Al-Jazeera: making video mobile

For some media organisations, mobile video is answer to the challenge of delivering visual stories to tight deadlines. But as digital journalist Adam Westbrook explains, mobile video also breaks all the rules of traditional video journalism.

In our multimedia, multi-platform world, journalists are expected to add more and more skills to their repertoire, from photography, to podcasting and now video.

Web video has exploded in popularity since Youtubes launch in 2006, powered by faster broadband and cheaper equipment. Its a medium all publishers want to be a part of, but as we found running a new web video journalism workshop for the Thomson Foundation with journalists from aljazeera.net, its the most demanding one of them all. It requires more time, effort, energy and expense than most others combined.

Tight deadlines Over ten days I worked with experienced journalists from all over the middle-east, including Algeria, Jordan and Iraq. Their challenge was clear: how to begin telling engaging, visual stories in video, but with tight deadlines. For them, the answer was in mobile reporting: using smartphones to quickly film events and then edit them as rapidly as possible.

Most smartphones are so advanced that theyre able shoot full HD quality footage, even in difficult conditions. With a few affordable app purchases journalists can convert their phones into mobile editing suites.

But mobile video is a very different beast and we learned that making mobile video work means "forgetting" some of the most basic rules of video storytelling, which are followed by TV and standard video journalists elsewhere.

During the workshop, we watched part of an Al-Jazeera documentary called Syria: Songs of Defiance. Working undercover, the reporter was forced to film only with his iPhone.

Authenticity The result, looks like no documentary you will have seen before. The pictures are wobbly and out of focus. The camera moves all over the place, barely staying still for a second. Often we see just footsteps as the reporter has to flee a dangerous situation. And the interviews would break every rule trainers like me teach video journalists around the world.

Yet, as my students pointed out, Syria: Songs of Defiance has something many crafted and stylised documentaries lack: authenticity. Its rough and raw but its real. And this is what mobile video reportage should be: messy, a bit hectic, but above all, honest.

So, after a week of exercises on how to shoot "professional" web video, I asked my class to take their phones out into Doha and capture the essence of the city using only their phones. The pieces they edited felt more authentic than their earlier work, even though it didnt "look like" video as we know it.

Adam Westbrook, a digital journalist and storyteller, has just returned from Doha where he led an online video workshop at Al Jazeeras training centre.

LINK:	http://www.thomsonfoundation.org/news-and-features/2013/04/24/al-jazee...
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