MEDIA MATTERS
... and now the SoJos
By Sevanti Ninan
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It is an experiment which highlights the latest trend in journalism: the use of SoJos or solo journalists who are replacing entire television crews.
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"Using the latest technology, including high-definition digital cameras and satellite modems, Kevin will deliver stories via a five-fingered multimedia platform of text, photography, video, audio, and interactive chat — all available on one website."
INNOVATIVE: Yahoo's latest initiative will move live conflict reporting to the Internet. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS
TOMORROW (September 26), Yahoo's latest media initiative will go on stream, and with it, live conflict reporting moves from TV to the Internet. If you encountered the announcement for it on Yahoo News, you might have been forgiven for mistaking it for an advertisement for a forthcoming Hollywood war movie. A banner with the crouching silhouette of a soldier against a flaming background, and the announcement: "Coming Late September Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone". Below that, a picture of a grinning Sites posing with warriors in an unnamed war zone.
The comparison is not facetious. Yahoo's current chief executive is a man who used to run the Warner Bros. movie studio, and its media and entertainment head is a former ABC television executive. Yahoo's own war correspondent who will in the course of a year cover every war on the planet, is the first offering from a planned media empire for which a huge complex has come up. Kevin Sites, formerly a war correspondent with NBC and CNN, has been assigned to travel the globe on his own, visiting every conflict zone on the world map in the course of a year. That includes of course those in our neighbourhood: Kashmir, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar.
A first for the internet
How this is going to work will be as much an experiment in relaying unmediated news as it will be a live war reporting first for the Internet: Says Yahoo, "A solo journalist ("SoJo"), Sites will carry a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit daily reports from nearly every region of the world. Using the latest technology, including high-definition digital cameras and satellite modems, Kevin will deliver stories via a five-fingered multimedia platform of text, photography, video, audio, and interactive chat — all available on one website (http://hotzone.yahoo.com)." They don't use the word blog, but essentially that is what Sites' production will be: a technologically enhanced video blog.
In an editorial, the Los Angles Times worried about what would happen if news consumers developed a taste for this sort of thing. Would it move them away from more passive sources of news such as TV and newspapers?
Yahoo promises "honest, thoughtful reporting", but the worry for those whose regional conflicts will be thus projected is how much depth a man scheduled to hotfoot it to 30 conflict zones in the space of a year can bring to his reporting. The counter argument of course is that the medium itself allows for more in-depth coverage than TV can give because you have text in addition to the audio, video and chat. (To know how effectively layered Internet war coverage can be visit this site which just won a Batten Award for innovation in journalism: http://www.newsday.com/other/special/ny-iraq-thecost,0,158813.htmlstory. It has a point and click format for conveying information on both the cost and toll of the Iraq war.)
Sites himself has been controversial for his Iraq coverage for NBC during which he filmed a marine killing an unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Fallujah. Many Americans responded at that time with hate mail directed at him. If that is anything to go by, his hot zone reporting could generate a lot of verbiage in all kinds of media including Internet chat. Yahoo, looking to make a splash, will love that.
A video journalist; cost-effective
The experiment also highlights the latest trend in journalism: the use of SoJos or solo journalists who are replacing entire television crews. Essentially a SoJo is a VJ — a video journalist. Networks like BBC have found that using them is much more cost effective, so you can increase the number of cameras you have in the field several times over. The VJ carries a digital video camera, he feeds the footage into his laptop, edits it, and transmits it to the TV network by satellite internet. The difficult part is learning to shoot oneself for the piece-to-camera bits in the story.
As the site called Harts Big Picture points out, solo journalism is the face of journalism to come: "multimedia, platform agnostic, interactive and directly accountable to the audience".
Tailpiece: The History Channel's "The Write Stuff" is essentially a packaged recycling of all the authors who figure in its Biography series. It is an easy-to-digest take on writing which dwells more on the personal story than the intellectual output. Certainly the episodes on Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King and Mario Puzo fall into this mould. Salman Rushdie is an exception.
The series will run through October, Saturday at 10 p.m.
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