bri1052-reporting

10:52 PM

Netcast Journalism
Kind of Like War Correspondence

Netcast reporter Marcy Swenson prepares a story in SOMAR's workroom - for tonight the Be-In reporters den.

words by Louis Brill
photos by Carla King

As the Digital Be-In unfolds, it's bombarded with all kinds of live performance entertainment, speeches, songs, dances and other informal, but highly inspirational moments. Amidst all this activity are journalists, photographers and TV cameras poking, prodding and partaking of each activity, savoring the best and assimilating it as documented history of the 9th Digital be-In. It is on-the-fly journalism at its best, looking for interesting things and transforming them from the spontaneity to streaming audio and video output.

"It's a new kind of journalism," says Carla King, editoral manager of the writers and photographers covering the event. "The closest thing I can think of to this kind of work is war correspondence - of course the ambience is positive - the direct opposite of that situation, but the rush to get the news out has about the same intensity."

Journalistic coverage emanates from the Bridge, which is the command center controlling both the outreach of Be-In and the output of web pages presenting its moment-by-moment cacophonous celebration. The command has many centers - each a different component of event-capture. In each corner: photo-journalist teams who file near-realtime stories, a computer center that massages the photo-journalism into web pages, live video streaming to the internet, and good old traditional film capture for later processing (digitizing) - to be featured in the future.

Content Director Kitty Wells - Uploading and Downloading

While this is the work area of the bridge, it is also a study in controlled chaos as computer jockeys chase down bits and bytes and wrestle them into their final page forms, TV cameras continuously move around as they cover each performance and speech. The TV director shouts commands, switching each camera, depending on its view, to become the 'dominant' camera portraying the event. The work flow seems to never end.

Once a production momentum gets going, an average story takes about 20 minutes from contact with the keyboard to its final net upload. For coverage of the Digital Be-In, journalists and photographers are paired in teams to mingle with the various activities and events documenting both actions and the spirit of each event.

The photographers are armed with digital cameras including Kodak DC-50s, Casios and Obsidians, each being a 'filmless' camera that record its pictures on a 5 MB data card. Once filed these cards are pulled out of the cameras and downloaded onto a computer. Here the digital images are massaged into their final form and merged with the story segments.

Journalists gather in a narrow room, quickly typing notes and impressions into their final stories. This is the beginning of the funnel as text and photo imagery pour down the funnel's throat, soon to be joined by video out takes, all pointed towards the Bridge and its computer center which outputted its data as web pages for the net, ultimately landing on computer screens around the world to those web surfers lucky enough to tune in.

In the end: about 60 stories were filed and almost 1000 photos taken, all data gist for the Internet mill and an impressive final record of the 9th Annual Digital Be-In, once again a showcase for cutting-edge and bleeding-edge technology, art, culture, music, and a forum for the gathering of the tribes.