Video tips

I’m at the big Knight Foundation meeting for grantees at Unity in Chicago. Kristin Taylor, Knight’s online communities manager, shared some video tips that might be helpful to newsrooms. Taylor says: “Be on YouTube and everywhere else. People treat YouTube as a giant public access service.”

She lists these free embeddable video players
1. YouTube. Quality is a problem. Has audience share.
2. blip.tv. Good for series or similar topic shows. Video bloggers use this. Intro, logo, branding is there.
3. vimeo: HD and internal interface (comments). Offers liking, sharing, embedding.
4. viddler: Ability to comment into the timeline of the video. Looks good (comparable to vimeo) but does not have HD.
5. flickr. Photo site. Added video. Limit to 90 seconds. (Check out the Fishstick video)
6. TubeMogul. Uploads a file to multiple services.

Taylor’s best practices
1. Context the video as you would a blockquote
2. When possible, indicate file size and format (so people know how long it will take to download)
3. If there is an HD version available, link to it
4. Explain player functionality for new users
5. Plan for comment moderation

If you’re online, you’re TV

Jeffrey Cole has seen the future of newspapers and he thinks it’s television. Cole runs the Center for the Digital Future at USC, which is conducting a multi-year study of media usage.

His comments:

“I think video is a central part of your new identity.”

“You can be as live as television. On the Web, you become like television.”

Cole says that with the rise of the Internet, television and video will grow dramatically in importance.

“On the web newspapers and magazines become like television and compete like never before.”

Good news: the Web puts newspapers back in the breaking news business and offers lower production costs. Bad news: Global warming and concerns about newsprint and print production’s effect on the environment.

Cole believes figuring out advertising that users will accept online and on mobile devices and in social networks is a critical challenge because people are unlikely to pay for additional subscriptions or information services. His center found a household on average spends $260 per month on services such as telephones, - mobile phones, television cable or satellite, broadband, satellite radio.

“People are saying ‘I don’t want ot psned another $30-40 a month on digital feeds and subscriptions.”

Cole closed with headlines from his research on young people and media:

Life of a 12-24-year-old
- Will never read a newspaper but attracted some magainzes
- Will never own a land-line phone (and may never wear a watch)
- Will not watch television on someone else’s schedule much longer
- Trust unknown peers more than experts
- For the first time (2005) wiling to pay for digital content
- Little interest in the source of information and most information aggregated
- Community at the center of Internet experience
- Think not interested in advertising or affected by brand, but wrong
- Everything will move to mobile
- Television dominates less than any generation before (important but not the only thing that’s important to them)
- Want to move content freely from platform to platform with no restrictions
- Want to be heard (user generated)
- Use IM. Communicate through Facebook. Think e-mail is for their parents

Update: Steve Smith, the editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane who is attending the conference, posts about Cole’s presentation here.

A “newspaper” wins an Emmy

I recently learned that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had won a regional Emmy this year from the Lone Star Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for its High School Huddle football program on www.star-telegram.com. The program is part of www.dfwvarsity.com, Fort Worth’s mega site for high school sports described here. The Emmy-winning show sounded like a great example of a traditional print newsroom learning new skills and applying them to news and information of high interest to the community. Kathy Vetter, Deputy Managing Editor/Multimedia, discusses the show in this guest post:

By Kathy Vetter

Our High School Huddle program originated exactly where it should have - in the Sports department. Our newspaper editor responsible for high school sports floated the idea of a weekly video program, and we then called in our video experts and started talking about who could host the show. We ended up shooting a 12- to 15-minute program every week for 16 weeks. Most of it was shot in segments in our newsroom studio, with the graphics, photos, video clips and music bed added in post-production by our video editor.

We used one main host and rotated in the two expert writers each week, from a pool of about four. These experts cover high schools for the newspaper. The host covered high schools for us for several years, but is now a Cowboys writer. When the playoffs started, we simply went with a host and co-host.

We shot the show using three cameras and a video switcher to output a single video feed. We used an audio board to mix the audio from the three mics. We scripted the show each weekend and gathered the photos and video clips of games on Monday. We occasionally went into the field on Mondays to get fresh video. We shot the show Tuesday morning, imported the file into Final Cut Pro, and had the show edited and ready to post by very early Wednesday morning.

We shot at least one video game of the week each Friday night, usually narrated in person by the same reporter who hosted High School Huddle. Those were edited and posted by early Saturday morning. We then used that video, either from the current week or the archives, to provide the game clips for the Huddle. We set up an online poll that allowed readers to choose the game of the week from the four our staff had selected. That was the game that we shot video of. The poll received around 50,000 votes each week.

