Insight Pioneers Cybercoverage

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 2, 2000 | by Paul M. Rodriguez

This summer, our editorial team set out to bring readers a new perspective on the two major political conventions through the prism of cyberspace with words and pictures.

It started with an ad. It was for one of those miniature cameras that can be mounted on a computer monitor to focus on a sender seated at the computer and jabbering with a friend or colleague via the Internet. What an idea! Could we strap those gizmos onto our reporters' laptop computers or mount them at our news booths during the national political conventions to broadcast what goes on behind the scenes?

And so began what we called "The Project" -- an editorially driven effort to harness new technology. About a week before the GOP convention in July, Insight contacted Apple Computer Corp. and pitched the idea. Would it be possible to transmit live coverage provided by our print reporters over the World Wide Web? Apple said yes, and led us to its QuickTime TV division in New York and to Uptime Computer Services, an Apple specialist in Northern Virginia. That was the easy part. The rest was an engineering adventure that, miraculously, was overcome by working 20-hour days.

Simply put, Insight set out to bring readers (and viewers online) a different perspective of the major political conventions. The editorial concept was to show exactly what reporters see and hear, go where they go and let viewers experience the processes through which political news is made -- all this in a straightforward but newsy format, live and with open microphones.

From that acorn of an idea grew a concept that, while not fully ready for prime time (or at least technically worthwhile for the average Joe or Jill until high-speed broadband technology is wired nationwide), quickly produced a new form of newsgathering and reporting. It also put to rest the idea that you can't teach old dogs (read: old news dogs) new tricks.

Just as the telegraph, radio and television transformed the news business, the Internet is poised to do the same. Seeing this, Insight showed it is possible to hook up the entire world to live-stream reports by traditional print journalists. In the course of this we also learned something about our role: Professional newsmen and their editors are not likely to be run out of business by the Internet, where facts and the truth behind them quickly can be jumbled into nonsense unless put clearly into context by honest reporters and wary editorial management.

Mixing traditional print journalism with the speed of electronics is nothing new, but having traditional print newsmen actually doing Internet Webcasting live with mobile cameras and computers capable of transmitting directly to the Web certainly is. In fact, Insight is the first and only traditional print outlet to meld broadcast, radio, print, still photography and Web publishing into a single live medium of constant news.

Essentially what The Project created was a new form of journalism in which a professional newsman can serve as an anchorman, reporter, producer, photographer and broadcaster while simultaneously being responsible for writing copy for print to post on the Internet -- all from a remote location. Sooner rather than later print media will expand fully to the Internet and, hopefully, careful and responsible professionalism will become more important in the wireless community.

Maybe that's why Insight was so heavily covered by the print and broadcast media while at the two conventions. We tried something new and it worked. Sure, the showmanship of having our reporters look like robo-journalists didn't hurt. The camera equipment from Xybernaut Corp. originally was developed for the military and only now is being marketed to corporate America. Wearing a portable personal computer with 8 gigabytes of memory and a battery belt linked to a camera and microphone makes the wearer a virtual walking studio. It also looks cool (see sidebar, p. 19).

Uptime's technicians were able to livestream Insight's signal from the Xybernaut equipment directly into Apple computers and then uplink the data feeds directly to QuickTime TV for viewing on the Internet. Apparently the marriage of the two computer platforms hadn't been done before. Or at least, we're told, never for live Webcasting on the fly as our team did at the Republican convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic gathering in Los Angeles. Using Apple computers linked to the Web with the computer giant's new and nifty AirPort technology gave Insight reporters unique abilities to transmit live reports from hundreds of feet away from the main Apple-based computer systems even from the floors of the conventions. They walked around, literally, as though on a cell phone simply by linking to Apple's amazing wireless AirPort technology. It was a first.

But the object of The Project never was to grab press attention. As we continue to plan coverage through the elections the objective remains what it was from the beginning -- to get hard news to readers that isn't covered by other media. Insight will continue to take subscribers behind the scenes to see how the news is put together and how politics works away from the klieg lights, scripts and coiffed newsreaders and spinmeisters. As the objective is to provide insight on the news, the technology is just another tool to expand coverage by enterprising print newsmen who know their craft.