Video vs. Text by Danielle Destrade

I chose http://baltimoresun.com as the source to critique rather than a national news outlet for a couple reasons. I have noticed The Sun's efforts in the realm of convergence on Twitter, as I am a recent follower of theirs and have admired their robust social media efforts. The Sun has been one of the many city newspapers struggling to keep its head above water, and they seem to be turning to multimedia and social media to keep up with the current. Instead of just tweeting links to their site, they interact with their readers, asking and answering questions.

Another way they are keeping up with the multimedia advances is by adding video components to their website, another reason I wanted to examine them. I was interested in seeing how The Baltimore Sun, a local paper, included video on their site, as opposed to The New York Times, a news outlet that covers world issues.

One of the videos I watched carried the headline, "Glen Burnie Park Elementary students to change state song Maryland My Maryland".
http://www.baltimoresun.com/video/?clipId=3545365&topVideoCatNo=72085&autoStart=true
The story was very interesting - elementary school students making a case to change the state song to one more positive, less biased, and in the words of a fourth grader, "not old-fashioned". A video story was the right way to go in this case. Hearing the cute 10 year old voices sing their song and seeing all of their young faces at a city council meeting tells the story in a more compelling way than a print story could without that visual element. I thought it was interesting that the video was not purely video - they also had still shots. The video was also not traditional broadcast journalism, with no reporter narration or standup. The subjects told their own story, which I really liked.

Still, it was apparent that the journalist shooting the video was a bit amateur. He favored zooming and panning shots, which were sometimes a bit jerky. Especially considering that he used still photography in addition to video, more of a sequence style instead of long clips with zooms and pans would have looked more professional and been more efficient.

Altogether, it seemed to me that while The Sun is doing a great job with the social media side of their convergence efforts, they need to challenge their video journalists to shoot better video. Right now, the video seems like a perfunctory addition to thebaltimoresun.com's reporting rather than a meaningful contribution.