You Really, Truly, Have to “Be There”: Video Journalism as a Social and Material Construction

Abstract

News organizations are turning increasingly to video journalism as survival strategy in the era of convergence. Video journalism, the process by which one person shoots, writes, and edits video stories, represents both a socially and materially constructed form of news and adds a new dimension to daily work practices. This qualitative project examines the daily work practices of video journalists in a variety of organizational settings, including newspapers and television stations. This project found that the material requirements of video journalism have the potential to shift control of some aspects of news narrative away from journalists and toward their sources.