When to use 360 video in a news story
by Jessica Brockington and Jennifer Groff
The New York Times launched the Daily 360 video series on November 1, 2016. A little more than a year later, this series will end as Samsung, a maker of 360 video cameras, concludes its funding for the project.
What worked?
A December 16, 2017 piece about prison reform compares two dangerous American jails, Rikers Island in NYC and Cook County in Chicago. In the differences between footage of the two jails there’s much to learn about what works in 360 video, and what doesn’t.
Spoiler alert: what’s at stake is audience engagement. If you’re going to ask the audience to look for things, to swipe photos, tilt heads, spin chairs, there’s got to be a payoff.
More than one important view
On the one hand, with 360 you can bring just one camera to capture all the viewpoints. You don’t need to edit the visuals for clarity, or for story line. The viewer can compose their own shots to understand the landscape you’ve dropped them into.
But there needs to be more than one view worth seeing, or it’s a promise broken.
None of the Rikers Island 360’s have anything going on behind the viewer’s virtual back. The basketball game happens in one direction. The conversation among the men sitting at their work training program in another clip could have all happened in front of one conventional camera.
Immersion
Immersion is key to the 360 experience. If the journalist overlays narration or text to tell the story, they’ve immediately insulated the viewer from that immersion.
In the case of the same Riker’s clip where men are sitting at a table doing job training work, there’s a narration happening and I spun the image around looking for the person talking. That person isn’t in the room. Questions start to arise and they aren’t the questions the journalists intend: Why bring me to that immersion? What am I there to encounter? Who is the person talking and why can’t I see his face?
Intimacy
Where 360 was most successful overall in this piece was in the images from solitary confinement in Cook County jail. The lighting and resolution allow an intimate view of the inmate in his cell: photographs over his cot; fabric covering the toilet; graffiti on the walls.
From the inside of those cells, with 360 video, we get an immediate sense of confinement and scale. It’s highly effective.
The 360 of the dormitory at Cook County was also effective. The room looked remarkably large in every direction; so much humanity.
Multitasking
The story of Rikers and Cook County jails is an urgent one. The NYT journalists, with their access into the prisons, and into the mindshare of Americans, have the opportunity to impact the lives of many who are held in unsafe, inhumane conditions. But they don’t have a lot of time to do it.
And most of these 360 clips require the audience to do too many things at the same time. I need to hear and process the narration both as a stand-alone story and in its role in the larger interactive piece. I need to look around the room to figure out what it is the videographer wants me to see. I assume there’s something special about it and I’m looking for that.
I’m used to letting trusted journalists lead me along an adventure, and in 360 the journalists have dropped me into a landscape and they’re letting me figure it out on my own. In the Rikers clips, the cuts are often too fast and the audience doesn’t have a chance to “snoop” around this forbidden territory, or to check anything out before the story moves forward.
Same story; just one camera
Compare the NYT interactive to this dramatic Daily News story about Rikers from a few weeks earlier:
There’s one camera that captures everything. And there’s a written piece that tells you what happened. You don’t get the sense that there needs to be more.
Or this one, a lush 2015 collaboration between New York Magazine and the Marshall Project. It’s told by inmates and corrections officers. Here, the storytellers are as important as the story being told.
Loss of impact by using 360
Overall, the NYT lost the chance at a great story by using 360. Getting access to these facilities is not easy. The intimate clips of solitary confinement in Cooks County were overwhelmed by the barrage of underwhelming footage at Rikers.
Audience response
We looked to social media for feedback since there is no comments section on this piece.
On Twitter, one of the authors says it was a great learning experience for her, but there’s not a lot of feedback otherwise. For a Sunday piece, it should have received substantial engagement.
Before you pull out your 360 camera
Here are some things to consider before you use 360 video in journalism:
- Are there multiple views that are worth exploring? Will your audience be glad they engaged?
- Is it important for the audience to discover those views by themselves? If a visual is a critical element in your story, you’re probably better off cutting directly to that visual.
- Will your story need a narrative overlay or does it stand alone? Too much going on at once distracts from your story.
- Does your story benefit from 360’s ability to convey intimacy, vulnerability or scale?
- Is the story compelling enough that the audience will want to spin around, swipe the screen, in order to watch it?
Fake News
360 video may have some future role in combating fake news. Or at least combating allegations of fake news. There are presumably ways of gaming or editing the 360 image, but the idea that a reporter has simply set the camera down and is allowing the audience to check out the view themselves might convey a sense of honesty that is being challenged by President Trump.
Improved technology
The cameras will only get better in terms of lighting and resolution. And internet bandwidth will allow higher definition of the transmission of the images. 360 video is at its best when it’s intimate and detailed and that will continue to improve.
