. A “mainly cock-eyed opinion”, but everyone’s allowed an opinion.

The thing that I’m surprised at most is that someone who professes to be ‘no dinosaur’ can, in the current climate (and the comment is only a month or so old) still see a distinction between print and ‘new-media’ and still labour under such an obvious print bias.

Still, spending all this time blogging, what do I know.

A great little site by Brian Poulter who teaches photojournalism at Eastern Illinois University.  Called ittybittyphoto:

Welcome to itty-bitty photo a website and blog. A site dedicated to “tiny format” cameras: cell phone cam’s, PDA phones, and digital point and shoot photography. Photographers make photographs, not cameras. Are you up to the challenge? Can you shoot with under these limitations? Use the link at top of this page to submit your photos.

Great stuff.

Recently I posted about the Belfast Telegraphs efforts in moving in to video, commenting that was sceptical about the approach and compared it with the online video from another local paper, The Irish News.

Paul Connolly, Deputy Editor of the Belfast Telegraph left a comment on my post about the Telegraphs efforts to go online.

1. Quality: You would not put up with inferior websites, or badly designed newspapers. So why on earth should the public endure inferior broadcasting on the web just because it’s from a newspaper? Papers invest vast amounts of energy and money on their brand – why would we thrown that away by producing poor quality products?

2. The news bulletin at launch date was the starting point. We don’t copy broadcasters, we bring newspaper values to TV in a watch-able way via the web. If you go on now (late Feb), you will hear the distinctly un-coached sounds of our reporters with their local accents breaking stories that leave broadcasters scrambling to follow up. In the past week or so, we have revealed a big sex abuse probe at a hospital for psychologically disturbed patients, a bugging scandal at Masonic HQ in Belfast and a secret plan to slash £300 million from the budget of our police force. We are big on showbiz, too, which, when local TV bothers to cover it, is so sycophantic it’d make you sick.

3. The news bulletin is just a tiny part of our multimedia approach, don’t be fixated with it. We are forging ahead with our video and audio journalism and a range of other measures. First, we need to train our staff … then you’ll see the results.

Point one is fair if you equate quality with high (cost) (TV) production values.

The debate about what constitutes quality is the crux here. I have said before that TV news is seen as a marker of professionalism for print journos moving in to that area. What you do to reflect that but not get stuck in the TV trap is something to discuss.    But I think this may come down more to a discussion of function over form.

It may be that the form – fancy TV studio, presenter etc. is something you can afford as well as training journos, kitting them out and winning the editorial hearts and minds battle to get the production functioning.

One school of thought is that the form is less important that the function. More importantly, mimicking the form of TV is a poor investment given the differences in consumption. Of course the reverse of that is that if you invest high to start with, you nail your colours to the mast and everyone raises their game.

In the end it’s a balancing act – match journalists and consumers expectations, based on their experience of TV, but then develop your output.  Make it your own.

Given what Paul says in point 2, it sounds like that’s the aim for the Telegraph, but I still think that in  form they are copying the broadcasters. Funny  when they say that’s not the aim. But I suppose that anyone who does video is, to some extent, following the form of TV. The framing conventions, the processes and tricks of the trade. That in itself is no bad thing.

What Paul stresses is that the ‘function’ is the important thing. The move to multimedia will keep the journalistic drive. In “breaking stories that leave broadcasters scrambling to follow up” the approach hits disruption nail on the head and I’m sure the audience will appreciate it.  That said, I think celebrity news, even if it’s less sycophantic, tips us back in to TV land  – but I accept that’s just me. But, I still have to question whether wrapping it in such an obvious TV form doesn’t tie it too far back in the TV camp.

Paul’s last point gives me pause to reflect again on the pressure of  time in developing an online video presence. As I have said before that in the rarefied air of the blogoshpere debate we can over emphasize the minutiae but miss the bigger picture.

We do need to give these things time. Enough time to get comfortable with working in a particular way; enough time to develop and grow.But at the moment, it seems to me that the Telegraph have built a monument to TV news and as anyone who works in it will know, and as people have pointed out, TV news is a hungry beast.

