Results tagged “Flip camera” from Life's a Pitch

Now I've got your attention.

One thing that has struck me about this year's Olympics is the quickness with which the NBC correspondents interview athletes after races/performances/matches. Good results and bad, the large majority of Olympic athletes agree to be interviewed. What good...sports they all are. (Poor Lolo Jones was even interviewed last night after not medaling in the hurdle. Props to her for having a great domain name, by way.) It's almost uncomfortable to watch an interview so soon after an event: must the runners still be panting? The swimmers dripping wet?  The answer is yes, I suppose. The Olympics are exciting, and NBC wants to capture that excitement in an interview the minute people get out of the pool. Wait until they dry off and decompress, and you've missed the moment.

Assuming TV is not an option (sigh), how can the media capture the moment of a performance just after it happens? Maybe a radio station can set up backstage, live-broadcast the concert, and then interview the artist live as soon as he or she walks off the stage. Perhaps the station ask the artist a quick question or two before he/she goes back out on stage for the second bow or encore: a breathless soundbyte with the audience applauding in the background. Similarly, why do all print interviews have to happen in the weeks/days leading up to a concert? To sell tickets, presumably, but does that necessarily make for the best journalism? Why not arrange an interview directly following the concert - backstage, even. How did the artist feel about the performance? What was the orchestra like? Did the woman in the front row play with her hair the whole concert?

Since video material is generally considered to be the most powerful, allow bloggers and their Flip cameras backstage. They can conduct an interview just before the artist goes on, post it on their blog, wait through the performance, and then post another interview when the artist comes off stage. Have computers in the lobby so audience members can watch the pre- and post concert interviews online, juxtaposed with the live concert they are about to/just experience(d). Additionally, use the same Flip camera and go out in the lobby to interview audience members; what does an audience member feel right before a concert is about to start vs. what the performing artist feels? After the concert?

None of these interviews need to be conducted by the media, by the way. An orchestra or presenter marketing department can record pre- and post concert interviews with artists for their websites as well; a great way to encourage concert-goers to visit their websites and, hopefully, see what other concerts they have to offer!

ArtsJournal's own Douglas McLennan on the past and future of, well, arts journalism, as told to Crosscut Seattle:

Where are we now in arts journalism? Newspapers have been dropping critics right and left.

Newspapers have not been the newspapers that I remember for quite a number of years now. The day of many competing papers and views in a city is gone. But the classic newspaper model was not built on a mass-media vehicle. It was a collection niches. People don't buy a newspaper because of its coverage of city hall. They buy it for the comics section or the crossword puzzle, etc. After they get through their favorite thing, they will read the city hall coverage. But the genius of this model is that none of the niche contents can support themselves, but if you aggregated them altogether, then you have enough readers and enough revenue to sell to advertisers.

In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the newspapers increasingly looked to TV as the mass media model. The mass market mentality is not niches at all. It is not excellence of product as the key to success. The mass market strategy is to find the place in the middle so that what you produce appeals to the most people. Editors I worked with at newspapers told me to write at an eighth grade reading level -- the mythical, average, mass-market consumer. As soon as you do that, and when you assume that every person ought to be able to read every story in a newspaper, then you are not talking to those who are interested in the niches. Then the classical music reviews in a given city are not intended for people who know a lot about classical music. They are pitched to those who don't know much. So you end up getting this content that isn't very good. It isn't very satisfying to the audience that ought to be your core audience, and you get this erosion of leadership of arts coverage. There are lots of exceptions. I try to post them every day in Artsjournal. But the majority of arts coverage is not very good.

Also, newspapers have never been able to cover community arts in an interesting way. Things like dance or jazz get really minimal coverage. However, now with the ease and the different ways that you can deliver information, we may discover a new model and improve the way that we cover culture. Right now we are in between the two models. The old one no longer works and the new one hasn't been established.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. I just spent a week in North Carolina with dance critics from around the nation. Like music, dance is hard to write about. You are trying to describe things that are not easy to describe. What would happen if we tried to describe an event in a new way? I broke them into three teams, and signed them up with blogger accounts, and gave them a Flip video camera, which has a convenient USB port with which to upload movies to You Tube. I asked them to use the video to compare dance styles, or show what you mean, or talk to critics, the audience, or the choreographer. So they had a day and a half to expand the palette on which they are working, to find something that is not so linear in form with which to describe this artistic experience.

I (heart) the Flip video camera, by the way. $149.99 of instant viral marketing potential. I love the idea of orchestras/presenters interviewing audiences before, during (intermission) and after concerts, and immediately posting reaction clips on their sites and YouTube. Also, if they agree to it, video-interviewing artists just as they're about to go on stage and just as they're coming off stage.