Katie Couric: anchor, reporter ... shooter?!?

Got this interesting and somewhat technical email from my friend Tom Roche, who works for the big Crawford video works in Atlanta, edited the great "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" and has been reading my stuff since the Reagan Administration.

I think most of us can agree that Katie Couric just had the best week ever -- what with her nailed-it interview of Sarah Palin and her talk with Palin's running mate that most people saw via David Letterman's show. But did you know that when Katie goes to do these talks, she often picks up a camcorder herself and shoots content for the broadcast and CBSnews.com website? And did you know it sometimes goes less than swimmingly?

Tom Roche writes:

We read a lot about strife in smaller newsrooms where the correspondent in the 2008 workplace must learn to shoot and edit in addition to report. Now this new-think has reached the network level - perhaps. Unless it is all just for show.

In the attached screen grabs, here is Katie Couric on Monday's CBS Evening News, shooting her own interviews with Biden supporters that ran within her Sen Joe Biden profile. She is shooting with a small Sony consumer grade camera with a small CBS inventory sticker on its side.

All well and good perhaps, except for these wrinkles:

The CBS Evening News is now in 16x9 HD, but the Biden package ran in a 4x3 square - HD viewers saw graphic fill on the left and right (as in the screenshot at the top). Nothing too unusual there, but...

Katie shot her subjects with the camera set to 16x9 forcing the picture to be stretched tall when edited into the 4x3 package. Note the very stretched face of man #1, and the misshapen Omama circle in the poster poster behind subject #2.

And none of the interview subjects had name supers. I guess the "reporter/shooter" was too deep into multitasking to write them down.

Also worth noting was the editing of the package went to some effort to show Katie with camera and shotgun mic in hand, back and forth with the voxpop interviewees.

Of course this way we could all see which CBS cameraperson was responsible for the incorrect aspect ratio.