Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2012/March
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Video/Audio??
First, if I've missed some archived discussion on this matter, someone please point me toward it. I've had something on my mind here for some time. I've lately wondered why we don't start trying to have "articles" that are 100% video or audio-only segments.....y'know, like you see on your local news. I can just readily see/hear, "Reporting for Wikinews, I'm John Doe........" I think this would work spledidly for OR interviews and the like. Audio and video are used here to, essentially augment a print piece, but I don't know of any "articles" that are just audio/video. There are the briefs....and that's great.....but again, that's just a regurgitation of a print piece that appeared a couple of days earlier. Thoughts? Admonishments? Bddpaux (talk) 16:36, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- There's been really massive discussion of this in the past few days, mostly (though not entirely) on the talk page of the just-published article. And it's continuing on from a distributed discussion of the subject that's been going on for... I'm going to guess a few weeks. Anyway, one place to start is Talk:News briefs:March 17, 2012.
- It's really the first of its kind we've every published, afaik, and as I say, we've been struggling to thrash out how to do it for quite some time. A key point is that our entire capacity to provide credibility in the output of a wiki —credibility being the key challenge of the entire institution of journalism in the modern age, as there's truly vast quantities of uncertain information available— lies in our ability to have an independent review and revision. The model we're trying to work the kinks out of, atm, is to have two-stage review, in which a script is presented, rigorously vetted and cleared by a reviewer, then the audio/video product is produced from the script, and a reviewer does a sanity check to make sure nothing went unacceptably awry in production, and publishes. We hope that, with practice, news briefs will allow the script-checking to be relatively tractable because the script is based on material already published on Wikinews; that didn't work nearly as smoothly this time as one might hope, so we're thinking we should try to prep-and-vet summaries of particular stories well in advance. --Pi zero (talk) 16:55, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- I get it and that brief was/is awesome! But, again, it's a well put together "news magazine"-style regurgitation of already-published stories/articles. Honestly,though, I never really considered the whole editorial oversight concept. In a perfect world, the reporter and reviewer could quickly bounce edited versions of the article's video back and forth between one another. I dunno.....it's all a work in progress, right? Bddpaux (talk) 22:54, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- It's the editorial oversight thing that makes live reports really hard. Hmmm. We have done it before, but I think only once... The issue is, if someone gets an on-scene video report done, does home, and the reviewer has a problem with it... then what? If we can deal with that, we can do some really sweet stuff. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 22:58, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- I get it and that brief was/is awesome! But, again, it's a well put together "news magazine"-style regurgitation of already-published stories/articles. Honestly,though, I never really considered the whole editorial oversight concept. In a perfect world, the reporter and reviewer could quickly bounce edited versions of the article's video back and forth between one another. I dunno.....it's all a work in progress, right? Bddpaux (talk) 22:54, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- Seems there'd be a spectrum of trade-offs between editorial control and authorial trustworthiness. The less plastic the medium, the less delicate the possible editorial control and therefore the more trusted should be the party producing the material. For a wiki, in the general case you want delicate editorial control because some producers are completely untrusted. In case of a less plastic medium like an audio/video report, a script affords some up-front delicate control, and then you want someone somewhat trusted to produce the a/v, who will pretty much stick to the script. The more flexibility the script affords, the less editorial control it affords over the final product, and therefore the more trusted the producer should be. At the far end of that spectrum would be live feeds of newsworthy events; for those, you want a trustworthy producer, as about the only feasible editorial control is the (common in the US, iirc) practice of putting the feed on a two-second delay, with a censor riding a kill switch to cut the feed in case of a wardrobe malfunction. :-) --Pi zero (talk) 23:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- In the MSM, when they have a video with questionable content that can't be edited out (due to relavence) and can't be reshot (one time event), they just add in a disclaimer. Sometimes it's a text overlay, sometimes it's a video addendum/preface to the piece. I'd suggest we deal with such situations in a similar fashion, when possible.
- Seems there'd be a spectrum of trade-offs between editorial control and authorial trustworthiness. The less plastic the medium, the less delicate the possible editorial control and therefore the more trusted should be the party producing the material. For a wiki, in the general case you want delicate editorial control because some producers are completely untrusted. In case of a less plastic medium like an audio/video report, a script affords some up-front delicate control, and then you want someone somewhat trusted to produce the a/v, who will pretty much stick to the script. The more flexibility the script affords, the less editorial control it affords over the final product, and therefore the more trusted the producer should be. At the far end of that spectrum would be live feeds of newsworthy events; for those, you want a trustworthy producer, as about the only feasible editorial control is the (common in the US, iirc) practice of putting the feed on a two-second delay, with a censor riding a kill switch to cut the feed in case of a wardrobe malfunction. :-) --Pi zero (talk) 23:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
- When the (hopefully) rare situation arises where the whole content of the video report is called into question, then we can decide whether or not it is publishable on a case by case basis, just like we do with the current peer review system. Gopher65talk 00:01, 19 March 2012 (UTC)