Reading Journal Two

Robert Machey said in class that he thinks video journalism is typically the most effective. It is powerful because you can really grasp what happened as more of a first hand experience than only audio or reading a recap. I agree with this; I am a reader, but when it comes to the news, I understand and retain the information provided much better via video. I started to check out some newspaper’s answer to this digital change, and found that video is in fact not always the most effective.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11396479 This is travel news (perhaps not exactly the same, but I appreciate the travel section) on Iraq, it advocates Iraq as place to holiday, despite the country’s corrupt reputation. This is an example of a news piece best made through video. The quotes are relatively bad, yet I see potential for a lede and catchy hook for this article as a story. Video is most important when the article is attempting to change the viewer’s present impression. Without the video, I feel like I would be reading of this tranquil place, but picturing in my head a war-zone, and the news would not hold.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11397555 However, this is an example of a video that I found unnecessary. This article, Obama’s address at a recent UN assembly, has both video and text. And I found that both the video and the text to be weak; the video is slow and I think that if the important quotes from Obama’s speech were highlighted in text, without the distractions of the camera, they would be more effective. The text should have been made strong enough to stand alone, as it almost is anyways. Also the camera does some movement that is up for interpretation, which to me would have been much more interesting had these observations been written (as opposed to seen through the video).

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ If you scroll about half way down this page, there is video entitled ‘the beauty of data visualization.’ This video is fascinating and clearly articulates how effective and powerful visual data can be; it also enforces how pertinent this type of information viewing is in our society today. I agree with the man who is giving the presentation, of course he is much better versed in the field than me, however- I believe that visual data can be entirely misleading and often it unfairly quantifies information. For example: he created a chart of the fear scares in recent history, with the swine flu showing to be the highest peak on this chart, which provoked a chuckle from the audience. The swine flu did not impact our daily lives in the west quite as dramatically as it did to those in east, and I do not think that displaying people’s most intimate fears in such a way is positive learning tactic.

Overall I found that leading newspaper's did not do as good of a job with video as online news databases. Blogs tend to insert the video directly into the text and include hyperlink pointing out related videos, as we have discussed in class as the advantage of blogging. An exception to this is politico.com, which has and entire multimedia section http://www.politico.com/multimedia/ which I found to be significantly worse than their written articles.