Staffing-wise, the director did most of the research and wrote the script (mostly info on cue cards), the high school sports editor helped pick the games we would discuss, the three reporters came in on Tuesday to do the show, and the video editor did the live switching and ran the audio board, then did the editing and graphics work. We got help from the photo desk in finding the necessary photos and running the cameras in the studio, and the high school sports staff helped with research.

The High School Huddle and games of the week are by far our most popular videos. For the five-month period beginning in September 2007 and ending at the end of January 2008, our High School Huddle of Nov. 6 was our highest-rated program, with 214,777 page views. The following week’s Huddle was No. 2, with 191,774. We easily topped a million page views for all HSH and game of the week videos during that time period. And a local car dealership bought a sponsorship for the videos.

The best advice is that this is worth doing. Even if you don’t do a studio show, find a way to take out a camera and shoot a game of the week. Ours were nothing fancy - a little game action, some time with the band and cheerleaders, some standups by our host - but they quickly became viral and they solidified our reputation as the media company that cares about something that’s very important in our community.

Here is a link to High School Huddle.

Star-Telegram sports online

Successful online ventures identify and tap into community passions. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has created a megasite for high school sports and is riding a wave of popularly and building revenue. I asked Ellen Alfano, Deputy Executive Editor/Vice President for Online at the Star-Telegram about the site, www.dfwvarsity.com, and the result is this guest post:

By Ellen Alfano

High school football is more than a tradition in Texas - it is an integral part of our culture. The Star-Telegram devotes a lot of resources and space to Friday night football. So three years ago, the Sports department and IS department began working on a super web site that would connect us to those readers who are fanatical about “Friday Night Lights.”

We created a home page for every high school team that we cover - nearly 100 - and have continued to improve the functionality as well as the number of high school sports that are part of the site. The site includes team photos, results, statistics, schedules, recruiting updates, player information, message boards and score alerts, as well as blogs and interactive pages for uploading user generated photos and videos. We have expanded the concept to include girls and boys basketball, soccer, baseball, softball and volleyball.

The staff that produces the content for dfwVarsity is a small army of sports staffers, correspondents and employees from different areas of the newspaper. This is the same group that covers games for the newspaper, only they file for the Web site after each quarter of a game and immediately after the game is over. The only additional people we have devoted to this project are programmers. There were a few missteps along the way, most of them involving the programming.  We are currently working on the third version of the software and we have a web developer from IS working with a newsroom web developer to finish the newest version.

Anyone who is considering a site like this needs to have a project leader who understands sports and agate as well as web development. Developers who worked on the site but didn’t understand sports left us with a table structure that was not flexible enough to allow us to adapt it to additional sports.

The one area that has never been an issue is the popularity of dfwVarsity.com. The site had more than 3 millon page views last year. It has also been a revenue-producer from the beginning. We began with a sponsor who paid $12,000. This year we will produce almost $200,000 in revenue.

Last year’s dfwvarsity site, including the videos, brought in $5,000 a month in revenue. The video was not specifically targeted. We quickly realized that was too low. This year, the main sponsorship was sold to Chevrolet for $10,000 a month for 10 months

One feature of the site is a weekly video program during the football season that just won an Emmy. More about that program later this week.

Teamwork and technology in Des Moines

After a tornado blew away the southern third of Parkersburg, Iowa, www.DesMoinesRegister.com published an amazing interactive map that led the reader house-by-house through photos, videos and text illustrating the massive disaster.

After I discovered the map last week (thanks to Al Tompkins at Poynter Online), I wanted to learn more about how the staff created the map and whether the Information Center structure that Gannett newsrooms implemented last year played a role in developing such an engaging and effective presentation.

I got in touch with Kelli Morris, a graphic artist in Des Moines who played a lead role in developing the tornado map. Her account may be instructive for newsrooms that seek new structures and practices that will expand the capacity of their staffs across digital platforms. Here’s Morris’ account:

First, the newsroom data department (created under the Information Center model) pulled a list of all the property owners in the town and those were matched with a satellite map of the town. The staff also developed a spreadsheet for the data that would be collected. “This helped to make sure everyone was on the same page heading in and knew the format of the information needed.”

Next, two reporters and a graphic artist headed to Parkersburg, about 110 miles away from Des Moines. The reporters focused on finding residents to get their stories. The artist focused on making “after” photos and getting stories when possible.

“Back in the office, the graphics department began to assemble the map - drawing in the parcel divisions by hand and seeking out a aerial image of the town as a whole after the tornado. Meanwhile, the data department had scraped the county assessor’s site for the basics for each property and began to build the database. A dummy data file was provided to the artist so he could proceed in the programming before the on-site artist returned from the town.” “Before” photos also were pulled from the assessor’s site and cataloged into the database.

