Consultant & trainer in audience engagement, Adam Tinworth, explains why multimedia is not just video, gives advice on how to choose equipment as a beginner and shares thoughts on the present and future of journalism.
What is multimedia?
We have a very bad habit in journalism, when we say multimedia we actually mean video. Actually multimedia means what it says: multi-media. It means the ability to use multiple media for storytelling. And this is one of my pet theories: I see what we have as a set of tools to tell stories, and we now have a very extensive toolbox; we can use words, pictures, videos, interactives, visualisations, charts, social media, audio. And also, in the light of online you can combine all of these as you see fit. From very early the Internet held the potential of doing truly multimedia storytelling.
The problem is, it takes time to get there. We still get to do a video or a photo. We’re quite good at integrating photos with words, we’ve been doing that for a long time, but integrating photos with words and video [or words and interactives]? We are not so good. We are getting better […] but it still tends to be a big performance thing rather than something we routinely do.
The big publishers tend to do the best work because they have the resources. And you see them grow up the video desk [and] the interactive desk. I saw a Telegraph story about the coronavirus that had a piece of interactive work by Ashley Kirk, a former City university student, just routinely embedded in it. We are seeing more of that, so rather than interactive being a particular thing you go to, it becomes a story element that you just reused.
Do you prefer photography or videography?
It’s interesting that professionally the two fields are coming together. There are still serious professional videographers – nature documentaries are the classic example here. These are very serious people who have to spend hours with very serious kit to get together that sort of footage. But that’s not the field we’re talking about.
At my heart I’m not really a videographer or a photographer, I am a journalist. But I am a journalist as opposed to a writer. And I think that’s quite an important distinction; a lot of journalists are hard writers, are word people, whereas I like telling stories, and there are multiple ways we can tell a story. Even when I was in print I was always very interested in the visual side of my journalism as well as the written side, and [the] magazines I worked for and sections I edited tended to be very visual . When I was commissioning magazine features I used to have the art editor or the art director of the section with us. […] We tended to develop illustration ideas in parallel with the story, and not in sequence with the story.
Communication vs publishing
One thing that is very interesting is this whole idea of video as communication rather than video as publishing, which is a cultural thing I think, age-based to some degree. […] How do we build trust, how do we build relationships? I think a lot of the obsession with things like Stories format video is about “how do we use this to tell stories?” [And sometimes the answer is] maybe don’t, or at least not straight away. Maybe sometimes we should be talking to our readers: “we are working on this story, this is what’s happening in our newsroom, this is what tomorrow’s issue is gonna look like”. That sort of dialogue if you like.
But do them readers care much?
More than you might think. Also, the readers who care are often the most important readers to have. The most engaged readers are also the readers who are most likely to share your stuff.
And particularly as things like paywalls [and] membership models become more important. These work best when people feel part of a community.
But isn’t it more like marketing than journalism?
No, I disagree. Journalism has always been performed for a community. And [we] are part of a community. Journalism is not an abstract art, it is performed for readers, our readers are our community. And is our job just to produce these platonic pieces of ideal journalism and throw them to the readers? Or is our job to engage with our readers?
AR and VR. Why haven’t they taken off yet?
Because the kit isn’t there. And because they are difficult to consume. I have a feeling that VR is never going to be more than a niche tool because of the degree you have to isolate yourself to consume it. Because for proper VR you need a helmet or cardboard or something, so you are cutting yourself off from the rest of the environment, you have to lose yourself in that.
Well, unless that’s how we live in the future…
Uhm yeah, and that’s a whole other conversation! But for now that’s quite a difficult thing, and the tools and the technology and the content are not there yet. There are lots of very good niche use cases for VR. I’ve seen it used for example for sports teams to create recreations of matches, to allow players to walk around an opposing team’s patterns of behaviour. There are lots of situations, [like] simulations for pilots learning to repair things.
Google Glass, which was meant to be the big future of AR, still exists but is now a very specific business tool, for people who need information but their hands [need to be] free. GG is useful in those maintenance-repair environments.
So I suspect they might end up, unless someone finds a really effective way of getting the price of delivery of VR down, and AR to some degree, being a very specific storytelling tool.
Drone journalism?
It’s a very useful, strategic tool to have in your toolbox. If you are reporting on the floods in Wales, get yourself a drone, fly it over the flooded fields. That’s more visually telling to people than a thousand words on it is. You can tell the human story, but actually just that shot of the flooded fields from above [is] incredibly powerful. Drones are underused. I’m surprised we are not seeing them used more often. [However,] people like automotive journalists are beginning to get the hang of it. […] You can actually do very Top Gear-like videos very easily now with a couple of GoPros mounted to the car and using a camera drone.
What video equipment do you use?
Phone, obviously, because the phone is great and is always with you and it’s probably the default.
I love my OSMO Mobile 3 because it’s small and light […] I like the Pocket, because it’s very good for things like time lapses […].
I use GoPros quite a bit as well. GoPros got really interesting because they do a lot of mechanical stabilisation [as well as] electronic stabilisation of footage, called HyperSmooth. [This] is using some interesting computational stuff to actually predict where the motion’s going to go and smooth it out in camera, which is quite impressive. Plus it’s waterproof, and particularly in my life childproof, which is quite important!
I don’t use DSLR anymore really, I use a CSC, a compact system camera. It’s one of the Canon M-series cameras, which are nice little cameras that do 4k video. […] The advantage of these as a kit is the size of the glass, and therefore you can get much more high quality visual effects. Essentially, it’s much easier to separate the subject of an interview out from the background.
Mics?
Sort of the default I have [which I] tend to carry with me everywhere is the Rode smartLav+. It’s just a little lavalier mic, and I’ve got all the relevant adaptors [so] I just clip it on anyone or clip it on myself, plug it in a device and off I go.
I’ve got a series of other scaling-up rode microphones of various sorts; I’ve got the VideoMic Go, which is a little one that will sit very comfortably on something like a Glif or a Shoulderpod [or] a DSLR.
The latest GoPro, the GoPro HERO8 Black has something called the Media Mod which goes around it and provides an extra microphone […], so if I want to do very high quality audio on my GoPro I can [use] that.
And then I got a more powerful Rode shotgun microphone.
How to choose the right equipment
You are making a lot of decisions here about tradeoffs of price and portability and – particularly for journalism – intrusiveness. But also [about] how easily you will get that footage back, how easily you will edit [it]. The more serious the camera you use, the bigger the footage is and the more serious the piece of computer equipment you are going to need to do the editing. So [don’t spend a lot on equipment] unless you’re gonna pay a lot of money for a top end pro editing suite, which is just not relevant to most journalism – certainly most online journalism.
I very deeply believe if you are getting started in video, start with your phone. […] If you start getting frustrated because it’s shaky, buy a Shoulderpod or a Glif, or an OSMO Mobile, and if you are frustrated with the audio quality then find ways to attach better microphones to your phone. If you want better than that, move up, start buying other bits of kit.
I have quite genuinely seen thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of pounds wasted on high-end video kit for journalists who have no formal video training and they don’t really know how to use it and who are overwhelmed by the potential within the equipment. You need the skill to unlock that potential and they don’t have it yet. It is easy to get distracted by the shiny gadgets, but it’s better to buy a shiny gadget you know you need and are desperate to start using than a shiny gadget to work out whether there’s a role for it in what you do.
Adam Tinworth writes about digital journalism at One Man & His Blog