Newspaper/Web Opportunities

[Baltimore's Finest Fotog]

Scott Utterback made the move from shooting TV news to shooting video for a newspaper [The Courier-Journal]. Now, I see the NPPA is doing a feature on David Frank, a still photographer/editor from the New York Times, who has made the transition to shooting video as many others have.

This has me curious about whether this is creating more opportunities for TV shooters to move into another storytelling realm. If we're getting tired of television news, it seems, on the surface, to be a great opportunity to continue to shoot - with perhaps more time to do really good long format pieces for the web.

Plus, I've always felt like newspapers do the best job of enterprising quality stories...I mean think about it, how often do you find yourself shooting a "newspaper" story? Am I the only one who finds some really great TV story ideas from any of the various local papers?

What do you guys think?

[F4 Fan]

Couldn’t agree with you more. I’m just not sure that many newspapers are looking outside of their current staffers for television shooters. Most for now are trying to do the Platypus concept or moving a still shooter over to the TV side. Plus there is the added worry that the whole newspapers doing TV thing could be a phase. Once they realize that TV on a newspaper web sites, apparently generate far less viewers than do slide shows, they may pull the plug on the TV experiment.

But using a TV camera as an acquisition method – we will be seeing more of that from our print brethren.

Some of the big Internet companies – Yahoo for one – are getting heavy into producing television content. Quality as one might expect, is not as good as what most local television stations produce, but there does seem to be more and more opportunities on the web side of things on an almost daily basis.