FUTUROOM is an experiment in hyper-local and Social Media news reporting on a national level in the Czech Republic.

This is a story of how a national news organization was built from the ground up, based on hyper-local journalism and social media.

The finished film will be posted as soon as it is done.

Technical details:

This film was story-boarded and shot in four days.

I used a Canon HF100 camcorder, a Sennheiser Evolution G2 wireless lavaliere kit, a Manfrotto Modo tripod, and for some sequences, a Sony T500 point and shoot camera.

Total value of my equipment: $1350

Is this truly lo-fi? In this case I would say yes. This is the cheapest I could make this type of film: HD, great sound and steady shots with a tripod.

This entire setup fit inside of my small laptop bag. I had a portable shooting/editing setup wherever I went, and it was incredibly discreet and convenient.

I hope to shoot many more projects with this same setup.

-Kirk

January 15th, 2009, a plane crash lands in the Hudson River. Less than ten minutes after the crash, a man named Janis Krums snaps a photo of the downed plane and uploads the photo to Twitpic. As the ferry boat heads to the crash site to pick up survivors, Krum’s photo becomes the defining photo of this event, running on the front page of newspapers around the world.

So who is Janis Krums? Who is this person who has captured one of the most important breaking news stories of 2009?

Janis Krums is your competition. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Remember the amazing photos from inside the collapsed tunnels during the London train bombings?
Or the flurry of Twitter and cell phone text messages from inside the Taj Hotel during the terror attack on Mumbai?
How about the amateur video shot by a passenger, capturing the murder of an innocent man by a policeman in the San Francisco BART train station?

The amateur IS the journalist and the amateur is everywhere. All the time.

How did it get this way?

First: The technological barriers to entry have disappeared.

More and more cell phones have the ability to record and send video. Applications such as Qik and Flixwagon allow cell phone users to transmit live video straight to the Internet. The implications of this are staggering. It is only in the last few years that traditional broadcast news networks have begun to use satellite phones to transmit live video without the need for a news crew or news van. Now this technology is common-place.

Secondly: Distribution barriers have disappeared.

What used to take miles of cable and access to a select few channels licensed from the FCC, or huge printing presses, endless amounts of paper and a complex system of newsstand and home delivery, can now be done with a few keystrokes and reach a more targeted audience than TV ever could.

For those wishing to create their own mini broadcast news network, it’s as easy as purchasing a Flip Video camera, setting up a Tubemogul account, and hosting it all on a custom WordPress website. All of this for under $200!

The destruction of these barriers has flipped the media economy on it’s head. Imagine the traditional media as a funnel. At the top there are world events, below that, the journalists who create stories from these events. Journalists then feed their stories into their respective news outlet, and that information is delivered in a one-way stream to the public. This entire time, the range of news items has been selectively narrowed down to what the news outlet thinks the public should know.

With the rise of amateur content, the funnel has been flipped upside down. Information is no longer scarce and flows from the public up the funnel. The most popular news items are eventually noticed by the media who then write about it or link to it on their website. News is now flowing both ways, and no story is ever complete.

Obviously a teenager with a Flip Video camera is not going to put the BBC out of business. And there are many valid critiques of citizen journalism.

Two Critiques of Citizen Journalism

Production Quality

As YouTube has shown us, people do NOT want what we think they want.

Timeliness, brevity, and emotional impact, are key traits of the most viewed YouTube videos. In nearly every category, videos that excel in these three traits have the highest view count.  This runs counter intuitive to what we EXPECT people to value.  In traditional journalism we expect people to value in-depth, long-form, fact-checked and tightly edited reporting.  We expect people to value accuracy over timeliness.  We expect people to value high production values over spontaneous raw footage. But this is not so.

YouTube hits such as Susan Boyle, from ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, is a testament to what people really want.  People do not go to YouTube for the highest video quality.  They go to YouTube to be informed, entertained, shocked, or moved during the small window of time they have to watch something at work or in between daily tasks.

