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The Moving Image 4.2 (2004) 22-37


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News That Moves

Accessioning Video for Newspaper Archives

Victoria McCargar



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One of the most intriguing topics in the paneled offices of news media executives these days is the phenomenon known generally as convergence, which describes the recent arrival in newsrooms of various nontraditional methods of delivering the news. Publishers, editors, and news directors—and their counterparts in the academy—are still in the early stages of understanding what it means to publish simultaneously in print and on the World Wide Web, to exchange stories and video with a sister broadcast outlet, and to equip practitioners to produce "content" (as journalism is known in this milieu) in written and visual form, for paper and for pixels, for driveway delivery and the eleven o'clock news.

Media convergence is still in its infancy, and it remains to be seen whether it will translate into the revenue stream that shareholders anticipate.1 One thing is certain, [End Page 23] however: journalists are starting to produce a growing body of work in a nontraditional medium. Indeed, such a strong cachet is developing around shooting video that an increasing number of print reporters and still photographers are asking to carry high-quality video cameras with them when they go out on assignment, and managers are budgeting accordingly.2 And there is the companion expectation on the part of these creators that their material will somehow be saved alongside traditional content in their organization's archives.


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Full-frame latimes.com Web site containing inset of video ("After the War in Iraq"). Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times.

Newspapers have done a fine job of keeping text records going back decades and a pretty good job of keeping photographs in some retrievable form.3 Moving images shot to supplement coverage on the paper's Web site or to feed a TV affiliate are an alien genre for newspapers, where the basic characteristics challenge their archival practice on many fronts: the structure of the bibliographic record, indexing and storage schemes, the issues of keeping visual material in what is otherwise a text-centric environment. [End Page 24]

Worth Accessioning

While there is still a great deal of uncertainty about how to do it,4 there is a growing awareness among newspaper archivists that staff-produced video is worth accessioning for several fundamental reasons.

It is potentially a record of history in the making. It is an old journalism school maxim that reporters write the first draft of history. The justifications for moving images as research material for historians are well documented: (1) representation of the historic event itself; (2) contextual evidence for social and cultural history; (3) so-called actuality footage as historic document; (4) history of the moving image as an industry, art form, or cultural artifact.5 As a research tool, video is a fresh layer of complication in the fundamental conundrum for news archives: how to determine, out of the hundreds of incoming image files each day, what may someday turn out to be historic.

"Converged" coverage is essentially a new form of journalism. This reflects the fourth item above. The jack-of-all-trades, nonspecialist "video journalist" model that was pioneered in 1980 by the start-up Cable News Network6 is in the process of morphing into an even fuller-featured entity, the reporter or photographer who has equal facility with keyboard, still/video cameras, and microphone, and produces material for a twenty-four-hour, seven-day news cycle for print, Web, and broadcast. If this material is not archived as it is created, it will likely leave a gap in the evolutionary record along the lines of silent films, early television, and the now famously vanished original Yahoo sites on the Web. Observing the profound effect of new media on archives, Wallot pointed out ten years ago that moving images and sound

should not be studied in isolation. They form part of the new information record of the 20th Century, which will have an impact on all...

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