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.

Comments

[Andy]

This kind of anchor DIY vibe didn't start with Couric, and I find it very annoying. For a few years now, Anderson Cooper has had the habit of carrying a DV camera with him during his location trips and sometimes during interviews. It's mostly just distracting (especially since it's obvious that Anderson is travelling with at least one professional crew in tow and a coterie of producers and assistants).

Similarly, during the Los Angeles-area earthquake this year, Fox News Channel spent an inordinate amount of time showing streaming video of one of their crews driving to the scene when there was already an abundance of useful live video from affiliate helicopters. It's all just a technology expo, and it proves nothing.

[Kristan]

I think the fact that Katie Couric is shooting her own interviews is a superb way to show the public that she is capable of doing just about anything herself.

[Jeremy W.]

Honestly, who cares if the ratio aspect was incorrect. I mean, c'mon, are technical things like that so important that they trump the quality of the work?