Tag Archives: digital camera

Schlesinger: Reuters’ ‘multimedia gospel’ and a new media Olympics

On Tuesday Reuters editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger urged the International Olympics Committee to rethink its accreditation rules and strategy for media/news coverage of forthcoming Games to take into account new forms of newsgathering, publishing and the democratisation of both in the hands of the non-journalist.

Schlesinger (or @daschles) is well placed to comment on such issues – during this year’s World Economics Forum, the Reuters head beat one of his own correspondents to a report by tweeting his own updates from George Soros’ speech.

Last night, he also described to the IOC how he had been pressured to remove a Reuters blog post after he took pictures of the Beijing Games without proper editorial photographer accreditation.

His comments also builds on the debate ahead of last year’s competition over whether athletes should be allowed to blog/report from the Games.

Some key quotes from the speech:

  • “The old means of control don’t work. The old categories don’t work. The old ways of thinking won’t work. We all need to come to terms with that.”
  • “More and more, we’re issuing a multimedia report to multimedia-savvy consumers who no longer make a distinction between information they receive from text and information they receive from images.”
  • “That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise. It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand. It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.”

You can read Schlesinger’s full speech on Reuters’ blogs.

Hurricane twitterer Mark Mayhew on rebuilding after Ike and Gustav

Mark Mayhew, who used microblogging service Twitter to update from New Orleans as Hurricane Gustav hit, is using a range of multimedia tools to document efforts to rebuild towns and cities affected by Gustav and Hurricane Ike.

Starting with Twitter again, Mayhew has set up the @RebuildHouston channel to update on the recovery efforts in the Galveston and Houston area. He’ll also be posting longer reports, videos and photos to CNN’s iReport site.

“I’m leaving New Orleans as part of a two person crew who has a van that is “locked and loaded” (my associate’s term) and should be arriving in Houston on Monday morning. We have stockpiled food, tools and we have an EVDO-enabled laptop with a digital camera (that can shoot vid as well,” writes Mayhew on iReport.

Mayhew hopes local journalists will get involved with his coverage, creating a ‘collaborative journalism’ project.

He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty either – posting the following ad for ‘”pay what you want” clean up/home repair/property management’ on Craigslist:

Howard Owens offers guide (and prize) for ‘non-wired’ journos

Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at US company Gatehouse Media, has laid down a personal gauntlet to ‘non-wired journalists’ to encourage them to be more active online.

Listing the full details on his personal blog, Owens is offering a $100 Amazon voucher (around £50) to the first journalist to complete his internet assault course. The currently unofficiated hack must, amongst other things satisfy the following criteria:

  • Get a small digital camera and start uploading photos and making videos
  • Join a social networking site
  • Learn to Twitter
  • Use social bookmarking
  • Set-up a blog

Financial incentives aside, Owen’s ten-step plan is straightforward and low-cost – a simple way to nudge even the most reluctant editorial staff into action.