I am, when all is said and done, a writer. I know how to take something happening in real life and spin it into a news story, wrapping my reader into exactly what I want them to know.
Using video is completely foreign to me. Somewhere between fumbling around with a flip cam to “interviewing” (correction: playing around) with a classmate in JOUR203, I realized this was going to be interesting.
In our first class, we watched a multimedia presentation called “The Ninth Floor” by Jessica Dimmock. In it, the reporter spent years with a group of drug addicts living in an Upper East Side apartment.
I love the way video can utterly capture a person’s emotions. Dimmock used still pictures and audio to tell the addict’s story. You can see the words “she shot up heroin in a hospital,” but to actually see a frail, lifeless woman with a needle hanging out of her arm in a hospital bed evokes emotions unattainable through print.
As a traditional journalist, I am going to have the most trouble in crafting my stories. While writing a story, I know exactly how I am going to report on the news. While videotaping, however, I need to rely more on the people I am interviewing. I need to learn how to coax emotions from a person and use their words to reach out to my viewers. Hopefully by the end of this class I’ll learn how to be not just a news writer but a video journalist!
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