Can community news organizations produce 360 video stories for less than $500?
360 video has been on the minds of many large news organizations, especially in New York City, where the charge has been led by last year’s 365-day experiment at The New York Times. But why not spread this visual revolution further?
More than 3 million people in NYC were born outside of the United States, and most of their communities are represented by some type of small news organization with a website and a Facebook page. What about 360 video at these news organizations? For the most part, the answer is no. Smaller news organizations have less free time to experiment with new tools like 360 video.
So we proposed exploring the idea that these small news organizations could produce compelling 360 video in the communities they know so well. The hypothesis was that sharing 360 video with small community and ethnic media is the first step to democratizing both the technology and this form of storytelling.
Thanks to a grant from the Journalism 360 Challenge, we started to test the idea of bringing 360 video storytelling to more of NYC’s news media. NYC community media organizations were paired with teams of graduate students from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach. I felt the students would benefit from working with a media partner that was deeply embedded in their community, and the partners would benefit from working with students who had made several experiments with the technology and had access to resources (like me and my project partner, Matt MacVey).
We had enough money to purchase six identical 360 video kits consisting of a 2017 model Samsung Gear 360 camera (chosen because it would work easily with either Android or iPhone), a memory card, a monopod and small ball head, a weight designed for a baseball bat (to steady the monopod), a roll of gaffer’s tape and two Velcro sticky pads, all fitting into a tripod bag and costing less than $500. (No effort is done alone, so thanks to our friends at The NY Times and McClatchy for sharing their 360 camera kits.)
To start, we needed to find some partners. Luckily, the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, which organizes training and coordination among the different community and ethnic media organizations, is housed right here at the CUNY J-School. The Center had the perfect mailing list to get this project started. Working with Jehangir Khattak and Karen Pennar, we wrote a pitch letter and blasted it out.
Much to our surprise — and relief — 19 organizations expressed interest. We narrowed that group down to the six strongest candidates based on the activity of their Facebook pages and their willingness to try new things. Social media presence mattered for this project because it’s easy to share 360 videos via Facebook and YouTube.
The six news partners for this project were ITV Gold (Long Island City), Ridgewood Times (Queens), Kings County Politics (Brooklyn), WestView News (West Village), Newsroh (Manhattan) and Afrikanspot (Harlem). My colleague Matt MacVey reached three partners by phone for more background on their interest in 360 video. The journalists Matt spoke with were proficient mobile journalists who were excited by new ways of telling stories.
We put everything we knew — contacts, web links, etc. — into a spreadsheet where the students could choose their partners, and we were off.
There were bumps and cancellations and complications, just like in the real world of journalism. The students worked with the partners to find connections and stories. In each case, the news organization was able to find a subject very suitable to 360 video, such as a drag festival in Queens, a dinner gathering prepared by people from North and South Korea on the theme of unification, and a large Manhattan church closed to the public.
Partners were invited to the shoots and also to the editing sessions. Some attended and were very active. The rough cuts all went to the partners for feedback.
One thing that surprised me in a good way about the final stories is that the approaches varied widely in the subject matter and narrative.
And we identified one major technical issue: Footage from the 2017 model Samsung Gear 360 does not play well on a Mac desktop. Trying to edit the footage in Adobe Premiere Pro 2018 was a very long nightmare (and we have heard in casual conversation that other people have had similar problems). We solved the problem eventually by using proxies in Premiere — a tortured, obtuse process that added time and space and trouble. Our guess is that many news organizations use PCs, which have not reported this editing trouble.
If you’re working with your footage on a smartphone, you can’t edit the 360 video; you can only post the best clips. The camera works well when paired with iPhone or Android.
Some partners published immediately, some have yet to publish. For us, it’s all part of the learning process.
“Life and Death of a Catholic Church,” WestView News
Constanza Gallardo and Maritza Villela captured the death and life of a large neighborhood church.
We look forward to repeating the tests next semester with a few improvements: This time our pitch will feature these stories from NYC small media organizations. And we still need to test our idea of shipping these cameras to partners for them to use on their own and, finally, to create a simple guide on how to shoot 360 video — an open source booklet that uses these real world examples.
Thanks to Knight Foundation, ONA and Google News Lab for funding this research as part of the first J360 grant, as well as to the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Matt MacVey, who runs the emerging tech lab at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
