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The video is informative and slickly produced: a 1:42 “explainer” in which a reporter deftly interacts with animated on-screen graphics and data to bring a potentially dry story on COVID-19’s global impact to life.
The segment is a social media extension of the Health Insider series on Scripps station KNXV (ABC15) in Phoenix, but the reporter, Jamie Landers, doesn’t work for the station. Landers is a May graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU, and she created the video using a green screen and a tool called Moovly as part of an unusual experiment in collaboration between a local TV newsroom and a journalism school.
WATCH the Jamie Landers explainer on COVID’s global spread
For the station, the project is an opportunity to expand its on-air health franchise to new users on social media platforms, including people who are unlikely to watch a traditional newscast, as well as to find out which techniques and platforms are most successful. The students produce the videos, but the station decides where to post them: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or a combination.
“I think part of it is giving a fresh perspective to how we’re covering digital news,” says Courtland Jeffrey, a senior digital editor who along with his ABC15 colleague Katie Fisher works closely with the students. (Fisher and Jeffrey are both Cronkite grads: it’s a cozy fit.) “I think we tend to get in the trenches of what we know works, but this