The days when people planned their dinners around the evening news are over.  People want short, informative, or entertaining ‘snackable’ bits of content that they can watch whenever they want.  The appointment-based broadcast model is coming to an end.

Accuracy and Objectivity

Citizen Journalism has been criticized for being inaccurate and opinion based.  True, stories such as the false claim that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, leaked one day over Twitter, sparked a massive sell off of Apple stock.  This certainly damaged the reputation of citizen journalists around the world.  However, the power of a social network based news distribution model is that any story that is released is subject to near real-time correction by readers.

(Time lapse of the first few hours after the London Train Bombings, showing the real-time article writing and correction.)

Wikipedia is created by the masses.  Yet, according to the magazine ‘Nature’, Wikipedia is more accurate and up-to-date that the Encyclopedia Britannica.  Much of our news will be this way soon, where a story is never really finished, it’s only in ‘beta’. Forever.

Many professional journalists scoff at the masses on YouTube.  In doing so, they do themselves a huge disservice.  The popular video creators on YouTube may not be trained broadcast journalists but they have added to the vocabulary of successful video production and more importantly successful distribution and engagement with an online audience.

You have to recognize this new vocabulary or risk becoming irrelevant.

So what can you do?

Broadcast journalists have a great skill: the ability to craft amazing and accurate reports out of chaotic and sometimes nebulous news situations.  This skill is a huge advantage when it comes to making compelling online video. But this skill alone is not enough.  There are new skills that you must learn to compete with people like Janis Krums and the video equipped masses.

The first skill to learn is how to shoot and edit a story using the equipment you have on hand.

Just as great works of art were created with the simple pencil, great stories can be created using Flip Video cameras, cell phone cameras and digital point and shoot cameras.  Sometimes it is impractical to carry a large camera or walk into a situation with a large crew.  Sometimes news breaks when you least expect it and you have no crew or proper equipment.  In these situations you must be able to work with what you have, and you should always carry SOMETHING on you that can take a photo or video and get it online right away.

Shooting with amateur technology introduces creative constraints.  Constraints such as bad low-light performance, weak audio and non-stabilized optics.  Each of these constraints can be overcome and by doing so you will become better at capturing breaking news and crafting compelling stories.  Technical constraints will enable you to look past the technical aspects of making a video, and focus more clearly on why you are shooting what you are shooting, and exactly how it will capture the attention of your audience emotionally and intellectually.

Put away the good gear and see if you can make something amazing with cheap equipment.  You will be surprised how this sharpens your storytelling skills.

Secondly, journalists must understand how to use social networks and video distribution networks to their advantage.  Currently, most traditional media establishments have only a crude framework for promoting content online.  Posting video on the official news website and writing a few blog entries is not enough.   News stations must get up to speed with how video monetization and distribution works.

How many times must the BBC or ABC news see their original content posted illegally on YouTube, racking up hundreds of thousands of hits under someone else’s name?

Those views could have been making the news station money if they had only torn down the wall to their content.  Content wants to be free and will be free. They have to attach some advertising to it, get it out there themselves on many networks, and monitor the number of hits, charging advertisers accordingly.  It’s money that is being left on the table.

Successful independent YouTubers and film makers already understand this and encourage people to take their content and re-post and re-use it all over the Internet.

Dying from Behind a Walled Garden

If your station or institution wishes to keep its content behind a ‘walled garden,’ then you must start thinking about your personal future as a journalist. You must become your own brand.  You must understand social media, viral video, and how to produce award winning content on your own.

The successful one-person video creator needs to focus on a specific type of content, something that they care about, are an expert in, and have access to. Content needs to be created for smaller screens, made in a shorter amount of time and with less resources.  Story, emotional impact, and/or educational value, must be the driving principles when creating content.

Your videos need to also have certain technical qualities:

• Under 5 minutes.

• Descriptive and enticing titles.

• Be tagged correctly.

• Have the best encoding and thumbnail possible.

