Technology A to Z

With easy, affordable tools, anyone can be a video journalist

By Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Real-life technology has a way of catching up with what's in sci-fi flicks. In the 1994 film "Star Trek VII: Generations," Capt. Kirk is accosted by video reporters with pocket-size cameras in the imagined 24th century.

Yet today's video journalists are already replicating the feats of the futuristic "Star Trek" media by using ordinary camcorders, mobile phones and laptop computers, paired with a fresh breed of Web-video services. These tools are so affordable and easy to use that anyone can go live, right on the Internet, and send moving images for the world to see.

Take the UpTake. This citizen-journalism outfit, formed in Minnesota about a year ago, has set out to cover the U.S. presidential election with a national network of volunteer correspondents and a shoestring budget. The UpTake has no satellite trucks, souped-up news cams or high-tech control rooms. But it is able to transmit political news without that expensive equipment.

The UpTake provides edited video segments, sent in from about a half-dozen states so far, along with live streaming video of high-profile political events. Here's how the network's volunteers pull it together:

Video cameras. Next time you see a mom or dad using a late-model video camcorder at a birthday party or school function, take a closer look. That's media gear with vast potential, if in the right hands.

The UpTake's Chuck Olsen, for instance, uses what seems to be a pedestrian Canon HV20 that records on humdrum MiniDV cassettes. These tools have been around for a while, yet this technology has made great strides. Olsen can capture footage in high definition, which translates into Web videos that look exquisite. His images are further enhanced with tripods, microphones, add-on lenses and other attachments for a professional effect.

Mix in Olsen's storytelling talent and sense of humor, and the result is an unconventional style of video journalism.

On a major trip to a Democratic Party function in Iowa, Olsen pokes fun at image-obsessed network TV reporters ("earring malfunction!") and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whose speech is sped up, Alvin the Chipmunk-style, as she's introducing every candidate as "the next president of the United States"). Olsen mixes in freeway roadkill, Iowa state troopers and Hillary Clinton-haters caught redfooted as they trample campaign signs. Hilarity appears, amid a serious scrutiny of crucial issues, with segments showing the top candidates.

Olsen's brand of reporting doesn't hew to traditional journalistic standards (network correspondents would never speed up a national politician's speech, for instance). You'll see him pretend to disrobe in one video, swear in another segment, and flit aside a Red Bull can strewn alongside a seemingly unconscious fellow UpTake member. Don't hold your breath waiting for Diane Sawyer to do anything like that.

Olsen recently churned out video during what he called a Southern Fried Tour of several states, but his coverage wasn't exclusively in video form. He manually uploaded a flurry of still photos to Flickr (later lamenting that he didn't have an Eye-Fi card for his camera to automate the process) and dramatically chronicled his trip in 140-character snippets of text on Twitter.

Webcasting. Though largely concentrating on polished, pre-recorded video segments, the UpTake goes live on the Web during key events. These include recent primaries and caucuses, and candidate visits to Minnesota.

When then-Democratic candidate John Edwards arrived in late January, for instance, an UpTake camera jostled for space with TV crews to capture his every utterance. Footage was instantly viewable on the network's Web site thanks to new service called Mogulus, which lets users create the Internet equivalent of TV stations. UpTake staffers could provide a continuous stream of commentary, anchor-style, in the live-video window on the upper right of the group's home page.

Unfortunately for the UpTake, Edwards didn't select this venue to reveal he was pulling out of the race. That announcement came the next day in New Orleans.

Mobile phones. The video cameras in newer cell phones have become live-reporting tools, courtesy of new services that send moving images over the Internet as they're being captured. These services include Qik, Kyte, ComVu and Flixwagon. When paired with certain cutting-edge handsets, such as Nokia's N95, video journalism becomes possible.

Reuters has paired N95s with the ComVu service as part of a Mobile Journalism Toolkit experiment. Minnesota-based Technology Evangelist, which specializes in Web-based video coverage of technology topics, used Qik for live reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show late last year. During the recent Super Tuesday of U.S. presidential primaries and caucuses, MTV sponsored 51 citizen journalists using phones equipped with Flixwagon.

Likewise, the UpTake has harnessed Qik with several N95s for live webcasting on the group's home page. It accomplished this with a first-ever melding of Qik with Mogulus, which permitted N95-packing UpTake correspondents in St. Paul and Boston to zap their video directly to that little window on the group's home page.

Super Tuesday became a tech tour de force for the UpTake.

Chuck Olsen was in a New Orleans bar during Mardi Gras celebrations (Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday happened to coincide this year), webcasting live via Mogulus and the iSight videocam built into his MacBook Pro laptop. This permitted him to co-anchor the UpTake's national coverage of that night's political mega-event (despite a few technical glitches) alongside volunteers in St. Paul.

UpTake executive director Jason Barnett was in St. Paul with one of the organization's two N95s, transmitting footage of inner-city Democratic caucusing. Video blogger Steve Garfield had the other N95 in Boston, transmitting from a bar near Fenway Park as he solicited the political views of fellow tech-heads. This event was a technical coup for Garfield, a veteran Qik user, who negotiated the agreement between Mogulus and Qik so the services could interact for the first time.

Super Tuesday was a trial run for the political season's two culminating events this summer when the Democratic and Republican parties hold their nominating conventions in Denver and St. Paul, respectively. To get ready, the UpTake is in frantic boot-camp mode to give additional recruits the basic technical and reporting skills they need to assemble balanced and engaging video stories.

The citizen journalism network is also begging for handouts -- consumer technologies, after all, will only get a nonprofit so far.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata covers consumer technology for the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, a MediaNews Group newspaper. Find his coverage at yourtechweblog.com and twincities.com/techtestdrive.

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