Multimedia storytelling: community soap edition

In 14 days, I will be on a boat circling the North Pacific.  Until then, I’ll be reading up on school law.  As a project for my graduate seminar in communications law, I’m trying to put together a sort of “how-to” guide for students interested in free speech.   Fortunately, it’s an issue I’m passionate about, which makes all the mucking less of a chore.  Still, case law is tedious, especially when you’re grinding your teeth over a lot of court decisions that don’t necessarily fit with your view of the First Amendment.  (This is why I need the aforementioned vacation.)

Anyway, while trolling the blogs at the Student Press Law Center, I came across this story about a student journalist from the University of California-Berkeley who was arrested while on assignment for the Daily Californian.  The student, Cameron Burns,  wandered a little too far onto the freeway while covering a protest and ended up in jail on unlawful assembly charges.  He’s posted a video response to the incident on YouTube.  Fortunately for him, the charges were dropped a few days later thanks to his squeaky clean record and the word of his editor.  He’s lucky – “pursuing a story” is not a valid legal defense; journalists don’t have any greater right to break the law than the average citizen.

But what struck me about this particular incident was a quote from Burns about being a multimedia journalist.  He told the SPLC that he didn’t have his press pass on him, but he’s not sure if it would have helped because “…the camera I had was this little Flip video camera and the news people like NBC, ABC, CBS they would have larger cameras with the corporate logo on it.”  True story.  Even the fancy hi-def cameras they use over at Channel 8 don’t command quite the same respect as the behemoth broadcast cameras of yore.  (Though I’m sure it does help to arrive in a news van Toyota Scion emblazoned with the KOMU logo on all sides.  I wouldn’t know.  The system for KBIA involves me hauling ass in an increasingly worn VW Jetta with a dog kennel in the backseat and questionable mileage reimbursement system.) But I digress.

Burns’ video ends with a cheeky allusion that he’d do it all again, but at the same time, he’s promising to 1.) always carry his press credentials in the future and 2.) put the paper’s logo on his Flip video camera.  This is probably subtle encouragement for me to march myself to the student center and shell out $20 for a KBIA press, but then I remember that I reported for half a year in London with no AP press credentials and did just fine.  Same for my summer at the SJ-R.  And second, I don’t think an inch-high sticker with the Daily Californian logo would have gotten him into any less trouble here.

The bottom line is that Burns did do something illegal, even if the fact remains that a middle-aged guy with a microphone and 50 pounds of high-dollar TV equipment wouldn’t have spent the night in the Santa Rita jail.  But this isn’t anything to cheer about if you’re a backpack journalist, especially if you’re freelancing with the intention to sell your story after the fact.  How do we get taken seriously as multimedia storytellers when we still get mistaken as part of the rioting crowd we’re trying to cover?