For my final field test for a course in my emerging media platforms class, I recorded the 70th Shinnecock Powwow in both 360 video and traditional video.

I was curious to see if I could create a 360 video, using a relatively inexpensive, standalone 360 camera–I used the 360Fly 4k camera–that would be as compelling as a video shot and edited in a more traditional way.

I have to admit that I went into the study with a bias, with my mind made up that it just wasn’t possible. The 360 video I had seen on the web did not utilize the storytelling techniques I had been taught were necessary to make a compelling video–they didn’t have a traditional beginning, middle and end; they didn’t have conflict and resolution; they didn’t elicit an emotional response.

So I created  and produced the two videos and posted them on my website and asked friends, fellow students and colleagues through social media to answer a few simple questions about the videos and whether they saw a future
for 360 video in news-gathering and reporting.

Both the experience of producing the videos and gathering the data from my colleagues changed my mind. I was able to see that the recent advances in technology would make producing 360 videos easier. I also realized that if used correctly–as a medium to stand beside, rather than replace, other storytelling techniques, 360 videos certainly have a place on news websites.

You can view my entire field study report by clicking the link below.

sutton_final-paper

I’ve seen so much change in the years I’ve been around, and been inspired by it, that it’s difficult for me to imaging the future sometimes without my head exploding.

I remember sitting at a desk in my bedroom when I was i
n my 20s with one of the first PCs being mass produced, an IBM clone, that by today’s standards couldn’t do much, but back then felt like pure and utter magic.

I was the only one who I knew who had a computer. I set the trend. I mostly played Dungeons and Dragons games on it. There wasn’t a lot else to do. There was no real internet yet. It had a modem, but unless you were calling Compuserve, there wasn’t much to offer.

But I used one at work and I was entranced from the first time I laid eyes on it. I had to have it.

Many years after that, I remember sitting on a swing with my ex, looking up places we had lived on the maps feature of the original, first version iPhone. There weren’t a lot of apps–the App Store hadn’t been invented yet, so there wasn’t much to do, but we nevertheless sat on that porch swing until the battery was dry. I was just as entranced as the day I saw my first PC.

They couldn’t do much at the time, but maybe I saw the promise of those new technologies and had a momentary glance into the future–what it could be once those two devices could progress and develop into what they have become today.

What I couldn’t imagine that day back in the late 1980s playing games on my PC with an orange monochrome screen was the threat that it represented to an industry I would one day be part of. I couldn’t imagine the shuttering of newspaper offices, the laying off of friends, the decreased quality if journalism overall as the industry tried to recover from the suckerpunches dealt by the promises of new platforms that ended up nearly killing it.

It’s been good then, for me to see hope, from the emerging media class, but also from the master’s program as a whole–Journalism Innovation–which has taught me that the death knell has quieted. There will always be threats, but journalism will continue, in one form or another. We’ve survived the worst of it, and with new technologies are reinventing the news.

What’s the future hold? Promise. Will VR be the next big thing? Probably, but there will be another big thing after that. And another. And another. And another one after that.

I don’t have the foresight to see what all those advancements will be. But I do know that whatever the technology, some simple truths and rules will prevail. Stories will be told. They’ll have a beginning, a middle and an end. They will contain truthiness and will withstand ethical scrutiny. And behind the stories will be people like me and the crew I work with, there because they have a simple passion for telling stories.
 

As often as I find myself feeling incredibly left behind by some new technology or other, I have to remind myself of the incredible strides my colleagues and I have made since I first became a journalist some 20 years ago.

We’ve embraced the digital distribution of the news, and luckily for me, I’ve always had a fascination with technology and was able to adapt (with a lot of bumps along the way) to most advances in the field.

Even so, my head spins with the frequency of new tech advances lately. It just seems that once you wrap your head around one thing, something totally new emerges to take its place or sit next to it.

So I feel better prepared after taking this class. I know that by the time it’s over, things will change once again, dramatically, but maybe I won’t have that moment of anxiety and denial and will be better able to embrace and explore new things.

Along those lines, it was exhilarating this past weekend to go to the Shinnecock Powwow with my new 360Fly camera and record some 360 video. I felt like a fresh, new, eager reporter again, with butterflies in my stomach and worrying about whether everything would go as planned.

The anxiety continued when I got home and looked at some of the footage. The quality wasn’t what I had hoped, but it was good enough. I trimmed a bunch of clips and joined them together using the Fly software, which doesn’t allow a lot of options. I would have liked to do more to “produce” the video, but maybe that’s kind of the point with 360–it shouldn’t look that produced.

And there there was utter frustration when I couldn’t get the video to upload to YouTube. The Fly software kept timing out. It’s a familiar frustration–one that I’ve felt every time some new software or technology doesn’t cooperate. And maybe that was a little exhilarating, too, one the video actually uploaded.

Overall, I liked shooting the 360 video, and I have to say, it feels pretty damned cool to have 360 video I produced up on the web. And it got a pretty god response in the newsroom, and I was flooded with suggestions about what we could use the camera for.

So I guess it’s part of my tool belt now. I’m the guy in the room with a 360 camera.

We have a drone at The Press (actually, it’s our second drone, I’m sworn to secrecy about the status of the first drone).

It’s significantly improved our coverage of certain stories where an
aerial shot can be used to help explain an issue or put it into perspective.

