Monday, October 27, 2008

Reinventing the News:Steve Garfield

Last Wednesday, Steve Garfield came to speak to our Reinventing the News class on video blogging since our class is currently working on videos that we will ultimately upload to our blogs and on to youtube. He showed us various videos he has been able to upload from his cell phone and apple computer to broadcast online. In addition to being a citizen journalist he also teaches classes at Boston University on new media. Steve uses his main domain, stevegarfield.com, to link to all of his different blogs and other websites that his work is featured on. 

Being someone that is new to the world of blogging and video blogging I thought that Steve Garfield's presentation was very informative to me. I was unaware of the websites that you could upload videos to and that you could upload videos directly from your phone to a website. During class Steve uploaded a video of our class directly from his Nokia cell phone to Qik.com and we were able to immediately watch it on the website. Qik.com shows live streams of video as different people upload them. You can sort the videos by the most recent videos that were uploaded or by the users that are viewed most often. 

Steve Garfield also uploads his video to his blog which is something that our class will be learning to do sometime within the next week or so. He uploads videos that he has used in his reports for Rocketboom and any other obscure videos that he has taken. I think that the fact that he freely uploads all of his videos on to various websites is admirable and something I'm not sure I would be comfortable with. He is able to create a video on the spot and without editing it, be able to post it to a website and have it be viewable. From the short amount of video that I have shot for our projects in class, there is no way that at this point in my video blogging career I could be able to execute a video without any edits. 

Steve has even uploaded videos that have been broadcast on BBC during the presidential debates and CNN iReport during Hurricane Kyle when Steve was conveniently where the hurricane was taking place. He is very heavily involved in citizen journalism and it was very interesting and helpful to learn about some new ways that I can become more involved with online journalism. 

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