SoloJourno

Via Media Beat:

Morgan Spurlock has more in common with working journalists than you may think. For one, he toiled for years in obscurity, and debt, before making it big in Hollywood. Furthermore, his documentaries have achieved the ultimate coup of quality reporting: change. (While Mickey D’s won’t admit it, we’re sure Super Size Me is responsible for the disappearance of those humongous portions.)

Here, Spurlock gives tips for journos treading into video for the first time and talks about the effect technology has had on the art of filmmaking.

THE GOOD: “The democratization of cinema has made it where anyone with a camera, computer, and a good idea can make a movie.”

THE BAD: “There will always be a turd that rises to the top.”

His words, people.

David Dunkley Gyimah provides a visual journey of videojournalism starting from 1995, a year after the web became a feature for UK newspapers, the influence of BBC Radio and TV e.g. Reportage - the BBC’s 80s current affairs series, which today could be current.tv, and then to the UK’s first regional newspapers turned vjs.

Interview clips include CIA former boss, Quincy Jones and Chatham House. Videojournalism’s aesthetic is mentioned, as well as new techniques - all wrapped together across continents, Chicago, Cairo and South Africa - explains the z principle of video film making. Shot on sony cams vx1000, digi-beta and Ah1. Watch out for the uber talented Rob Chiu.

Visit David Dunkley Gyimah’s site: ViewMagazine.tv.

Via Innovative Interactivity:

You may not know it, but the multimedia field is filled with inspirational gurus. Last year I highlighted 40 of them, but after a year of scouring the Web and interacting with II readers, I felt the need to publish an updated list. Included are 100 notable data visualization specialists, graphic artists, videographers, photographers, interactive designers, programmers, storytellers, visual journalists and Web developers.

I made a conscious decision not to sub-divide this list by specialty because I strongly believe that it is important to be familiar with work done in all visual fields to truly succeed as a multimedia professional. If you are not included on this list, it could be because I have not stumbled across your work (well, that or I just had a momentary memory lapse!). If this is the case, please introduce yourself and your work so I can put you on my radar. In most cases I tried to use producers’ own words for descriptions. However, if there was no about page (shame!), I just wrote a quick synopsis.

NOTE: This is by no means a comprehensive list of all excellent multimedia producers. I have already noticed several names that I meant to include, but I really like the “100″ benchmark. Therefore, there is always room to grow and perhaps next year I will include more …

Read the full article.

Via Nieman Journalism Lab:

When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.

Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.

It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.”

What the Judge Ate for Breakfast (the name comes from a quote attributed to Jerome Frank) launched in early 2008 as an ancillary outlet to Sylvester’s court coverage. It initially featured interesting asides and courtroom miscellany, all delivered as regular text-based blog posts. Sylvester started mulling bigger ideas about a year into the site, and his growing interest in video dovetailed serendipitously. “I was kind of jealous of TV,” Sylvester said. “I wished people could actually hear some of this testimony and see the expressions instead of me describing it to them.”

With the help of colleagues in the Eagle’s photography and web departments, Sylvester cobbled together equipment and started learning. The first video in the series — which runs under the title “Common Law” — appeared in July, and he’s now posting a minimum of one new clip per week.

Read the full article.

Via Time Magazine:: More than 100,000 registered sex offenders live in California. A TIME.com video looks at how police keep track of them