NAA: The march to video

The Newspaper Association of America‘s new survey of newspaper Web site’s production of local video provides one of the best snapshot’s I’ve seen lately of newsrooms in transition, and the transition may be significant. A year ago, many of the newsroom leaders at Knight Digital Media Center’s annual Leadership Conference saw aggressive pursuit of local video as a priority for 2007. Like many of their peers, they saw the value of video in enriching news coverage, increasing traffic and possibly creating a new advertising revenue stream. They were searching for tools and strategies.
The new NAA report suggests many traditional news organizations have leapt into video—or at least have a toe in the water. It also suggests there is more work to be done.

Here are a few highlights of the NAA survey, entitled “Newspapers’ Online Video:”
- News (breaking), features sports and entertainment dominate online local video content. Interestingly, the report notes, while people frequently go to a news site for weather information, only about a third of the sites surveyed feature weather or traffic video.
- Most site visitors watch video in the morning (32 percent from 6 to 10 a.m.) or in the middle of the day (27 percent 10 am. to 2 p.m.). Nearly a third of those responding didn’t know the most popular times for visiting their Web sites. (It’s also important to keep in mind, as Rick Hirsch at the Miami Herald and others have noted, that readers of different topics may be hitting the site at different times.)
- Photographers are most often shooting video (86 percent) but reporters are not far behind (74 percent).
- Most newsrooms provide video training (58 to 80 percent provide it, depending on size).
- Pre-roll is the dominant format for online video advertising. About half of the newspapers surveyed feature pre-roll. At smaller newspapers, 43 percent reported selling pre-roll advertising. At larger newspapers, 78 percent feature pre-roll advertising. Banner adds and sponsorships also are popular. Fewer than 10 percent feature post-roll advertising or ads that run across the bottom of the screen.

The NAA survey is based on 213 responses out of 1,117 solicitations that went to newspapers. That’s a decent response rate (19 percent) and newspapers of all sizes are represented. But NAA notes that “it is possible the conclusions may not fully represent the entire U.S. newspaper industry.” My own guess is that those who were more engaged with video were more likely to respond, so the survey may be a snapshot of early adopters rather than the industry as a whole. Still it’s encouraging.

How does your news organization compare with organizations in the NAA study? What tips can you offer other editors seeking to improve their online video offerings?

NAA: Resources for online video

The Newspaper Association of America has released a report urging newspaper sites to get on the video bandwagon - if they’re not there already. NAA also provides a lot of resources aimed at newsrooms that are just getting started.

”Zooming In on Online Video: A Development & Growth Guide for Newspaper Web Sites” is “intended to help newspapers of any size develop profitable video applications,” says the report. “As competition heats up for online video mindshare, newspapers have an excellent opportunity to leverage their skills and content and capture an even larger share of online advertising spending.”

The financial promise of video is significant, NAA believes. “Local online video advertising was a $400 million business in 2007, according to Borrell Associates,” the report states, and “eMarketer expects that online video ads will pull in $1.3 billion this year.”

If your newsroom is getting up to speed in video, here are key NAA links:
Shooting quality video
Equipment: What to buy
Editing and publishing
Live video
Making money (!)
Building a newsroom studio
Beginning video glossary

NAA also conducted a survey of practice in video across newspaper sites. I am wading through that and will summarize key findings later this week. Meanwhile, is your newsroom active with video? Who is shooting it? Who is editing it? What works best? Are readers responding?

(And thanks to Howard Owens for the pointer.)

Keeping comments clean

News organizations seem to have a love-hate relationship with user comments. As I mentioned earlier, journalists often respond to the topic with eye-rolls, forlorn sighs or frustrated shrugs.

Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at The New York Times, typified a somewhat grudging view last fall, when the Times began allowing comments on a few stories. The newspaper, Hoyt wrote, “is struggling with a vexing problem. How does the august Times, which has long stood for dignified authority, come to terms with the fractious, democratic culture of the Internet, where readers expect to participate but sometimes do so in coarse, bullying and misinformed ways?”

I would turn that around. While recognizing the challenges that offensive comments pose, I think sites will have more success if they focus on what their users experience and less on self-image (which is not the same as credibility).  Perhaps the question for news organizations is something like this: “What can we do to create an online environment that engages our community, empowers people to share their perspectives, and encourages them to suggest fresh, relevant angles and stories?”

Obviously, a free-for-all that allows offensive comments does not foster such an environment. Rigid control of comments, including screening them before publication, as the Times does, is the opposite end of the pole. It may work for the lofty Times, but the practice sends a message of distrust and takes resources that might better serve journalism in the public interest elsewhere.

Many news organizations have moved to a middle ground of practice. As I noted here, the Miami Herald recently moved from an open, anonymous system to a registration system in an effort to clean up site comments. Another newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, recently dropped the practice of previewing comments.

“We switched earlier this year to moderating comments after they are posted automatically. We put in a flagging system that allows users to object to comments for various reasons. Previously, we reviewed every comment before it went up.  It was very labor intensive, not immediate and we couldn’t keep up,” says Ken Chavez, assistant managing editor for interactive media at the Bee.
“The flagging system has greatly reduced the number of comments we have to review.  A flagged comment comes off the site and is sent to a queue for our review. We either delete the comment all together or restore it to the site, where it can no longer be flagged since it has already passed muster.”

