Does the future of photojournalism involve stopping HD video in its tracks to grab still images?  "A small but passionate group of photographers are convinced it is," according to a report in Photo District News.

The point is that while high-definition camcorders don't compete for detail with the latest digital SLRs, they do produce stills good enough to run across several newspaper columns, or so the article says. And if a "newspaper" photojournalist is shooting video, it's that much easier to put a clip -- not just a snap -- on the paper's website. Not a huge innovation... but the article will make interesting summer reading along with a bunch of items I've downloaded or grabbed with my just-installed Firefox scrapbook plug-in...

• The spring Nieman Reports' 27-page section on Newspapers' Survival... 
• A recent American Journalism Review piece on innovation with a catchy Darwinian title, Adapt or Die...
• The Washington Post's history of its own online evolution, Web Site Starts from Memo, Gains Millions of Readers, with accompanying items, As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever ChangedWeb Users Open the Gates. (That last one is by blogging J-prof Jay Rosen.)

(Heh. That Post ...Millions of Readers story has had a small error corrected,  which could have been done with less subtlety by extending the headline to read  ...and 13 Years Later Goofs on Reference to Its Own Start-Up Date. I hope it was a Post editor who caught the typo, even if it made its way into print first.  Good job, anyway. Maybe Web journalism should adopt the motto "It's never too late to set things straight.")

For more on that theme, two more items:

• Is the role of editors more or less important in the digital age? (I must have been at the pub when John Burke of Editors Weblog published that one way back on St. Patrick's Day.)
• And, finally, another section of that spring Nieman Report: The Job of the Frontline Editor.

12:37:49 PM  #