In September 2008, reporter Steve Rennie took part in the evolution of broadcast when two of his colleagues filmed him grilling Agricultural Minister Gerry Ritz as he got off an airplane.

Rennie had broken a story about a conference call in which Ritz joked about listeriosis. The disease is contracted from eating tainted meat, and 21 Canadians died from it in the summer and fall of 2008.

"Did you make the remarks? Did you make the remarks?" he asks over and over as the group of reporters follow Ritz out of the airport.

"Get out of my face, please," Ritz responds.

This is typical fare for the nightly news, but the video highlights some key ways broadcast is changing.

First of all, Rennie isn't a television reporter. He works for The Canadian Press, a news agency that delivers stories to most of Canada's major media organizations.

Second of all, the segment wasn't shot with a broadcast-quality TV camera. One of the cameras Rennie's colleagues used was a point-and-shoot digital — the kind many Canadians might use to film their child's piano recital.

The internet makes it possible to include video, audio and print in a single story. Traditional one-medium news organizations can now provide multimedia content on their websites.

Shifting standards

The internet also breaks the rules about what constitutes "broadcast quality." YouTube and video iPods proved consumers are willing to watch grainy videos on tiny screens.

Media organizations started accepting videos that would have been laughed out of the newsroom 10 years ago.

And some of these low-quality videos, often recorded by members of the public rather than journalists, have played an important part in advancing major news stories.

The inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski, who was tasered by RCMP officers in an airport, relied heavily on a video shot by a bystander for evidence.

At the G20 protests in London in April 2009, an onlooker shot a video showing riot police beating — without provocation — a man who died from a heart attack soon after. And a cellphone video showed Tim Kretschmer when he shot himself dead after killing 12 people at his high school in West Germany.

But media organizations can't just rely on the public for video on their websites — they need journalists who also know how to shoot and edit. That's an entirely new skill set for many print and radio reporters.

Training required

When they're done well, videos draw the audience into the story. But Andy Dickinson, who teaches digital and online journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in England, said it's a mistake to push reporters into the field with a video camera without proper training or extra time.

With newspapers barely scraping by in the recession, some editors are already scaling back ambitious and expensive online video projects.

With newspapers barely scraping by in the recession, Dickinson said some editors are already scaling back ambitious and expensive online video projects.

The cheap, low-quality videos that were hailed as the way of the future have experienced a backlash. The Poynter Institute of Journalism stirred up controversy when it declined to award a first prize in the online news video category of the 2007 National Press Photographer's Association awards, saying no video was good enough to win.

And if you were just getting used to online video, Dickinson said it's already considered a bit passé among people who follow media trends because it's not interactive.

"Video is very much a lecture, it's very passive, it's very linear, you can't interact with it apart from stopping it, starting it, fast-forwarding and rewinding," he said.

"It's kind of an old school way of communicating."

But lots of news organizations are using online video. In fact, today's journalism students are told they need to learn many skills, ranging from writing and video editing to website coding, if they want a job when they graduate.

Audience 'won't care too much'

Ellin Bessner, a freelance TV and radio reporter who teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto, said she sees fewer and fewer students who resist working in more than one medium.

Journalists can add video to their other reporting responsibilities and still tell in-depth, high-quality stories, she said.

"I do think the quality is not affected if you're really organized," she said. "You do the best you can, and the audience won't care too much as long as you got the story right and you got it first."

Both Dickinson and Bessner think online news video is here to stay, but Dickinson predicts news organizations will think harder about when to use it and why.

"I would hope to see it as being a standard part of a toolkit for a journalist," said Dickinson

"I think what we'll find in the future is we'll [still] see video on newspaper websites, but we'll only find it when it adds something to the story."