The Voice of San Diego is similar to most news organizations in that it tries to utilizes words, pictures, and videos on its Web Site.
What’s different from VOSD and other organizations, is that they rely almost entirely on one man.
After scouring the Web site, it seemed almost every photo byline belonged to Sam Hodgson. Whether it be a standard still shot of a person to accompany a story or an action photo, it always seemed to have Hodgson’s name on it.
He also manages Credentialed, a photo blog that features Photo of the Day as well as “the best photos that were left on the cutting room floor.” Hodgson tries to add a little background information for each story and tries to generate reader feedback by asking for captions and comments, to mild success.
It’s a cool, little feature that gives some personality to Hodgson, which doesn’t always happen for photographers. Photographers often hang in the background and rarely get much attention from readers. But giving him a chance to explain his methodology and decision making for why he took certain pictures gives readers some additional insight.
Unfortunately it seems that Hodgson mostly focuses in on still photography and not video. There really doesn’t appear to be much in the video department for Voice of San Diego at this time.
There is the occasional user submitted video but for the most part VOSD does not post many videos. It’s an issue that doesn’t have an easy solution either.
One of the first issues at hand has to be either hiring journalists trained in taking video or training current employees how to shoot video. Readers and consumers want to look at photos and videos and niche like publications such as VOSD are not going to flourish without those ingredients.
While it might be hard to convince journalists to take a video camera out with them into the community, it needs to be stressed that it’s imperative for the survival of the product.
For an organization such as VOSD, the goal has to become a one stop shop for everything San Diego related. And that simply is unable to happen until there is a sufficient amount of video on the Web site. Otherwise consumers can just go to the local CBS, NBC, or ABC Web sites for all of their video needs.
