engaging stories... ...told economically

Social media has turned news upside down and now inside out. I went to the start of the #OccupyLSE protest at St Pauls last week. I wanted to capture the flavour of the start of the event for myself.

There is a phenomenal stream of information about this global phenomenon on a variety of platforms. When there is so much information you need two things: filters and searches. And you have to build them yourself.

A quick look at Twitter revealed that the Guardian newspaper and the BBC were quite actively reporting. There were many posts with several hashtags leading to articles and blogs everywhere.  But flipping between sites is labour intensive; I wanted to aggregate as much as I could find into one stream.

Yahoo pipes is a sort of visual Unix tool for the Internet. The basics are not hard to learn;  fairly quickly you can take disparate sources, fiter and aggregate them into a single feed. On the left hand site you can see a 'Fetch Feed' box which I used to pull in hashtags with URLs like https://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23OccupyLSX - it and its siblings return a Twitter stream in XML which gets piped off to a Union box which joins them with the other feeds. By selecting the various boxes on the pipes site you can see what each component is producing. The picture below shows a collection of feeds and filters being aggregated into an output. There is no reason why some of those feeds should not be video as you will see.


I picked up several site feeds from places like the BBC. Since they were general news feeds I filtered for words likely to return in-context content. You can read the feed in real time on the Pipes site. But I wanted something a little more convenient. For ease of consumption I built a Paper.li publication which updates twice daily. In effect I have produced my own newsroom which automatically researches the subject whilst I am doing other things. The appearance of an iPhone and iPad Paper.Li app facilitates editorial roles while mobile too.

This is the live paper:

This can be seen and subscribed to at Paper.li.

Adapted from a presentation given at the RTS meeting on 28/11/2011


In part 1 I talked a little about the strategic reasons for engaging with the idea of mobile reporting from an iPhone. Here we get tactical and I shall explain how to put together the disparate pieces of technology required to be able to get reports from interview to publication in just fifteen minutes.

The iPhone is currently the device of choice for multimedia reporting. It can record CD quality audio and, although the video is not to broadcast specs for HD it is arguably better than what we had in the late 1970s.  It also has the fastest video rendering. Android and other smartphones are baying at Apple's heels, so it won't be long before there will be significant choice. In any case, if you have the first/only footage of something significant then 'good enough is good enough'.

The iPhone has a tiny lens, so no matter how good it is, geometry dictates that the amount of light reaching the sensor will be limited. The iPhone is not heavy. So it wobbles easily and that doesn't make it easy to acquire professional looking footage. The solution is the Owle Bubo, a sold billet of aluminium milled to take an iPhone and to put a larger accessory lens in front of it.

The iPhone mic is good for audio recordings but not good enough for filming as it faces sideways. The next step up is to use the mic that comes with an Owle Bubo. It plugs into the iPhone and faces forward. It's fine for simple interviews in quiet locations. But you really should attach a broadcast mic and get in close. For that there is a choice of  interface cables and many microphones. Some have XLR plugs and others have 3.5mm jacks. Some have a monitoring adapter too so you can leave it on while editing. I use VeriCorder's cable as it has some circuitry inside for better signal to noise performance.

Some mic's need Phantom Power. I found the B29L pre-amp manufactured by AKG to be small and not particularly expensive. The device has two inputs but you'll need converter cables from XLR at the mic down to a mini XLR at the other end. It also has a belt clip, useful since there are lots of accessories to manage.

Lighting is often required. The Rotolight interview kit comes with a variety of filters so that you can balance for various different lighting conditions. There are two light heads, one of which can be mounted on the Owle Bubo and the other can be handheld or mounted using any of the variety of brackets and stands available.

The above will give you a sound, still and video recording system which is compact and fairly unobtrusive. With practice you can get really quite reasonable results, certainly good enough for radio, TV and online news reports, and even feature films if you like.

If you have the CNN news app it allows you to shoot stills and video and upload them directly to their iReport site either as a guest or to your own account. It also allows you to upload a report which you've already edited too. There are several options for editing on the iPhone. iMovie and ReelDirector are two common ones but I prefer VeriCorder's 1stVideo app. It comes in two versions, a consumer version which will do pretty much everything you'll need and a Network version which is aimed at newsrooms. The latter can be deployed for specific channels and events. Simply downloading the free app gives the iPhone much of the functionality of a single camera satellite truck with edit.

From within the app you can import or acquire audio, stills and video which you can then edit into a package for streaming directly into a newsroom server system. The editing is simple but adequate with cuts, mixes and captioning. The bottom line is that if you can't tell a story then you won't be able to hide the fact with production quality bling.

After my RTS talk, I was able to shoot and edit a short piece in around fifteen minutes. I uploaded it to a server and everyone could see the piece on the web from whatever device they had available to them.



It could equally easily have been sent to a TV newsroom for inclusion in a broadcast. The ramifications of this technology are profound and perhaps welcome in the light of the BBC's recent agreement with BECTU over rates for freelance. In particular, the use of this technology will allow the speedy production and delivery of reports at very low cost.

The final piece of technology is to do with story itself. For this we turn to Aristotle again. His beginning, middle and end was not a prescription for a three act structure, but to illustrate the notion that a story must be complete to be beautiful. Beauty is the quality which makes a story compelling to its audience.

So these short reports must be complete to leave the viewer satisfied. The traditional reporters' questions are borrowed from Kipling:

I keep six honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew,
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

These are good questions, but they can be arranged as part of a quad of complete questions:

• What and where is it?
• How does it work?
• What does it mean?
• Why is it important?

What, where, when and who are subsets of what and where is it. How is from my second question and Why is part of How. This leaves two questions often unanswered.



The film above is a very simple example of an extremely short, but complete story. The production value is absolutely minimal but there is no doubt that the content makes a complete piece.

My examples are very early experiments in an area that I believe will become quite pervasive, driven by price and emerging technologies.

In the UK, equipment and advice can be sourced from Appleworld Distribution at Pinewood Studios. There is a lot of information on VeriCorder's site and the 1st Video app is available from iTunes.

If you are interested in learning more then please contact me by phone or email.