"Photographers can work successfully with both still and video cameras"

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After delivering the opening keynote at Digital Trend Day , in Amsterdam last week, Randy Covington director of Ifra Newsplex (US) took time out to chat with Journalism.co.uk about digitising news and the effect of mass journalism on the trade.

Journalism.co.uk: In your presentation you said you did not think that there was a problem with journalists, particularly photographers, multi-tasking when out on a story?

Randy Covington: I'm opposed to one size fits all, so yes, journalists can multi-task but that does not mean that they can multi-task on every story nor does it mean that every journalist can do that. There are some journalists that can do that very well.

Specifically for photographers I sometimes encounter a resistance that I think is unfounded.

I see that there are some stories where a photographer can carry both a still and a video camera and work very successfully. It's up to each news organisation to decide priorities… I do think that a photographer in today's world can alternate both still and video.

I get the impression today from the speakers that there is a reluctance to do that and that, within their newsrooms, they want to have more specialised staff - to have a photographer and the multimedia person present to report?

It depends on your expectations. TV is hard and what we see is that those organisations that really want to create complicated video stories or wish to create TV programmes need specialists. However, if you are going to cover a story and post a video clip of the handicapped skier going down the slope I don't think that you need to send two people to do it.

A friend of mine who worked for Danish radio once said we used to send two reporters, a radio reporter and a print reporter, to interview the football coach and to ask him 'who is going to win this weekend?' and it was his observation that they got the same answer.

So there are many times when one person can do it and there are many other times when the story is complicated and you will want to send specialists.

I'm hesitant to say that it is one-size fits all and to come up with blanket rules. I am happy to say, though, that there are many cases when a photographer can shoot both.

Do you think that new technology and its ease of use will lead to fewer journalists on the ground?

It's just different today, actually overall I think there will be more journalists because of new media and bloggers.

The nature of competition is that some of our long-standing journalism institutions will not be around.

In the United States we have three or four television news operations per city, local television news, I'm not sure that the economics are going to support three or four local television news operations per small city.

However, an army of people is replacing them with camera phones and home video equipment. In my view there are more voices today than there were in the past even though traditional organisations are threatened.

The rules are different now, in the US there was a story two weeks ago about John McCain singing the Beach Boys' song

Babara Ann

but he was using the words

bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

. This became a major story, it was captured by a blogger and the video was posted on a site devoted to politics run by some young bloggers. It was picked up and used by some traditional news organisations all over the US.

So it seems there are more people covering stories. The issues though, and the challenge, is that they are following rules that are different from our generally accepted rules.

Do you think that there is something worrying about the fact that bloggers are picking up these points? Is something wrong with political journalism if it is becoming all about these moments and less about the issues?

Political journalism became less about the issues and more about horse races and bizarre things 10 or 15 years ago. The downturn of political journalism started well before the emergence of the internet. Quite frankly, I think the internet is the hope.

Let me give you a couple of examples. In 2004, we did a project, we being Newsplex, where we covered the race for the [US] presidency with camera phones. We compiled a mobile weblog - it has 1,300 images on it.

When we started the project I thought it was a gimmick, by the end of the project I had accepted, and accepted with a great deal of pride, that the journalism of the project was quite good. It was a different kind of journalism. We were doing stories like how the homeless viewed the race for the presidency.

When I looked at the major TV news programmes and the newspapers I saw a relatively short news agenda covering three, four, five stories. Some college students running around with camera phones covered 50 to 100 stories. It's a small example of how co-operation can expand horizons.

I will concede that journalism in general has become pre-occupied with celebrity and with the sort mondo bizarro strange events. I'm not offended by that given that journalism has always been not just what's important and interesting but what's happeningm, but from my perspective what is interesting is now shutting out what is important.

I think that process started before new media emerged. Now we have these conflicting cross currents where you have 'what's the strangest thing I could find' versus this proliferation of voices and emergence of new, talented, good writers with something to say.

If you ask me to generalise, while new media may pose new challenges, it more than anything else offers new hope.

If we went back to the early days of how we communicated information we were all really plugged but then society got complicated and that's when we the traditional media became the arbiters of 'this is a story' and 'this isn't a story'.

Now because of new media we are so linked with the wider world we are part of something very powerful. As with all things new there are abuses, the best practices are not always agreed upon and it's relatively easy to point to the problems.

I would point to the power of what is going on and the fact that people are learning things and seeing things that they never would have before and that, in general, society is better off for it even though it is easy to find the abusers and shake our heads and say 'wasn't it awful that blogger did this, and said that, and this picture shouldn't have been published, or this picture was altered'."