The social media revolution (with funky beats)
I am the bastard child of old & new media
Putting my money where my mouth is…
I gotta admit, I’m one lucky son-of-a-bitch.
I’ve been given the enviable job of heading to Cape Town in South Africa for the duration of the World Cup as part of the SBS broadcast team. My main job will be as the producer of sports news reader Craig Foster each morning, ensuring he gets all the scripts and background information needed to go to air.
But once that is done (by 11.30am Cape Town time) – I’m putting my money where my mouth is as a multi-platform, mobile journalist, filing for online, radio & TV.
Coming with me is a veritable feast of gadgets and prosumer equipment, and there’s little doubt I’m going to be extremely busy for the 6 weeks in South Africa, with requests already piling up.
Here’s what’s coming with me:
- MacBook Pro 13″ with Photoshop CS4 & FinalCut Pro
- Canon 70-200mm f2.8 zoom lens (camera buffs drool now…)
- Canon 18-135mm f3.5 zoom lens
- Velbon CX480 fluid-head tripod
- Flash Microphone
- iPhone 16GB laden with content producing apps.
With it I hope to spend my days shooting video for TV, filing interviews and doing live crosses for radio, photo galleries for The World Game & World News Australia online and a couple of other bits and pieces I can’t really discuss yet 
With today’s incredible and cheap equipment and with a bit of technical nous, I’m hoping to prove the point that truly mobile journalism is possible and can still be of the high quality, despite he claims of many traditional media journalists (including many workmates) that new media is killing off quality journalism.
I’ve laboured the point a million times before, but I’ll labour it again. Quality journalism isn’t only the domain of 2,000 word feature articles or 25 minute mini-documentaries, especially in the new media world. With media outlets facing such dogged competition from all platforms, the true skill of a quality journalist is telling stories in an engaging way for their audiences.
This requires journalism to evolve, to grow, and to adapt to the new breed of media audience that demands more from their media outlets.
Just have a look at the list of online news winners from this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Or the fact that, for the first time, an online-only publication won one of the prestigious awards.
Isn’t it time we all started moving past online as a ‘value-add’ for newspapers & TV? Here in Australia we may be bombarded with tabloid reporting in our biggest online publications, but as the saying goes, you are what you eat. It’s out there, you just need to look for it…
Here’s hoping I can contribute in a positive way to finally ending this debate over online as a legitimate journalistic endeavour.
