By Ryan Broderick
The Flipcam died this week. Cisco, the company behind these horrid little video-goblins decided to pursue other ventures.
It’s kind of incredible they lasted this long, considering they were obsolete before they were even on the market. It’s a camera with the same fidelity as the camera on your phone, without the ability to do anything else other than take horrible, grainy digital video. They’re the 8-track of home recording.
And now—most hilariously of all—a pile of them is sitting in Dempster Hall’s equipment room, hopefully waiting to be incinerated.
I suppose that’s what you get for hopping on a bandwagon.
And that’s what the Flipcam represents really: the horribly misguided, painfully sad desperation of members of a journalism industry reaching for anything to keep themselves relevant.
Around Dempster you’ll hear a lot things like, “just shoot on the flip,” or “it’s viral video, it doesn’t have to be good,” usually coupled with completely idiotic buzzwords likes “hyperlocal” or “cell phone journalism” or “Patch.com.”
That’s nice and all, but it’s a myth.
What will hopefully die with the Flipcam is the idea that “hyperlocal” journalism can look like a monkey did it. It’s easy for Hofstra’s journalism program to say, “oh, if it’s done fast, it doesn’t have to look professional.” Meanwhile, better schools with better programs are learning how to do the same speed of coverage with dSLRs edited professionally on Final Cut Pro.
If The Chronicle can be an example of an organization moving slightly faster than The School of Communication, at least in terms of technology, then know we have switched to HD video segments on dSLR as of last semester. Now, swing on over to nyunews.com and feel like a complete failure. And if you think, even for a second, “well that’s NYU,” then I suppose you deserve your miserable little Flips.
In a post-internet-journalism world, where everyone can broadcast instantly but not everyone can broadcast instantly and professionally, it’s nice to know Hofstra’s missed the point again.
Take for example, the amount of snake oil salesmen that have come through the School of Communication in the last five years, claiming they have the answer to Hofstra Journalism’s relevancy problem. I guarantee that each one of those professors have raved about the power of the Flip. We won’t name names, but thankfully they’re no longer employed at Hofstra.
It might seem like a huge overreaction to align the errors of an entire department with the ill-begotten, delusional, completely and objectively wrong purchase of a bunch of wretched little point-and-shoot video cameras, but explain how it isn’t a perfect symbol. Now maybe we can stop teaching Windows Movie Maker. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we wouldn’t want our students getting any sort of real-life skills in digital media.
