Vine shifts from comedy clips to a valid journalistic tool
Channel 4’s Alex Thomson filmed Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone and shared the short videos on Twitter
Vine is a video sharing app that allows a user to film and edit six-second clips, which loop continuously, and post them online. It was founded in June 2012 and was bought by Twitter in October the same year. It now claims 100 million people are watching Vines each month.
Although it is still mainly used for visual gags and comedy – France’s Jerome Jarre, for example, has more than 7 million followers and has turned comedy “Vining” into a career – Vine is becoming an increasingly popular journalistic reporting tool.
In recent months Vines have been used to report on stories from the riots in Ferguson and the Scottish referendum to last week’s student protests in London. Video filmed in the app is low resolution and, obviously, very short, so the video file is small and can be uploaded to the internet with a relatively weak connection.
This is an example of user generated content that arguably has improved the standard of journalism. In my opinion it has, as videos such as these of ebola in Sierra Leone and riots in Ferguson, which news institutions can use in their reporting of the event.
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