Sophia Kocur
Winstead, Ed. “Putting It All Together — on Video.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Nov. 2017,
This article titled, “Putting It All Together — on Video,” Members of The New York Times’s video department explain how they use forensic techniques to uncover new information about news stories. On Oct. 26, the United Nations released the findings of an investigation on a lethal sarin gas attack in a Syrian village in April that the Syrian Air Force was responsible for. This was no surprise to the director of news for The New York Times’s video unit, Mark Scheffler, who worked to uncover what really happened in Khan Sheikhoun.
After the attack, two of Mr. Scheffler’s team members, the senior story producer Malachy Browne and the video editor Natalie Reneau, pieced together satellite imagery, photographs and videos of the attack, drone footage and more into a seven-minute video examining the strike. They concluded that “all of the circumstantial evidence points to a chemical weapon being dropped,” as Mr. Browne says in the video, which “put Syria and Russia’s story in serious doubt.”
“We’re increasingly seeing the value in this type of reporting, and The Times has committed to making it a part of how we gather and report the news,” said Marcelle Hopkins, the deputy editor of the video department. “It has been done in the past with human rights organizations and some smaller investigative organizations, but we’ve recognized that this is something that can be extremely useful in reporting.” For Mr. Browne, videos of an event not only provide a sense of what it was like to be there, but are also sources of important information about the location and timing of key moments. “There has to be visual evidence that we can make deductions around, and there have to be discrepancies in the story being told” — by governments, the police or even the news media — “and the one we think we can tell through this sort of evidence-based journalism.”
Overall, Witte’s article is well-written. The information is presented chronologically, and it is easy to follow why video footage is so important to developing cases despite all of the other different elements of the crime being examined. However, I would have preferred if the article mentioned what kind of specific evidence was found while using the new method that they had. I know this was strictly a “report” of what new method they found, but because this was on a forensics publication, explaining what kinds of evidence they were able to obtain would have been more appropriate.
