VeriCorder in Vancouver: mobile journalism at its finest
Brian Pellot and I sporting our new Canada sweatshirts on our trip in Vancouver!
For our capstone project, Brian Pellot and I are working with VeriCorder Technology Inc. The company was founded by Gary Symons, a Canadian journalist with more than 20 years of experience reporting and editing for newsrooms/organizations such as CBC, and has developed an application that allows you to record and edit audio on an iPhone, and easily add pictures to create a photo slideshow in minutes (or less). Then, you can send it through email or FTP to your newsroom/server in a matter of seconds. The goal? Breaking news faster by filing from the field.
We traveled to Vancouver to meet with the VeriCorder team and to test out the capabilities of the application. We filed stories for radio and web (you can check them out here) and figured out what we loved or what we would improve about the software. We worked with Ashley Rowe and Nick Wynja, two broadcast journalism students from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario.
We found lots of benefits to the software, as well as some functions we’d like to add, or additional components we thought could make the process better. But overall, it was definitely a new endeavor in the world of mobile journalism. I was able to shoot/record a story in the field, walk to the nearest Starbucks, edit it while in line and send it into the server via FTP before the barista finished making my drink… which is a big improvement over recording the story, driving back to the newsroom, uploading and editing. I do recognize that this isn’t the first chance journalists have had to do the same kind of thing (i.e. use your laptop!), but the iPhone is incredibly portable, and the system is pretty cost-effective. If you already have an iPhone, you’re only looking at $6 for the software, and $20 for the microphone. This makes it a viable option for a lot of independent journalists and bloggers who want to produce stories quickly on the go, but may not have the budget to afford expensive equipment. But it also works well for professional journalists in traditional newsrooms looking to increase their multimedia production or just speed up the process.
We also used the Owle Bubo, a piece of hardware that adds a macro lens & a wide angle lens to the iPhone camera as well as makes the iPhone easier to hold/stabilize and allows for screwing in a monopod or the like. We produced audio stories- both voicers and interview clips— and photo/audio slideshows.
We arrived back in the states this past weekend, and are already starting the next step of our project. We’ve already given VeriCorder our input on the application- now, we want to train other journalists on the software and see what they think, along with doing some quantitative research (production times, pricing, etc). I posted a tweet this afternoon to gauge some initial interest in the project, and already have tons of interested individuals who we’ll be working with one on one. We plan to show them how to use it, ask them general questions about its functionality, and in some cases use it out in the field to do stories and see how well things work.
As per quantitative research, we have a few different ideas (in fact, we gave a presentation detailing them this morning!)…the first of which is producing a radio story using the traditional Marantz, still camera, computer and editing software, and then producing the same story from start to finish using the VeriCorder app, and then comparing the time it took to produce each piece, the ease of production for each piece, and the quality of each piece. We hope to get started on that soon!
If you’re interested in learning more about the software, feel free to shoot me an email at erica.zucco@gmail.com, connect with me on Twitter, or visit the VeriCorder Web site at www.vericorder.com!
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Posted on: Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Posted in: BLOG ENTRIES, MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY
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[...] VeriCorder in Vancouver experience (read more here) really sparked my interest in the capabilities phones & other small, portable mobile devices [...]
[...] For Brian Pellot and I, the reporting might not be easier/faster, but the process just might. We’ll be covering a few election-related stories for KBIA, and we’ll be doing so on-the-go. We’re using our iPhones, an audio app and a simple FTP transfer process- meaning that recording a few bites, writing scripts, recording voicers, editing and transfer will all take about 15 minutes (or less…) and simply feeding back bites will take about 2 minutes once they’re recorded. If you recall, we first used the software in Vancouver at the 2010 Olympics. [...]