A couple of weeks ago, Annette Schulte posted something about a Cedar Rapids video blogger who uses his cellphone camera. The salient point was that media companies don’t need fancy equipment to get into the digital age. In fact, they don’t needs anything they don’t already have.
She’s dead on. You’ll never catch me argue for fewer toys for the newsroom, but we need to start doing the things we’d like to, however we can, and prove that it’s worthwhile before starting to throw money at it. The name of the game is audience building, and that means trying new things, particularly low-risk things, to try and capture new eyes. If it’s more successful, we can develop it.
Or maybe we don’t need to. At my last paper, we started shooting video and bought a Canon GL2 and started to shoot video. We had a nice set of wireless mics, a decent shotgun mic, a mini news-gathering setup. Very high-quality video.
No one used it unless I made them. It was too much.
Then we bought the Pure Digital Flip for $100. This little camera is stupidly simple to use. It has a big red button on the back, and that’s it. I call it reporter proof. It also produces better video and sound than a camera that cheap has a right to. Reporters loved to take it out, and our use of video went way up.
People in the media talk about “just good enough,” but it’s also really misunderstood. That doesn’t mean making crappy content. It means not getting hung up in perfecting things and actually getting content out the door. If that means a cellphone camera or the Flip Video, what’s wrong with that?