Innovation in College Media

Update: Angela Grant, a multimedia producer at the San Antonio news organization that prints a paper called the San Antonio Express-News, disagrees with Owens' contention. Go over and see her case.

Via Journerdism, I found out my RSS feed for Howard Owens' excellent blog was broken, because I missed this post that student media folks should read: Video, not Flash for newspaper reporters.

The money quote:

Here’s the thing, building a good Flash story takes hours and hours (depending on the story and the content assets), and has probably less than a 20 percent chance of being a hit with the audience. Whereas a quick video can take very little time to edit, and stands about the same chance of being a hit with the audience.

Flash multimedia gets lots of attention because it's eye-candy and it has a certain mystique, like people who make Flash stories are some sort of new media savants or something. But it's a very complex program to operate. Even Mindy McAdams, who wrote the book, says as much.

Learning Flash is very time-consuming. I would not introduce it in an intro Web course of any kind. It's more likely to frustrate the students than to enlighten them.

For newsroom use, training all reporters on iMovie or some other cheap or free video editing program is a much better use of time and energy. Think about it. What's the hot site on the Internet? YouTube. Why? It's video. Flash provides the video platform, but that's all done behind the scenes.

On a side note, I was looking at Toufee (where do they get these names?), an online Flash movie authoring site, last night. I didn't really get to use it, but it may be something to consider as a "get-your-feet-wet" step into Flash creation.