Apple eNews - Breaking New Journalistic Ground



by Nancy Eaton On December 23, 2000 (on the eve of the Serbian parliamentary elections), WashingtonPost.com videographer Travis Fox set out to document life in Yugoslavia—just two months after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. Equipped with a digital video camera, a PowerBook G3, and a translator, Fox captured a powerful set of stories about a retired widow forced to sell heirlooms on the street; a family of refugees who fled Kosovo after NATO’s victory; a Serbian rock group formerly banned from the state media; and two leaders of a resistance youth organization who played a role in bringing down Milosevic. Trumpeter Marko Petronijevic’s band was banned from the state media during the Milosevic era. Just two months later, in February, 2001, Fox’s feature, The New Yugoslavia, won several awards from the White House News Photographers Association (WHNPA), marking the first time the WHNPA had recognized a web-based news publication. “We were flattered,” says Tom Kennedy, Managing Editor, Multimedia, for WashingtonPost.com. “Everybody had worked so hard.”		Using a digital video camera, his PowerBook, and Final Cut Pro, Travis Fox created a series of award-winning features stories on the scene in Yugoslavia. You can see them all at washingtonpost.com. Complementing the Newspaper Although WashingtonPost.com operates independently from the paper edition of the Washington Post, the two work closely together on both news and feature stories. But there’s an important difference in the graphical content: Because WashingtonPost.com is an online publication, the staff can develop stories in greater pictorial depth than the newspaper, where space is at a premium. And they can develop stories using a wide range of media—from a series of still photographs to complete multimedia productions, involving sound, video, and interactivity. Kennedy and his staff of 20 photographers, editors, writers, and producers create still images, QuickTime videos and QuickTime VR panoramas for nearly all parts of WashingtonPost.com, showcasing their multimedia and photography work in a section called Camera Works. While on assignment, videographers transfer video from their digital cameras to their PowerBook computers using FireWire connections. Because they have Final Cut Pro loaded on their PowerBooks, the computers become portable digital editing studios they can use wherever they go, whether in an office, on an airplane—or even in a hotel room in Belgrade.