WCCO has taken a different approach. The station has one homemade box that it takes to various locations for a few hours at a time. This box also has a transmitter so reporter David Schechter can talk to people by remote control from a nearby van, while a second camera shoots cutaways from a discreet distance. Perhaps the most ambitious project involving a video kiosk is by KCTS public television in Seattle, which has produced two half-hour documentaries for PBS on education and health care by trucking its box to a Milwaukee high school and medical centers in Seattle. Its box is modeled after a 1950s photo booth, curtain and all.
Speakers sit inside and respond in privacy to question prompts.
The result is both visually interesting and insightful- and offers a whole new way of helping people understand important issues. Not by the old top-down definition, which held that news is something journalists tell to everybody else. Maybe that's what is so refreshing about these boxes. They're redefining what news can be, and producing content that's surprisingly intimate and compelling. But a laudable effort for a business that's usually more imitative than innovative.