Biz journalists who now shoot video

Adrienne LaFrance of the Nieman Journalism Lab writes Monday about The Wall Street Journal‘s new WorldStream, where journalists are shooting video with their phones of events they are covering and downloading them onto the paper’s website.

LaFrance writes, “While WorldStream aims to be a way for viewers to get a potpourri of fresh video content, it is first and foremost an internal newsroom tool that the Journal has opted to make public. Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor for the newspaper online, says he had long been looking for a way to, er, streamline the filing process for video.

“To do this, the Journal worked with Tout, which created an app especially for the paper so reporters can file video straight from their smartphones with little fuss. (Tout users can normally upload 15-second videos, but The Wall Street Journal’s proprietary Tout app gives reporters a luxurious 45 seconds.) Before showing up in the WorldStream, videos have to be cleared by an editor. In WorldStream’s nascence, Murray says videos that are filed but kept off the stream are the exception to the rule: Most of what they get is what you see. But there will be times when the Journal opts to keep a video private so as not to ‘tip off the competition,’ or in cases where further explanation is needed for proper contextualization.

“‘This is kind of like an internal work tool that’s being exposed to the public,’ Murray told me. ‘The work tool still functions even if we don’t expose it.’

“For the 400-plus reporters whom The Wall Street Journal has trained to shoot video, WorldStream conceivably makes the process much easier: They see someone or something interesting. They shoot, and they file. ‘They don’t have to worry about it after,’ Murray said. ‘It actually removed friction from the process… What this does is just give them an outlet.'”

Read more here.