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In era of gadgets, old ways are still best

In era of gadgets, old ways are still best
People’s Daily Online, China
The simpler, the better.

In preparing to cover this year’s two-week legislative meeting, the newspaper I work for asked Wang Wenlan, a veteran photographer, to give writers a crash course on how to snap pictures for those occasions when our photographers are not immediately available.

“All you need is a foolproof camera, which allows you to do your work conveniently, without distracting or offending the subject,” Wang said.

The simple solution offered by the award-winning vice-chairman of the China Photographers Association echoed in my mind, as I believe the same simplicity could be applied to journalism in the digital era, when the profession has been complicated and journalists are sometimes bewildered by new must-have gadgets.

I am referring to the all of the high-tech “weaponry” available – the Internet surfing PDAs, digital recorders and video cameras that some of the people covering the session are carrying.

A humble pen and notepad, plus some curiosity and observant eyes and ears are all that reporters really need to do their job.

I have covered the annual legislative sessions for seven years in a row. In 2001, I went to the conference carrying nothing more than a notebook, a ball-point pen and a tape recorder. This year, my only change was to switch to a digital audio recorder.

While the recorder has helped reduce the odds of misquoting someone, I find relying on it for interviews leads not only to time-consuming transcribing afterwards, but also makes some speakers shy or more careful.

The popularity of the Internet increased in China, offering reporters a new tool to use when looking for clues and doing research. But I found an obsession with the Web could lead to a very dull experience for reporters.

While the Internet speeds up the flow of information, some go to extremes. At a press conference on agriculture last week, a few reporters walked out midway through because on-the-spot stenographers were helping designated websites broadcast the meeting online, offering full texts of the questions and answers in “real-time”.

Even if one is toiling for new media, the traditional approach to journalism is still essential when it comes to telling a story.

For example, this year our newspaper for the first time invited senior lawmakers and policy advisors to our website for online chat sessions with Internet users.

Even with digital recordings, video streaming being the “infrastructure”, I find that good moderators will employ those time-tested journalism skills – asking questions and stimulating the guests to respond.

Our guest last Tuesday was lawmaker Zhou Qiang, who is also governor of Hunan province, who came to our chat room and talked to netizens about topics ranging from snowstorm relief to investment. I did not miss the points like “How has your law education influenced your career as one of the youngest provincial chiefs in China at 47?”

Perhaps what Wang Wenlan really wanted to convey was this: For reporters, it is not the tool that matters so much as the way it is used.

Source: China Daily

Add comment March 17th, 2008

Canon Digital Ixus 900 Ti

Canon Digital Ixus 900 Ti
PC Authority, Australia

The “Ti” in 900 Ti means this Ixus boasts a titanium shell and, despite its elegant looks, it feels almost bulletproof. It’s a regular Canon at heart, though, so if you’ve used a Digital Ixus before you’ll instantly be at home. Newcomers may find it takes a few outings for the controls to become second nature, but once you’ve acclimatised to the system it’s consistent and responsive.

On automatic settings, the 900 Ti produced sharp, well-exposed images across all of our tests. In our outdoor test, it produced a very appealing shot, with balanced lighting and the sort of crisp detail you’d expect with a 10-megapixel CCD. At extreme close-up in Photoshop, we saw some noise and smudgy colouring in areas of low contrast, but don’t be alarmed by this: the high resolution means that even if you blow your prints up to A3, such flaws should be imperceptible from normal viewing distances.

The camera’s macro mode achieved a focal distance of around 5cm – not exceptional, but fine for most uses. Colours were perhaps a little less vibrant than those produced by some other cameras, but more accurately represented the actual lighting conditions.

Our twilight test revealed an excellent dynamic range: although dark areas were predictably underexposed, the camera still captured a remarkable amount of detail, which we were easily able to recover in Photoshop. There’s no anti-shake mode as such, but the camera’s ISO 3200 setting allowed us to take relatively sharp low-light shots without a tripod. Movies were acceptably clear and smooth at 640 x 480 and, while there’s the first 1024 x 768 mode we’ve seen, it cuts the frame rate to a jerky 15fps.

If the Ixus 900 Ti has a drawback, it’s the 3x optical zoom, which is really the bare minimum for a modern compact digital camera. The 10-megapixel output gives you plenty of scope to work around this by cropping your pictures before printing them, but it would have been nice not to have to.

Apart from this, the 900 Ti does more or less everything right. It’s small yet tough, so you can carry it everywhere with you, and it uses standard SD cards and a standard mini-USB cable for total convenience. If you want a longer zoom, you might find the Sony DSC-T100 more approachable, but if you value versatility and portability the Ixus 900 Ti is a winner.

Add comment March 17th, 2008