In Newark, The Star-Ledger also requires registration and relies on post-publication monitoring by a central Advance Internet Interactivity Group.

“Members of the group monitor comments, forum posts, user-submitted photos and videos and contributions to our new public blogs. In each of these areas, there are also tools that allow users to alert the group about inappropriate content,” says John Hassell, deputy managing editor. “Newsroom staffers have the ability to remove inappropriate content, but we rarely do; instead, we alert the interactivity group, and they act quickly. Generally speaking, this system works well, and the level of interaction on our sites is very high. The quality of discourse varies wildly, of course, but there is no question that user contributions make our sites better and more engaging. ... Ultimately the quality of the discourse is driven by our community of users, and the more open and accessible we are, the better.”

Encouraging users to report inappropriate comments is key: It helps assure a productive discourse and it reflects new rules of user ownership on the Web. And if comments on a particular story or topic get out of hand, the site always has the last resort of simply shutting comments down while things cool off.

If you are thinking about how to handle comments on your site, here are a couple of resources:
Amy Gahran’s tips on Poynter Online.
Rich Gordon’s advice (via Beth Lawton at Newspaper Association of America)

If you recommend additional resources or have tips and experiences to share, please do so in the comments. (And keep it clean )

Search optimization tips

Mark Glaser at PBS Media Shift has a thorough and easy-to-follow list of steps news sites can take to draw more traffic.
Do you have more tips to share?

Inventing a new ecology for news

News Tools 2008 is now history. As Joe Grimm explains here, it was an unconference that eschewed expert panels and speakers and instead relied on participants to shape the agenda and convene sessions.

I saw abundant bursts of energy and creativity, rather than the carefully crafted storyline more traditional conferences seek to create.

That may also be an apt description for an emerging ecosystem for news collection and distribution in the digital age: Increasingly individuals and smaller collections of people will create significant amounts of news content and make it available to the public online.

Key to this new ecosystem is entrepreneurship. Journalists - many from downsizing newsrooms - are exploring ways to get paid directly by the public or by community foundations or even private investors.

How would this work? Here are a few experiments:

-- Small payments or subscriptions that pay for journalists to cover specific stories or issues. Would parents in a local community, for example, be willing to pay small amounts for more detailed coverage of their children’s schools than the local metro newspaper is providing? Journalist David Cohn is working on online tools to help journalists monetize their efforts.

-- In a similar vein, the just-launched ReelChanges Web site will allow people to make tax-deductible contributions to support production of documentary journalism.

-- Could a community hire a journalist to provide local coverage? Journalism professor Len Witt has a grant to try that idea out in Northfield, Minn., where a “representative journalist” will be hired to add professional reporting to an existing community site.

These experiments are fraught with potential and with risks. The journalists will need to take care to protect their journalistic independence as they step into the world of fund raising.

All the same, experimentation and risk-taking may pave the way for future journalism that can supplement and enrich what traditional news organizations provide.

Dan Gillmor, who heads the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, says it’s a great environment for young journalists.  “What I’m telling students is that they chances that they would get on career ladder that people of my age got on are shrinking rapidly… That is not a problem because there’s never been a better time in journalism to invent their own jobs This is an incredible time of opportunity for young journalists”

These efforts may provide little solace to traditional news organizations coping with a digital tsunami and a diminishing bottom line.

Still, they may suggest opportunity. How will traditional news organizations interact with an increasingly diverse and potentially chaotic news universe? Do these developments suggest an emerging role for large traditional news organizations? As news system atomizes and diversifies, who is better equipped to synthesize as a more coherent whole?

How to talk to your programmer

As I am learning at News Tools 2008, the tech-journo divide is both wide and deep, despite journalists’ great intentions and enthusiasm for all things digital. Different cultures and miscommunication are key factors. So I’m happy to pass along a great set of tips from Lisa Williams, “Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Programmer.”
What are you doing to move your newsroom culture across the digital divide?

News Tools: Aggregate now!

The News Tools 2008 conference opened with a list of the Top 10 Disruptions/Innovations Reshaping Journalism. It’s an exciting and daunting list.
I went to a follow up discussion of item number 4 on the list: Aggregation, linking, tagging, filtering. About a dozen people heard from Scott Karp, CEO of Publish2 and Vineet Gupta, tech evangelist at DayLife Inc., discussion leaders who strongly recommend that news sites increase their links from their own stories to related content on other news sites.
The way to build the brand of a site, Karp said, is to make it a “destination not just to what its limited resources can produce but what the whole Web can produce.”
For example, Karp said, a story on local water quality problems might link to stories about similar problems and solutions in other communities.
Learn from Google, which does “nothing but send people away and people keep coming back again and again.”
That advice makes sense. Who can argue with Google’s success? Still, many news organizations have been slow to using extensive linking out of fear of helping a rival site or linking to a less than credible story.
Those are valid concerns. But reluctance may also stem from old newsroom attitudes about control that are no longer useful in a new information and news environment, one where the reader has a vast array of choices and one role for a news site is to point to some of the best ones. Karp calls that “link journalism,” and it doesn’t necessarily mean linking to anything and everything.
Does your site routinely link to content on other sites? How do you decide when to link and what to link to?