Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Stuart Watson, and aside from being husband to Lorraine Jivoff for 30 years and parents to Erin and her three siblings I work as an investigative reporter at the local NBC television affiliate in Charlotte, NC.
What hardware do you use?
I use Pilot G2 black pens and legal pads, a Dell desktop issued to me at work, a five year old MacBook Pro at home, my iPhone for pictures and tweeting and various copiers for scanning documents and photos.
I also have some lenses and attachments for the iPhone such as a small tripod. Occasionally I borrow the Sony XDCAM and a light kit from work to shoot my own video. I own my own tripod and a shotgun microphone with a cable and XLR inputs, and an old mini-DV tape camera I now rarely use.
And what software?
I use Microsoft Word and Google Docs to write and Excel for spreadsheets and on rare occasions Access for database analysis. We use Dropbox to transfer video files or FTP. Then we use various proprietary services for research like Lexis/Nexis, Accurint as a people finder and Courtsearch to look at North Carolina court cases, but mostly I stick with public records and public databases online.
What would be your dream setup?
I'd love to have new gear like a variety of cameras ranging from versatile GoPros to DSLRs to high end digital video cameras which replicate film. And I'd like to have high end Macs with lots of muscle and memory to edit my own stuff with Final Cut Pro.
I'd also like to have my own digital audio recording equipment including wireless microphones, to conduct interviews and record natural sound at the same time.
I'd like to know a lot more about putting this video online and I'd like to design my own web page - something I am intimidated by.
I'd like to know a lot more about hardware and graphics used to create clear and meaningful and accurate visual displays of quantitative information. I view this as an ethic and an aesthetic.
Specifically our industry could use an app which combines time code with better voice recognition software so we could ask the computer to log interviews from raw video. Now voice recognition is amazing but crude compared to what it will become.