(Here, Here, and Here are some great resources.)

Making great content is not enough.  You must create an online identity, a brand if you will.  This requires a beautiful and fast-loading website that serves as your resume, your social network headquarters, and most importantly as a place to gather your audience.

You as a Brand

Things you can do to create your own brand:

• Create a custom installed WordPress website. Load it up with social widgets. Network.

• Create and brand your own independent stories and distribute them to multiple video websites using Tubemogul (or a similar one-stop distributing platform.)

• Find where the type of person you target hangs out online and market to them.

• Create valuable educational content for free and for pay.

• Blog about what you know. Become a thought leader. Become the news source, the one that people turn to as an authority.

• Start Twittering, and build connections to people that will rave about your content.

Branding and marketing yourself will make you a sought after content-creator no matter what happens to the traditional media during these times of change.

There is no guarantee that traditional media will remain in it’s current form or have jobs for all those graduating from college.  Trends suggest that most traditional media jobs will be a thing of the past.  But you can thrive.

In fact you can do better than your predecessors.

Your core skills of integrity, personal vision and storytelling are in demand and hard to come by.   If you step outside of the box known as the traditional media and become more than just another journalist or camera operator, you will have the opportunity to innovate and re-define what news is and what shape it take in the future.

Traditional mediums may be dying, but great news and content is thriving more than ever.

Thank you.

I spoke specifically to the Broadcast Education Association at a panel called The Pedagogy of Television Production in the Age of YouTube.

What did I talk about?

1. What traditional broadcast journalists must learn from the film making vocabulary of YouTube.
2. How the traditional media is flipped on its head by the rise of the amateur.
3. How broadcast journalists can save themselves by being their own brand and marketing their work independently.

(This video contains an abbreviated version of my speech.)

*In the spirit of lo-fi content creation, this video was shot using a Sony T500 digital point and shoot camera.

-Kirk

The end of the newspaper era is the beginning of decentralized news reporting, where ‘timeliness over quality’ is the rule of the day.

I have always believed in the Media Singularity which is the ultimate outcome of increasingly cheaper technology combined with ever expanding online distribution. I just never thought it would come so soon.

Of course we have been creeping along this path for some time now with excellent examples as far back as 2005. But it hasn’t been until this year that a ‘perfect storm‘ of economic recession, advanced cell phone technology and cheap HD technology has cracked the giant fortress of traditional top-down media.

2009 will be known as the year that media shatters into millions of fragments, with millions of citizen journalists beating seasoned journalists to the punch by transmitting from the scene of the crime/crash/emergency/flood/fire/standoff, using only their cell phone.

(Shot with a Kodak Zi6, then uploaded to YouTube.)

A few of these citizen journalists will even be able to tell a complete story and articulate what is happening in an informative manner. (Unlike myself in the above video where I say ‘Fire Ambulances’ instead of ‘Fire Trucks.’)

Live.

With their cell phone.

Let me explain this transition in steps.
(This way it will be much clearer to those that have been holding out for multimedia to save the newspaper or for the amazing quality of the Canon 5D Mark II or Red Cameras that can do both still and video.)

Step 1: Flip Video Camera + YouTube + YouReport + Vimeo + etc.

This year, many of my articles have focused on small cheap 720/1080 HD camcorders such as the Flip Video Camera, Flip Mino HD, Kodak Z16 and Creative’s Vado HD.

These video cameras appeal to the amateur with their simple all-auto operation and ease of use when uploading to YouTube. A total beginner can shoot and upload decent HD quality video to the internet for millions of people to find and watch. Cheap and easy video technology poses a threat to professional journalists who are just now learning to shoot video for their paper using incredibly complicated HD work-flows that include wireless mics, DV Tapes, and expensive MacPro towers for editing in Final Cut Pro.

Many pros have great equipment and meet deadlines for producing weekly multimedia video in addition to still photos…but it will be all for naught because viewers don’t care about quality, they care about immediacy (Just look at the hit-counts for many amazing multimedia stories produced in-house at newspapers.)

