For too long, perhaps, we’ve thought about news as a channel … not about the actual content. Hence words like newspaper, TV news and radio news. Maybe this is an outgrowth of increasingly mediated information … don’t know, that’s a conversation for another day.

As I said last week at a panel on citizen journalism, a "newspaper" has a key core competency: finding, researching and reporting on issues of import to their audience. Newspapers, I said, need to think beyond the printed product and recognize that creating content, not paper, is what they do.* And do very well, in the main, thank you very much.

Enter the Washington Post, aware of both this core competency and an increasingly multi-media world:

Shortly after Steve Coll became managing editor of the Washington Post
in 1998, he wrote a memo about the coming marriage of print and
Internet journalism. He said that future reporters would be outfitted
with video cameras, which could be attached to their hats, almost like
the little press cards stuck in fedoras back in the old days.

In the newsroom, reporters laughed and called the futuristic reporting device “hatcam.”

No one’s laughing now: The Post is shipping digital video cameras to its bureaus. Post reporters are expected to report in multimedia.

“About
a quarter of the foreign bureaus have digital video cameras,” says
foreign editor Keith Richburg. “Our goal would be to get them out to
them all.”

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