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Jul 2, 2009 5:21 pm US/Eastern
Inside The Newsroom: The True Power of "New Media"
Commentary by Adrienne Roark, News Director at WFOR.
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
You want to know the true power of "new media?"
Read this:
"Two South Florida TV journalists do an hour long live web chat using Twitter, a social networking website, with students at a Texas University, about a story the journalists did on the new iPhone 3GS, that was shot entirely using the new iPhone 3GS."
A mouthful, huh? Well it happened.
Our Investigative Producer Gio Benitez and I had a live one hour TwitterChat recently with a journalism class at Texas Southern University.
The subject: the iPhone news story Gio did on June 19th.
Gio put together a story that day about the lines that formed for the new iPhone. He put the story together using the new iPhone itself.
You can see his story here.
He bought his phone that morning at a Miami area Apple store, then went out and got back in line at the store to interview people waiting to get their new phones. He used the new iPhone 3Gs's video camera to shoot the video and the interviews. Then he used the Voice Memos app on the iPhone to record his audio track for the story.
Now, this is not the first cell phone to have a camera and the ability to record audio. But it is the first to combine high quality and ease of use in a way that allows TV stations to think about creating a story with it without a lot of hassle.
The result – a story about the new iPhone buzz, done entirely using the new iPhone itself. Good enough to make the Evening News, literally.
Since the story aired and hit the web, it's taken on a life of its own.
Bloggers, people on Twitter, Facebook, viewers, fellow journalists, students, all have weighed in on our piece. The students in Professor Serbino Sandifer-Walker's journalism class at Texas Southern University had great questions for us during our Twitter Chat. Here are some of the questions and our responses.
Tiffany: "Was the iPhone story planned to be done on the iPhone?"
WFOR: This was a totally spontaneous idea. We thought it would be a unique way to do the story.
Paul: "Do you think that this type of journalism will replace traditional journalism?"
WFOR: No. The two will merge into the "new" face of journalism. But there is no substitute to solid journalism and storytelling.
Professor: "Do you plan to make the iPhone a part of your essential reporting tools?
WFOR: It will be absolutely be one of our tools.
Incidentally,
CBS4 Political Reporter Michael Williams bought his iPhone after seeing Gio's story. He is now using it to e-mail video reports from the field to his blog, while still working his story. Check out "
First Impressions."
Back to our TwitterChat and the questions.
Aurelia: "Will the iPhone make it easier for stories while you are out and about and with breaking news?
WFOR: Absolutely. Case in point, what's happened in Iran. Most of the video and pictures coming out of Iran were shot using cell phones.
Aurelia: "Will citizen journalists take part more in journalism with more high-tech phones being developed?
WFOR: The new technology does make it easier for citizen journalists to participate in journalism. Many of our viewers send us pictures of severe weather when it rolls in, using their phones. They email us the pictures; we put them on TV.
Chris: "Is this groundbreaking?"
WFOR: We believe so, yes. As far as we have been able to determine, no one has put together an entire news story using the new iPhone.
Our story has been tweeted, re-tweeted, "Facebooked" (is that a word?), linked to, emailed, you name it. It was posted on blogs around the world. We had a big response. So you guessed it, we did a story on the response to our iPhone story, and once again,
we shot the whole thing with our iPhone.
But not all the response has been positive.
On a photojournalist website called b-roll.net, a lot of the posters didn't like our story. One guy went so far as to
create a video in response to our story, essentially poking fun at our story, by trying to mount an iPhone on a tripod.
Whether people liked or disliked our story is irrelevant. The story and the way we did it represents the evolution of our industry.
The future of the news media is new media. We must innovate and evolve, or we as an industry will not survive.
Evolution and change are two very scary things for many people. But those two words are our reality, whether we like it or not, so we can either run from them, or embrace them.
Here at WFOR, we've not only embraced them, we're heading full speed into the future.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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