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March 18, 2008

Getting to grips with the new vids on the blog

By Press Gazette

In 20 years as a television reporter, I have never seen it as my job to hold the camera, rather to stare into it, checking my hair from time to time. But perhaps that is changing. Now that most of us carry mobile phones which can double as video cameras, will it become the TV reporter’s job to shoot as well as shout questions at passing politicians?

For the past month, I have been involved in an experiment which has involved shooting video, not for broadcast but for a blog. In January, after tiring of our constant nagging, the BBC allowed me and my colleague Darren Waters, who edits the technology pages on the BBC website, to start publishing Dot Life, a daily blog with our musings about gadgets, games, and other aspects of technology. It quickly attracted plenty of readers and responses – a few of them complimentary – but we decided our audience might like to see some of what we were talking about.

Our experiment started, appropriately enough, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I was covering this event with an excellent cameraman and editor, Peter Page, for a whole array of BBC television and radio outlets. But I also took with me two mobile phones with good video capture capabilities – the Nokia N95 and the LG Viewty, although the battery life on the LG phone was so poor that it was soon abandoned. Between compiling some beautifully shot and edited reports, I shot half a dozen very wobbly clips on my phone for inclusion on the blog.

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