Drills and Digital Video

Tuesday February 8th, 2011

Pittsburgh-based photographer Scott Goldsmith was hard at work last summer on an in-depth story for National Geographic, which has just been released.

The piece is a mix of text, still images, and video, and all the content aligns to give a very comprehensive picture of a very complicated issue: hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, particularly underneath Pennsylvania. This is a major event for Pennsylvania’s economy, and for its natural environment. Detractors have pointed to the damage done to the environment, and, potentially, human health. Supporters argue that the jobs created by the presence of the gas companies outweigh the risks.

Not only has Scott illustrated the story with photos, he has also worked on video interviews of people from all sides of the debate. The videos, which you can watch online, are well worth viewing; not only do they make for a more immersive experience, they represent a variety of very human stories and perspectives.

The Marcellus Shale issue is extremely complex, and this is not the place for a sustained examination. This is the place, however, to step back and look at the way this story was presented, and why. The combination of text with video is fairly common, though here it has been executed in a very closely integrated way. We can read the narrative, which has all the rigor of standard print journalism, and then turn over to the video to see the very same people we read about. This is something that the internet lends itself to, though we haven’t seen it executed systematically quite yet.

Because of a new little device called the iPad, however, this may be about to change. Just a few days ago Rupert Murdoch declared: “New times demand new journalism. The iPad demands that we completely re-imagine our craft.” With those words, Murdoch launched his new “newspaper,” The Daily, designed specifically for iPad.

Reviews of The Daily have been mixed so far. Blogger Wade Roush wrote a thoughtful analysis:

While the actual reporting in The Daily isn’t as deep or as level-headed as what you might find in the New York Times, I find that the overall package, especially for the lead stories, is far more informative. That’s because I’m one of those people who Murdoch described at the launch event: educated and informed, but unlikely ever to pick up a print newspaper or watch a TV news show… For me, The Daily’s offerings could help fill this gap, by offering a genuinely multimedia experience on the platform I’m already using for most of my information-gathering.

For this reason, Roush sees potential in The Daily, but also notes that the quality of reporting is an issue. “The writing feels a little too bloggy,” he notes, “the editing rushed.” And though The Daily is designed to offer a “rich” experience with mixed media, this, as the New York Times Bits Blog pointed out, can make for extremely long download times—blogger Nick Bilton described driving to the newsstand and buying a physical copy of Wired faster than the magazine’s iPad version could download.

And in spite of the “richer” experience, Roush noticed, there’s not a lot of integration with the rest of the internet, one of the features that makes Wikipedia both extremely useful and a total timesuck. The Daily, he reports, has only a few hyperlinks: “and forget rich Web-style hyperlinking from within the text itself—in that respect, at least, The Daily is like an old-fashioned magazine.”

-Asad