While the visual dominates over text in the digital platforms, the printed news have to adapt to these preferences and achieve visual attractiveness in their pages, making a more diversified use of their photo and video tools.
With the existence of smartphones and tablets that have high quality phototographic and video cameras, the opportunities to take advantage of the graphic capture of news events have enriched the coverage of the printed journals, which are no longer only in the hands of the traditional photographers but also in those of our own reporters.
This is the new lifestyle that is experienced within the challenging processes to fusion the multimedia that assist in giving extra dimensions to graphic coverage, which increasingly have a predominant role in news information.
In the current stage of hybridization of the printed and digital media, the pillar of photography is within the most impacted ones by all that technological innovations that fertilize the resource pool that’s required today to meet the demands of readers and users.
Since the iPhones, tablets and other new era devices are now true high quality cameras with wider resolutions than before, multimedia reporters have had to learn how to use said devices for photos and videos, and to manage those applications that allow them to immediately upload to the internet the product of their graphic work.
Professional photographers also learn to manage themselves in two disjunctives: in capturing the most striking moments for the cover of certain events, and in not losing focus of precision and high-quality by time related pressures.
Here also comes into play the quality versus quantity. It’s not as important to trigger the video-taker button on the iPhones or the tablets to reach an interesting sequence of graphical frames, than knowing how to capture a single moment in which the factors of proximity, lighting or framing, contribute to offer the greatest amount of information that might contain a wisely taken stand-alone photograph.
The learning of the techniques of filming and photography for the two platforms is considered as an imperative these days. In some cases, some printed journals have taken the decision to suppress or diminish their photography staff to better bet on the work of the multimedia reporters.
This is what happened in 2013 to the Chicago Sun-Times, which dismissed all of its photographers and avowed responsibility over their graphic coverage to the multimedia reporters or to some free-lance photographers who were hired for special activities.
The Guardian, from England, also endowed iPhones to numerous journalists whom they trained in their use for videos and photos, but without so radically dispensing with professional photographers.
In some cases, these changes of experimentation and mistakes are the meal of every day for the integrated newsrooms that strives to be up to the demands and innovations that brings this dynamic digital era to the world of social communications.
Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez
Director's Thoughts 