Kennedy talked to Terry L. Heaton of Thepomoblog about what it’s like at the forefront of successful print, television, and Internet convergence.

Kennedy said that his staff uses primarily Canon GL2's and Sony PD-150's and edits their video on Mac laptops, using Final Cut Pro (for field edits), Mac desktop units, or on PC desktop units using Adobe Premiere. The VJs’ backgrounds vary; some are former still photographers, writers, or editors, while others are self-taught VJs and editors.

WPNI distinguishes between breaking news and short form documentaries, akin to longer feature stories in a newspaper. The videos, Kennedy said, are meant to “provide story-telling driven by the subject’s natural action”, and many videos are shown in combination with factual text, providing a package for the viewer.

Kennedy says that WPNI’s fluidity in production, as opposed to the rigidity of editing and format in television news, allows his VJs to cater videos to individual subjects and achieve greater visual intimacy than traditional broadcast news can. He sees WPNI as lucky to be able to start from scratch to take risks where mainstream media, driven to perform to economic standards, cannot.

Travis Fox, a WPNI VJ won two National Press Photographers Association (NPAA) Television News awards last week. Fox’s wins, for short-form documentaries on Agent Orange and Romania, exemplify media convergence; essentially, he is a newspaper journalist winning a television award.

For the future, Kennedy is optimistic. In the next few years, he says, he plans to see a cable channel showing WPNI’s content in conjunction with the Internet.

“The Internet has leveled the playing field technologically between the individual practitioner and the mainstream media company,” said Kennedy. “That doesn't guarantee commercial viability or the requisite audience, particularly if one is using past standards for mass media consumption and the economics driven by that model. However, I'd submit that an alternative universe of media creation and consumption patterns may be in the process of being born now, and that will exist in the future as a parallel to the rigidly bounded universe of mass audience broadcasting.”

Source: Thepomoblog