To the photojournalists/TV people out there:

Get used to it. It’s only going to get worse.

On your current path to making beautiful, technically perfect multimedia stories, you will be absolutely crushed by the amateur who is there at the news event BEFORE YOU, sending text messages, Tweets, and gathering stills/video with some sort of video camera, cell phone or point and shoot camera with video…essentially gathering your news and eating your lunch.

And they will do it gladly, with gusto and for free. And there will most likely be multiple points of view and levels of quality for any event due to the number of people at the scene recording something.

Step 2: Enter the iPhone 3G

With the launch of the iPhone, cheap still photography meets cheap distribution, on a device that allows the user to take a photo, edit it on their phone, and upload it to Flickr or share it with friends via Twitterific instantly. The iPhone has brought together what I consider to be the two ultimate tools that a photojournalist truly needs in an immediacy driven world: a camera and an instant distribution network.

Is a two megapixel iPhone photo good enough for national news? YES.

If I still worked at a newspaper I would definitely consider shooting an iPhone photo immediately and getting that to my editor before shooting with my DSLR.

Step 3: Cycorder + Qik + Flixwagon: The Last Nail in the Coffin

This last week I jailbroke my iPhone using QuickPwn. It was super easy compared to the relative complexity of previous jailbreaking attempts using the previous PwnageTool.

This allowed me to install Cycorder which is a free app that makes your iPhone into a Flip Video Camera (essentially.) With Cycorder you get 15fps recording with sound at 384×288 in an elegantly compressed video format. The file size, video size and frame rate make it ideal for web viewing without any modification. Just upload it to YouTube once you get home…

(Shot with my Iphone + Cycorder.)

or better yet,

…broadcast LIVE using Qik or Flixwagon!!

(Shot with iPhone + Qik.) (ed: I realize I cut off my chin in this vid. Didn’t quite point my phone correctly…)

These two programs allow you to share what you are experiencing live with anyone who is on your Qik or Flixwagon channel. Some people have already used this to great success.

To me this is live news reporting at its best and on par with the video phone reporting that I have seen more and more of on TV when they are unable to send a full camera crew and truck to a live news event.

Many will say that the quality isn’t there or that people won’t figure out how to do this, but just consider what is possible now with available technology. Everything is in place, it is only a matter of a few years before the citizen journalist overwhelms the pro.

Even if 5% of citizen journalists are good at what they do it will still outnumber traditional reporters significantly.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

With millions of iPhone owners out there who will all eventually know how to send live video, take great pictures and distribute instantly through the Internet with their cell phone, how many years will it be before the news is 90% crowd-sourced?

-Kirk

As originally written by the Flickr photog:

“(Taken on my Apple iphone, straight from phone cam, no computer enhancement, my Nikon D50 is broken. Location is Artesian Road in Rancho Santa fe; Highest position on explore was #2; this photo was also picked up by the front page of yahoo news which resulted in the 80,000 views)

We saw these horses standing here right in the middle of all the smoke and fires smoldering and the aftermath of the main fire that ran through here. I almost couldn’t believe that about 25 horses were standing here and their fences had all melted or burned away.

….cont.

This photo was picked up by Yahoo News, so the views are skyrocketing. Also it is moving up in Explore. It’s from my iphone cam and I’m thrilled because this is the proof I was looking for to help people understand (including me) it is the photographer, not the camera that counts.”

-ms4jah (photographer)

………………………………………………………………………………

This is a great example of how cell phones and citizen journalism will eliminate photojournalism jobs as well as revitalize public interest in photojournalism.

Strange paradox eh?

Now the average citizen can BE a photojournalist and therefore determine the future of a field of work which was previously out of reach to the average person.

-Kirk

Today I’m going to tell you about Lo-fi talent. And luck. And the masses. And cheap accessible technology.

Yesterday’s experiment was based on this lo-fi kick I’m on.

