Friday, February 29, 2008

Get your lemonade! 25 cents!

Two weeks ago, I talked about how video is not a new medium, but rather an old one that has evolved with the coming of the internet and online journalism. While we typically associate video with television and film, it seems that the internet is the medium that video was waiting for.

When it comes to journalism, news broadcasts are great for getting our news fast while we're busy doing other things around the house. But on the internet, you don't only find news broadcasts, but also featured videos, mainly on newspaper sites. Yesterday, Ricardo Lopez, videographer from the Miami Herald, showed us two videos he has done. One feautured a comical 6-year-old boy selling lemonade, and the other featured a high school student who competed in rodeo. Perhaps the most famous video put out by the Herald is "Chicken Chasers," a video about men who go around Miami-Dade catching chickens. All of these stories could not have been told without the internet simply because no other medium provides the space for such supplemental work. Supplemental not because it is less important, but because video is used to add on to a print story or as part of a larger interactive feature. Before the internet, there was no medium for such creative work to exist.

So while a topic such as a little boy selling lemonade made seem trivial to traditional journalists, those of us in the 21st century see these stories as opportunities for videographic genius.

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