Steph Stuff

The site I’m linking to is someone’s personal blog. It’s not part of any kind of journalism community or a network of community blogs (that I’m aware of) but this post is a great example of someone using many forms of multimedia to report a story that literally happened right outside his window.

The reason I want to highlight this is because I see this as a sort of wake-up call for journalists who are still resistant to plunging into the world of digital journalism. Those who might believe they can’t learn “new tricks” or are just plain resisting change. Grabbing some video or audio and getting it into your stories to enrich and enhance it is easier than you might think. Let me tell you what this guy did.

He was awoken by noises in the street. He looked outside, saw the police gathering outside his neighbour’s home, and so grabbed his camera and began filming (I should stipulate that he did not include footage of the person being arrested, just the police doing their thing and milling about). At first, he was baffled as to why the police needed a full film crew with him. As the day progressed, he followed the story. A couple of hours after the raid on his neighbour, he got a knock on the door. He grabbed his iPhone, fired up Audioboo, and recorded the convo with the police office dropping off anti-drug leaflets. He snapped a pic of the leaflet and wrote the post linked to above, adding all the multimedia elements. Both YouTube and AudioBoo provide easy-to-paste embed code you can drop right into your story.

Later in the day, he found the story about the raid on his local paper’s site and updated his post. And after that, he recorded a report on TV about it as well and added it to the post.

So using just a couple of tools (Kodak ZI6 video camera and iPhone) and nothing but FREE software available to anyone (YouTube, AudioBoo, WordPress), he put together a media rich report on some drug raids taking place throughout his town.

I know he’s not the first to do this sort of thing, and he won’t be the last. But tools and software are becoming easier than ever to operate and share (Flips, Twittelator for iPhone has just integrated audio/video right in the app, Tweetie desktop for Macs let’s you record video right in its app…) and journalists, it’s imperative that you take advantage of these tools.