We’re not new to using aerial images, we used to hire a plane (i
nfrequently) in the past to take a photographer up to take certain shots, but that was usually an expensive endeavor, and they would get as many shots for as many possible stories as they could. Not only expensive, but it took a lot of pre-planning.

Now, we can get something at a moment’s notice if a story lends itself to it.

We’ve had fun videos of the annual polar bear plunge, dramatic footage of rebuilding a beach that had eroded and lots of shots of areas proposed for development.

At first, there was a real wow factor when we used the drone, but now it’s become a matter of course and, I think, an integral part of our journalism toolbox.

Depending on the regulations, and how they develop, I think you’ll see drone footage used more and more to help explain stories.

I’m curious to see if the addition of smaller 360-cameras like the 360-fly will add an ever greater dimension to the footage as the technology continues to improve. Maybe something to try soon.

So while perusing available sensors on Sparkfun.com, I found exactly what I hoped I would find, a dissolved oxygen sensor. No, really.

Dissolved Oxygen Kit

The quality of water in the bays on eastern Long Island is always a concern and something we write about quite often at The Press
. 

Basically, and I’m over-simplifying this because I’m not a scientist, nitrogen from yard fertilizers and septic systems run off into enclosed saltwater bays, overfeeding underwater plant life and causing it to grow. You’d think that was a good thing, but the plants (seagrasses, etc.) draw needed oxygen out of the water (dissolved oxygen, or DO). Fish and other marine life need that oxygen, too, so when the level of dissolved oxygen decreases, the marine life die off because they basically suffocate to death.

So as a news organization, we’re always reporting on “fish kills” and other environmental issues int he bays AFTER the fact. And we rely on various scientific and environmental organizations to describe the condition of the bays and the DO levels.

How cool would it be to have the dissolved oxygen kit sensor from Sparkfun to be able to get DO levels either before conditions got to a crisis stage, or, afterward to be able to get our own readings to help the reader understand what happened without relying on the scientific data.

Maybe we could even set up a few senors around town and have a live feed to our website, so that readers could track the DO levels over time. We could incorporate it into an interactive map, so readers could click around and see how different bays are doing.

I think that would be pretty proactive journalism.

So here’s a story from Newsday (a little advertorial, but that’s OK) about an island (and, of course, the 4,000-square-foot house on it) for sale just a little north of me: An island for sale in Southold at $2.495M, house included.

There are a lot of real estate stories on Long Island, especially out east where I am. It’s the primary industry and is interesting both to the real estate industry folks, the locals who support the industry and the folks like Bob Bierman who come out and ruin the summer for us locals.

A story like this would be perfect for a virtual reality piece, if it could be done quickly and fairly cheaply. There’s no telling how long the property will be on the market, so you don’t want to dump too many resources into it, but it could be up for grabs for a year or more, maybe even two. The $2.5 million price tag is actually pretty affordable for property out here, so it’s a bit of a bargain.

So imagine how cool it would be to start a VR experience at the bridge from the mainland onto this property, follow the driveway up to the house, tour the house, take a swim in the pool and then take a leisurely walk along the half-mile of beachfront and the woods surrounding the house. Make you want to pony up the $2.5 mil yet?

The article on Newsday has one crappy photo, and an aerial at that, that doesn’t even show the house.

Look, everyone on Long Island who doesn’t own a McMansion dreams of owning a home like this, or a larger $10 million to $30 million McMansion on the ocean or bay, so why not feed into that dream and let people take a walk through these kinds of properties, even if only digitally for a while.

I imagine that would get a lot of hits on the web and be a pretty cool feature. If you did one for a listing or two a week, you’d really have something there.

I have a friend who ran a car service up to a few years ago. It was nothing fancy. She invested in a Town Car, had business cards printed, put up flyers and took out a classified ad
in my paper. Strictly an independent thing. She ran people back and forth to the airport–a pretty lucrative business on Long Island, lot’s of people do it.

She undercut the bigger companies and some of the independents and did OK. In the end, like many ventures, it turned out to be unsustainable. I look back on it now and wonder how things would have turned out for her if Uber or a similar business had come along just a little bit sooner.

Locally, there’s been a huge controversy in both Southampton and East Hampton towns between Uber and the traditional hometown taxi companies, which it seems are fighting hard for the business they’ve been losing to the independents working for Uber. East Hampton officials last year outright banned Uber drivers in favor of the local companies and in Southampton this year, officials decided to require any driver for hire to purchase a $1,000 annual license.

Obviously, the local companies have used their influence with the town officials to legislate the matter. But I wonder if they’re missing the bigger picture. Rather than adapt to the technology making the Uber drivers successful–and a threat, the companies continue to charge exorbitant rates (some say as much as $100 for a ride home form the bar on a Saturday night in the summer), keep people waiting for as long as an hour after calling for a cab, and turning to the old boy’s network to try to legislate themselves out of a jam.

It seems like a classic Innovator’s Dilemma to me. Refuse to change until it’s too late, while a new technology (the mobile app that allows Uber to get a car to a client in minutes, prevent overcharging and eliminates the overhead of running a garage full of cabs) comes in and lets someone take over an industry.

Uber and Southampton Town reached a compromise  yesterday–lowering the license cost to $250 for drivers, at least for the summer. Uber moves forward, and the taxi companies will, eventually, eat their dust.