(Illustration of how I held my camera to shoot through my car window)

I asked myself what would happen if I stuck a 90mm lens on my 5D and shot randomly through my car window while driving to my girlfriend’s house in West Seattle.

It’s like that mental experiment: if an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters had infinite time to type, they would eventually produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Today in photography we face exactly the same problem.

With millions of new photographers in the last several years publishing photos to sites such as Flickr, we are seeing the infinite monkey theorem at work in the photography space.

With a cheap digital camera, a few Photoshop actions, and the ability to publish quickly and cheaply to the web, we are seeing an over-saturation of the photography market with work that is ‘good enough for print’ along with occasional accidentally amazing images, that over time will create an infinite library of excellent imagery covering every imaginable topic.

We are only 5-7 years into the digital photography age and the amateur has already produced enough free content to completely fill sites such as iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, and Jupiter Images.

In case you missed what is directly above:

• 4,374,279 royalty free photos.
• 43,312 new stock photos added this week (OMFG!!!)
• 115,818 photographers (!)

So what does this all mean? Where is Kirk going with this post?

Well, as a stock photographer at Aurora Photos I can tell you that there may be a sliver of a chance that a pro *can* stay in business over the long term.

What these gigantic image aggregators lack for the time being are two things:

1. An efficient image filtering system to find the images an editor needs at a quality level that is acceptable.

2. Model released images. Most amateurs have no clue how model releases work. That isn’t to say they won’t figure it out soon enough. Without model releases images are not quite as valuable in the market place.

So here is my message to those who wish to be pro photographers. The only thing separating us from a pack of wild dogs, er, monkeys with cameras are three things:

1. The ability to choose interesting/unique subjects and shoot them with a carefully developed consistent style. Consistency people. Consistency is key here.

2. Whatever you did before the surge in photography 5 years ago is no longer good enough. Stop bitching, please! If you fail now it is your own fault. The stakes are much higher now: you have to jump higher, be better than the rest and never rest on your laurels.

3. Be a professional with your business. Learn how to make money so you can stay in the game longer and outperform your competition. This means model releases, this means learning how to negotiate, this means learning how to figure out your cost of doing business, this means having a solid knowledge of how to write a contract, this mean dressing, talking and acting like a professional, not like a prima donna, scarf wearing, cigarette smoking, globe trotting, wine sipping, reportage photographer; who, without a trust fund, is ultimately doomed in this day and age…

…you can be all fancy like HCB once you have your business in order. Because things are changing fast.

Remember, the pack of monkeys at your heels. Good luck and god speed.

-Kirk

Moving silently through the back roads of the country through towns such as Carter (pop. 106) and Arco (pop. 600+-) it occurred to me how much of our collective American past has been lost.

Looking around me I saw boarded up gas stations, abandoned city streets and an empty playground covered in a light dusting of snow. I had to ask myself, what industry could possibly keep the remaining people here?

Arco, situated on a high cold plateau in central Idaho must be at least two hours from any other medium sized town.

After finishing our meal at Pickle’s Place, a small local diner, we struck up a conversation with the waiter.

Dressed in black with several facial piercings I immediately took him as a goth or heavy metal fan at the very least. He told us how he had tried to move to Boise, ‘the big city’ he called it, but eventually drifted back to Arco, defeated by the immensity and strangeness of a larger, busier environment.

He didn’t feel comfortable in Boise, so after giving it a go right out of college, he packed up and returned to Arco to start a record label and promote his band called ‘The Local Misfits.’

Behind him standing in a corner was a surly looking guy who paced around drinking coffee as we talked to the waiter.

As we paid our tab to leave, I heard the sound of a walkie-talkie in his jacket. He put the coffee down and answered his radio.

It turns out that this guy is one of the remaining firemen in the town. Before leaving to answer a call he comes over to talk. I notice his shirt and ask to take his picture.

I liked his shirt.

The next day we hit the road, continuing on our way to New Orleans, silently moving along the forgotten parts of America.

- Kirk