When the reporters and artist returned from Parkersburg, they added information to the spreadsheet, including the stories from the residents, damage levels, and photo ID numbers. The data department then compiled the spreadsheets into one html feed that could be drawn into the multi-layered Flash graphic built by the graphics department.

The map was published two weeks after the May 25 tornado. The staff has kept it up to date with information from daily followup coverage and e-mails from readers and residents about their experiences during and after the tornado.

“Overall we’ve had very good response to the map,” Morris said in an e-mail. “We’ve received more than two dozen stories from residents or their families or volunteers who helped clean-up. Some have even asked for a way to preserve the site as a keepsake, saying that the town will never be the same again. Additionally, we’ve received several comments from folks in the industry, who have appreciated in particular the way that the video, photos and story-telling all work together.”

By the end of June, the map had generated nearly 40,000 hits and was the third most popular database on the site for the month, right behind a state salaries database and a map of flooding across Iowa. Update: Morris reports that the map got 42,000 hits by the end of June, which makes it the third most popular interactive graphic the newsroom has produced.

Such smart interactives can significantly increase user time on site. “In general, these types of interactive maps usually provide fewer page views and much higher time spent on page, because they take more commitment to explore than the other quick-hit searchable databases. True in this case as well - we’re seeing times of four minutes per visit, which is very, very good, “ Morris said.

As in many newsrooms, the rise of digital has created a larger place at the table for graphic artists in Des Moines. “We’ve gone from a department that produced secondary graphics and centerpiece illustrations to one that is suggesting and writing its own stories, driving online traffic to interactive graphics, and essential in showing readers the story, rather than just telling them,” Morris said. “Much of this has been driven by the ability to take advantage of technology - satellite images, Flash interactive graphics and the database work. Editors frequently approach our graphics staff looking for different angles to tell a 1A story. And many times, the artists are included in project brainstorming sessions in earlier stages due to our unique understanding of what we can do with graphics for both print and online.”

It’s another illustration of how mastery of emerging technologies increasingly sits side-by-side with traditional skills in effective news organizations. Are you encouraging that kind of growth in your newsroom staff? Please describe your efforts in the comments.

Vaulting into video

“What do you think, can a newspaper newsroom produce quality web TV?” That’s a question posed by John Hassell on his exploding newsroom blog. And Hassell and his colleagues at The Star-Ledger and NJ.com in Newark are about to find out.

The Star-Ledger newsroom recently launched an aggressive strategy to grow audience with news and enterprise video.

“We want to produce great video journalism in New Jersey and to showcase local video of all sorts, whether it’s produced by our staff or not. New Jersey has been traditionally under served by the local network TV outlets in New York and Philadelphia, and that presents an incredible opportunity to build audience and revenue around video content,” Hassell says.

To get started, the newsroom invested in HDV cameras and intensive boot camp training for 20 veejays in May. Within the first few days of training, participants were producing video and Hassell says the quality is improving all the time.

“We believe quality is key when you’re talking about telling stories with video. Our newly trained veejays are still cutting their teeth, but the level of their work is already quite high and rising every week. The visuals should be compelling, the writing taut and the arc of story clearly drawn. Storytelling is really at the heart of what we’re doing, and we feel we bring a lot to the table. All of that said, there is also plenty of room for short clips where production and storytelling values give way to the simple act of witnessing something newsworthy, fascinating or just plain weird.”

The training also attempted to address and help avoid post-production logjams that many newsrooms have experienced in the rush to video.

Hassell explains in an interview with “Newspapers & Technology:”

“The class teaches students how to bridge the gap between gathering news intended for both video and print distribution, Hassell said.

‘What a lot of people do is when they first get a video camera and are sent out to shoot video they come back with a lot of video and that creates an inefficient post-production result because you get back and have three hours of footage that you have to watch and edit,’ said Hassell. ‘We are teaching people how to think about what they need to shoot for the story they want to tell so that the process of producing video stories’ becomes more efficient.’’

The newsroom also shifted three print-oriented journalists to manage the new video enterprise: AME/Video, with overall responsibility for video efforts; Video Enterprise Editor, with a mandate to keep the standards high; and a new veejay who becomes a full-time producer and host of the daily noon web cast that launches next month.

You can link to a recent progress report on the effort by Hassell here and to one example of a new veejay’s work here.

Hassell says it’s too early to tell whether the video strategy is paying off.

“We’ll judge ourselves on the quality of our work, the traffic it generates, the revenue it produces and the extent to which we can build and nurture a network of New Jerseyans who are making and sharing video. It’s early to judge the results, because we only recently launched a video platform at NJ.com, but the viewership trends and number of user submissions are encouraging.”

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.)