The Solo Video Journalist

The Solo Video Journalist, now in its second edition, offers a comprehensive overview of the solo video reporting process from start to finish. Drawing from years of professional experience in the field, the author covers all aspects of multimedia journalism, from planning for a segment, to dressing appropriately for multiple roles, to conducting interviews, and editing. The book contains interviews with more than a dozen top storytellers from around the United States and offers practical advice for how to succeed in a growing media field. New to this edition are Career Chronicles – chapters that detail the career paths possible for modern journalists – and a fully updated chapter on the importance of building a digital and social media presence. This book is an excellent resource for students learning skills in broadcast, multimedia, backpack, and television journalism, as well as for early-career professionals looking for a back-pocket resource in solo video journalism.

It is becoming increasingly important for television reporters to be proficient in many, if not all, of the steps in production. The Solo Video Journalist will make handling all these responsibilities seem possible, and do so from the hands-on perspective of a current reporter with years of experience as a multimedia journalist. This book will cover all aspects of multimedia journalism, from planning for a segment, to dressing appropriately for one’s multiple roles, to conducting interviews and editing. The instruction and guidance in this text will help make readers valuable players in their field, and it is filled with real-world examples and advice from current professionals. Whether it be college students learning from the ground up or journalists early in their careers, The Solo Video Journalist ensures they will have all the materials they need to be successful multimedia journalists.

Videojournalism is a new field that has grown out of traditional print photojournalism, slideshows that combine sound and pictures, public radio, documentary filmmaking and the best of television news features. This amalgam of traditions has emerged to serve the Internet's voracious appetite for video stories.Videojournalism is written for the new generation of "backpack" journalists. The solo videojournalist must find a riveting story; gain access to charismatic characters who can tell their own tales; shoot candid clips; expertly interview the players; record clear, clean sound; write a script with pizzazz; and, finally, edit the material into a piece worthy of five minutes of a viewer's attention. Videojournalism addresses all of these challenges, and more - never losing sight of the main point: telling a great story. This book, based on extensive interviews with professionals in the field, is for anyone learning how to master the art and craft of telling real short-form stories with words, sound and pictures for the Web or television. The opening chapters cover the foundations of multimedia storytelling, and the book progresses to the techniques required to shoot professional video, and record high quality sound and market the resulting product. Videojournalism also has its own website - go to just one URL and find all the stories mentioned in the book. You also will find various "how-to videos on the site. To keep up with the latest changes in the field such as new cameras, new books, new stories or editing software, check the site regularly and "like" www.facebook.com/KobreGuide.

The traditional model of video news reporting has always had two separate roles: reporting and videography. For years, however, small-market news outlets have relied on “one-man bands”—individual reporters who shoot and edit their own video—for stories and footage. Lately, as the journalism landscape has evolved, this controversial practice has grown more and more popular. With the use of video constantly expanding, many large-market TV stations, networks, and newspaper Web sites are relying on one person to carry out a job formerly executed by two. News outlets now call these contributors VJs, digital journalists, backpack journalists, or mobile journalists. But no matter what they are called, there’s no denying the growing significance of solo videojournalists to the media landscape. Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century details the controversy, history, and rise of this news genre, but its main objective is to show aspiring videojournalists how to learn the craft. While other textbooks depict the conventional reporter-and-videographer model, Going Solo innovates by teaching readers how to successfully juggle the skills traditionally required of two different people. Award-winning journalist G. Stuart Smith begins by describing how and why the media’s use of solo videojournalists is growing, then delves into the controversy over whether one person can cover a story as well as two. He illuminates how, together, the downsizing of the media, downturn in the economy, and growth of video on the Web have led to the rise of the solo videojournalist model. Going Solo profiles TV stations and newspaper Web operations across the country that are using the model and offers helpful advice from VJs in the field. The book presents useful guidelines on how to multitask as a reporter-videographer: conducting interviews, shooting cover video, and writing and editing a good video story. Readers will also learn how to produce non-narrated stories and market themselves in a competitive field. Smith, who started his career as a “one-man band,” insightfully covers an area of journalism that, despite its growing market demand, has received little academic attention. Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century is useful for students learning the basics and those already in the field who need to upgrade their skills. By presenting industry know-how and valuable tips, this unique guidebook can help any enterprising videojournalist create a niche for him- or herself in the increasingly fragmented news media market.