Will the training and results always be in the shadow of this monument?

Kevin Anderson tips his hat in to the ring on the ‘online video not TV’ debate over at Strange Attractor.

I think at the end, the opportunity for video exists, not in replicating television, but in:

• Taking advantage of the disruptive economic potential in pro-sumer video production, not in trying to replicate TV production methods.
• Developing a workflow that supports on-demand video not rolling television news.
• Developing an editorial voice and grammar that works in an online, on-demand world, not one that apes CNN and other rolling news channels.

Loads to agree with in the post and very interesting points to finsih with. But perhaps they reflect more on what is wrong with TV rather than what could be right about online video.As I said in a previous posts, it seems that the digital journalism fraternity are getting bullish about video. That disruptive economic potential is too good to resist and given the quagmire that TV news seems to have got itself in, the chance to wipe the slate clean and try something new is irresistible
In his post Kevin highlights this opportunity

…on-demand video divorced from television’s high overhead will begin to pressure rolling news channels. That is where the opportunity exists for newspapers and other non-traditional sources of video, not in jumping from one threatened business model to another.

The ‘other’ Kevin is referring to is TV as framed by a Poynter article about Norwegian media company Schibsted pulling out of mainstream TV.

Commenting on Q4 figures last week, Schibsted CEO Kjell Aamot said: “TV has peaked. Last autumn, as we went out of the business, I was worried. We were almost sure that TV had peaked. Today we are absolutely sure.” The reason for this peak, claimed Aamot, is that TV will meet increasing competition from online video.

Running with the point, Kevin picks out an obit for 24 hour rolling news in the Guardian by Paul Mason, business reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight programme. It makes depressing reading for TV execs. Here’s a taste.

All the evidence suggests that audiences want a timely, authored, edited summary of what has happened – “breaking” or otherwise – updated to reflect new knowledge and events. Now they can get it on the web in an instant. The BBC website’s “Watch a summary” button takes you to a looped three-minute bulletin read out over pictures. Reuters’ website provides something similar, updated hourly.

But, in reading the obit I sense a contradiction. It would seem that, for Mason, the problem is that this 24 hour rolling news just isn’t fast enough. It’s looped 3 minute bulletins that he wants rather than looped 1 or 2 hour rolling content.

Or is it? In learning how to feed the rolling news machine with live two-ways and talking heads, Mason feels like we have lost something:

In the process, we lost the concept of “story” – an editorial process whose outcome is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and hopefully a meaning. During the rise of rolling news that was something we just had to live with. Now we don’t.

Am I wrong in seeing the contradiction in this?

Aren’t we in danger of simply worsening the problems of lack of story and analysis by squeezing time frames to the on-demand that Mason talks about? Just where is all the instant content and reaction that Mason talks about going to come from?

In setting out his thoughts Kevin identifies, for me, the fundamental point: Online video needs to be different and the journalists that make it need to think differently.

But he also identifies a pressure:

The bottom line is that as economic priorities shift to online, commissioning priorities for original journalism also have to shift in that direction. That’s a long term process. In the near term, media companies have to radically revamp their development process, but that is another blog post. Suffice to say, new media development cycles have to become incremental, iterative and measured in months, not in years.

I think that’s a measure that we, as journalists should resist. I think it’s that bottom, that expectation that online is faster, cheaper and more that is the driving force behind a lot of the ‘quick-fix’, tv replication that many have criticised.

It should be questioning that transfer and compression of time and money from TV that focuses our attention rather than slipping in to challenging the form of TV. In doing that, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In our disappointment with what commerce has made TV, we may be in danger of ignoring the good, practical stuff that we should save from the wreckage.

So, I did it with Adrian Monck’s maxims and with all respect to Kevin I’m going to rewrite his opportunities

• Taking advantage of the disruptive economic potential in pro-sumer video production, using appropriate TV production methods to drive the process,. This will help in….
• Developing a workflow that supports effective journalism not a format that will…
• Help journalists develop an editorial voice and grammar that works in an online, on-demand world, not one that mirrors CNN and other rolling news channels.

