Steve Garfield is becoming a real media activist.
He tells a good story about a reporter who recently came to a podcaster meet-up.
Link: "What’s wrong with this picture?"
"….the reporter started taking pictures.
Nothing
unusual about that. People are taking pictures all the time, at blogger
meetings, podcast meetups and at videoblogging meetings where video is
taken too. So that’s pretty much the way life is these days. We all
take pictures of things and people that interest us and post them up to
flickr, where we can then share them and then post them on our blogs.So
as the reporter started to take a picture of the people at table, I
brought out my camera to get a picture of her taking a picture of us.
Pretty standard operating procedure for a flickr photo loving blogger
who is also into documenting the way media is made.
As I raised my camera, she shielded her face and said that she didn’t want her picture taken.
She was upset. She fled the room and hurried into the next room, out of sight."
There could be many scenarios as to why the reporter reacted in a stealthful way. We shouldn’t make generalizations about mainstream journalism based on this one incident. But it does show how blogging(text/audio/video) wakes people up to how reproters operate….picking and choosing their information.
Journalists are paid filters. Bloggers are usually unpaid practitioners. The difference between what you see on a blog and in the mainstream media keeps blurring. The playing field keeps flattening.
As a trained journalist as well as a professional photographer/videographer I might be able to add some insite into this person’s reaction…Some people simply hate being photographed. It sounds somewhat silly, but it’s completely true. There are people out there that have a REAL PROBLEM with that, I run into it every once in a while…I have even been threatened with violence, spit at, and even hit a few times because a certain person (in the background mind you) did NOT want their photo taken.
Just be glad she didn’t spit at you and then take a swing…
As a journalist, however, she shouldn’t act that way, totally unprofessional behavior. Maybe she has a phobia of bloggers…who knows.
The MSM is clueless and there seems to be no cure. I just did a post about the NY Times web producer who confesses on OJR that he cannot understand how to use a blog as a publishing platform. He’s an IT guy who got all tangled up in server and security problems and finally just gave up. A NY Times web producer!
Online newspapers don’t link to anybody, except maybe in a “For more information” type footnote tacked onto the end of the post, out of the flow of the editorial. They don’t allow comments except in discussion forums, so the users won’t contaminate their precious editorial junk.
MSM is dead, buddy boy. Totally dead.
I bought your book Videoblogging today at Barnes & Noble, offline.
Great book, I’m going to try to do screencast, for tutorials. Why no mention of YouTube?