As more newspapers and broadcast news outlets transition online, reporters and photojournalists are being asked to provide more and more video for their stories. This book teaches students and professional journalists how to shoot better video and tell better stories on the web.

As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.

MOJO: The Mobile Journalism Handbook is the first book devoted specifically to training citizens, journalism students and media professionals to produce professional-quality videos with only a mobile device. As journalism becomes increasingly competitive, students and emerging professionals need a broader skillset to make themselves more employable, whether as mainstream or entrepreneurial journalists. This book by Dr. Ivo Burum and Dr. Stephen Quinn, world experts in mobile journalism, provides comprehensive coverage of all the skills and practices needed to be a mobile journalist. Key features: Burum and Quinn underline the importance of story and storytelling, the crucial context journalists always need to keep in mind. Other books and tutorials merely offer step-by-step guidance to mobile technology and apps. The book synthesizes the knowledge and more than 70 years of combined expertise of two of the world’s leading mobile journalism practitioners, offering sage advice and tips from people who have trained mojos in more than 20 countries. Companion Website: How-to videos on the companion website offer powerful ways for learners to absorb the content easily, walking them through the key mojo components of research, shooting, scripting, voice-over, editing and post-production. www.routledge.com/cw/burum Ivo Burum is an award-winning writer, director and television executive producer. He has more than 30 years’ experience working across genres including frontline international current affairs. A pioneer in UGS creation, Dr. Burum lectures in multimedia journalism. This is his second book about mojo. He runs Burum Media, a mojo and web TV consultancy that provides training for journalists, educators and remote communities internationally. Stephen Quinn was a journalist for 20 years before he became a university professor in 1996. Dr. Quinn taught journalism in five countries until he returned to journalism in 2011 in Hong Kong. His UK-based company MOJO Media Insights trains mobile journalists around the world. This is his twenty-first print book. He has also produced 5 iBooks. He co-writes a weekly column syndicated to seven countries.

"In these engaging, challenging and beguiling dialogues, Pamela Cohn expertly draws from her subjects, personal biography and conceptual intent, process and nearly subconscious motivation, personal revelation and political mission. The result is a work that not only provides a road map to the furthest regions of cinematic possibility in the early 21st century but one whose spirited back-and-forth inspires the reader to think anew about artistic possibility." —Scott Macaulay, editor-in-chief of Filmmaker Magazine “Pamela Cohn has curated and conducted a series of interviews that simultaneously invite you to turn the page, and pause for a moment of reverie. Her interviews furrow the grounds where sensibilities become cinema, and attitudes become forms." —Luke Moody Lucid Dreaming is an unprecedented global collection of discussions with documentary and experimental filmmakers, giving film and video its rightful place alongside the written word as an essential medium for conveying the most urgent concerns in contemporary arts and politics. In these long-form conversations, film curator and arts journalist Cohn draws out the thinking of some of the most intriguing creators behind the rapidly developing movement of moving-image nonfiction. The collection features individuals from a variety of backgrounds who encounter the world, as Cohn says, “through a creative lens based in documentary practice.” Their inspirations encompass queer politics, racism, identity politics, and activism. The featured artists come from a multiplicity of countries and cultures including the U.S., Finland, Serbia, Syria, Kosovo, China, Iran, and Australia. Among those Cohn profiles and converses with are Karim Aïnouz, Khalik Allah, Maja Borg, Ramona Diaz, Samira Elagoz, Sara Fattahi, Dónal Foreman, Ja’Tovia Gary, Ognjen Glavonic, Barbara Hammer, Sky Hopinka, Gürcan Keltek, Adam and Zack Khalil, Khavn, Kaltrina Krasniqi, Roberto Minervini, Terence Nance, Orwa Nyrabia, Chico Pereira, Michael Robinson, J. P. Sniadecki, Brett Story, Deborah Stratman, Maryam Tafakory, Mila Turajlic, Lynette Wallworth, Travis Wilkerson, and Shengze Zhu. Can nonfiction film be defined? How close to reality can or should documentary storytelling be, and is film and video in its less restrictive iterations “truer” than traditional narratives? How can a story be effectively conveyed? As they consider these and many other questions, these passionate, highly articulate filmmakers will inspire not only cinema enthusiasts, but activists and artists of all stripes.