On a more practical note for audio, I thought I would share a couple of the common audio issues that I see when working with people using video for the first time.

When recording

Use a tripod - Tripods reduce handling noise.

Step away from the camera. But not too far. – If you only have the onboard camera mics to record audio then you want to avoid any extra noise like you breathing and grunting in to the mics as you lean over the viewfinder.

If you step to the left or right of the camera it helps you frame the shot better – the interviewee has to look across the frame at you – but if you make sure you are standing in the direction of the wind you can offer a little shielding for the microphone.

Setting up the camera microphones

When you only have the camera microphone make sure you set them up as best you can.

Manual audio level control – by default most camcorders will control the audio levels automatically. They tend to record at quite a high average level – what some audio people would say is quite a hot. Which means that they often dip the level if things get too loud.

Whilst this is good for avoiding distortion (too high a level) it can cause problems. One is a problem of reaction time. A sudden loud noise can force the level so low that it takes a second or so to come back to normal. It means the sound either side isn’t usable.

Another problem is ‘noisy silence’, As well as reducing loud levels it tries to ‘lift’ or amplify lower levels. That’s why you often have that sound like waves washing in when someone stops speaking. That’s the noise floor (background noise and camera noise) being amplified.

Combine the two and you get what is sometimes called ‘pumping’ – you will know it when you hear it.

By setting the level manually you will up the risk of having distorted audio but avoid that noisy silence.

Split audio channels – If you can plug an eternal microphone in to the camera, then do when ever you can, then don’t forget the microphone on the camera. Make sure that the camera is recording the audio channels separately. You may need to dig in to a menu setting for this one.

Some cameras can record a mix of any microphones on to each track. You want to keep things as separate as possible.

External Microphones

When using and external microphone use a specially designed reporter microphone (like the Beyer M58). These are Omni directional – they pick up sound from all round the head of a microphone. (they type you see at most gigs are directional, they pick up sound from the top) They are designed to be held still between interviewee and interviewer. They pick up closer sounds better but still pick up ambiance. They don’t need to be pointed so are less susceptible to handling noise. Holding them between you and your subject will also help cut down wind noise.

When using tie-clip mics don’t point them in to the wind. Point them downward and away from the wind using clothes to shield, but not cover, the mic. You should also check out Cyndy Greens make-do and mend windscreen tutorial (with video!). She also has some great audio tips.

Cyndy also points out that you should position tie-clip mics “on the side the subject will speak towards. So (looking from the camera POV) if the reporter is camera right, the clip should be on that side.”

She also, “Can’t emphasize wearing a headset/earphones enough…the best totally cover the ears…but anything is better than trusting to luck.”

Back in the edit

One of the biggest causes of poor audio on video I see comes from the mixing of track in the edit suite. This isn’t just down to poor setting of levels.

Some edit suites drag all the sound down(both channels) with the picture when you are cutting. But even though your camera might record two tracks they will very rarely be stereo. Even if it is, you will generally only want to use one channel. Your contributor only has one mouth!

What we often have is one channel with an external microphone and one with the camera microphone. The camera microphone is usually louder and will drown out the other mic so it needs to be discarded or used at a much lower level. The News of the World Video in my previous post sound s like it was a mix of microphones.

Set all of you tracks to mono – to start with I would set all of my output tracks to be panned in the centre (check you edit suite manual for details of this)

By default most edit suits will have track one panned hard left, track two panned hard right, three to the left etc. etc. Ideally you want to have several tracks panned to the centre for speech – one mouth gets one track – and then one stereo set.

I usually have them set as follows:

1- interview audio
2 – wildtrack – sound from pictures to run in the background
3 – voice over
5+6 – stereo music track.

Split your tracks – Once the tracks are set up always, always,split your tracks. Make sure you only edit to the timeline/sequence, the best audio track. Even if you have used the camera mics, chances are one of the channels will have better audio that the other. Pick the best.