#CourageON: Reporting for you, whichever way you watch your screen

1 week ago 19

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This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

And so one of our main endeavors now at Rappler, one of the quandaries that keeps us awake in the wee hours, is how best to tell you true stories of the world on your phone, where most of you interact with us, even as we hold on to the older formats that remain relevant and powerful

Hi! I am JC Gotinga, a senior producer and reporter here at Rappler. What that means is that I collaborate with the rest of the team in creating videos — reports, explainers, documentaries, skits, branded content — and regularly do my own reporting, too.

What do you imagine when we say, “reporting”? I am of the generation whose concept of a reporter is a person wearing a vest with many pockets (“chaleco” is what I call it), clutching a microphone, and perpetually tailed by a hulky cameraman.

That mic resembles a car gear stick, and that camera is the size of a portable stereo — what ‘90s kids would call a “boombox”.

It was the heyday of TV when I grew up. Television was the disrupter of the world order then. At the UP College of Mass Communication (I’m student no. 01-XXXXX), I, my classmates, and our professors debated over the ramifications of audiovisual blood and gore, what we understood as “sensationalism,” and the abbreviated way current events were narrated on the boob tube.

Nowadays, microphones are the size of matchboxes, and are clipped onto shirt collars. Everyone has a camera, and it fits in our pockets. There used to be a clear distinction among print reporters and radio reporters and TV reporters; social media now demands reporters of each medium to know how to shoot video and record audio and compose long-ish captions to contextualize photos uploaded by the dozens to their outlets’ online platforms, just minutes after they were taken.

Rappler came into being at the tail end of TV’s glory days. Many in our team, especially us in the Production unit, were “born and raised” in network TV news. Rappler was arguably the first news outlet to break away and embrace the “multimedia” concept, having neither terrestrial broadcast nor print to distribute our reporting — “content” in today’s parlance — except social media.

Vertical video is the latest disrupter to come along. Before TikTok and Instagram Reels, we reporters recorded video on our phones in landscape mode, i.e. in horizontal orientation. Because that was the norm established by TV. Shooting in vertical orientation was an abomination.

But the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. Everyone else who wasn’t a reporter used their phone cameras to shoot video in the most intuitive way — vertically, because that’s how most people hold their mobile phones. And so vertical video has become its own norm, its own medium.

As comms school taught us, “The medium is the message.” The medium, to an extent, transforms the message and the way the receiver perceives it.

A TikTok explainer viewed on a phone in your hand is a world away from the evening news viewed on a TV screen across your living room. The dynamics, the parameters, the experience are different. And yet both convey reportage of the same current events, analysis and commentary on the same issues, stories of the same world.

Think of how radio did not kill print, and TV did not kill radio, and the Internet did not kill TV. They have just come to coexist.

What this requires of us is agility. We need to thrive in all of these media. We have learned to hold up our phones to our own faces and report solo from wherever we are. And we know when to call up our videographers to help us with the more comprehensive pieces. And then, after all the scripting and shooting and video editing, here I am, writing you a good old article for your reading pleasure.

Here is our ask: We would immeasurably appreciate your help in keeping us agile amid all disruptions by becoming a Rappler+ member. Your support means we can keep abreast of technology, trends, ways of thinking, ways of delivering you news of the world.

So that, whether you prefer to read, listen to, or watch your news — in landscape or vertical — you’ll get only the best reporting every time you open Rappler.

Here are some of our best recent stories in video, including one by yours truly:

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