The Newspaper Association of America released a report today on newspaper video.
It provides some interesting stats on how papers are approach video, a fairly comprehensive overview of different strategic approaches (including GateHouse’s), and some hints, tips and equipment options for getting into video.
Jack Lail finally convinced me to give The Flip Ultra a try. He told me the Ultra didn’t have the sound qualty problems of the older version of The Flip. Below are two clips demonstrating the camera’s capabilities a bit.
I like it. It’s super easy to use. The sound is good — for a sound source in close proximity to the on-board mic. Anything voice more than three feet away is lost. The Casios we’ve been using do better in that regard.
The biggest draw back to making this the new camera we distribute to reporters is that it doesn’t take stills, and at our smallest papers, reporters want a camera that can do both still and video. However, at a cost savings of about $100 per unit, it’s a pretty compelling option.
First video is from my day at Syracuse University, where I spoke to some journalism classes on Tuesday. The second video is a bit of our tourism along the eastern edge of Lake Ontario on Monday.
Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com spoke with Beet.TV. He also covers some of the Post’s other multimedia efforts.
More from Brady on Beet.TV here and here talking about video.
If true, here’s a good move by Yahoo! They’re going to add video to Flickr.
Nobody should expect, I don’t think, for Yahoo!’s Flickr video to overtake Google’s YouTube any time soon, but sometimes being #2 isn’t a bad place to be.
Flickr has a huge user base. Certainly, many of them must be interested in video. Those users can jump-start Flickr video and help Yahoo! start ramping up some market share.
In an era when speed-to-market is paramount, taking a little time to get it right may not be such a bad thing. If this is true:
Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers.
Innovation is never about big smash break-throughs. It’s about iterating and re-imagining what has gone before you. And it can simply be sustaining innovation. There is a place for that, too.
I didn’t bite when Andy Dickinson posted his rather cheeky “video strategy” videos. They’re well produced (Andy has a great narration voice) and funny in their way, but also (especially on the point-and-shoot side) spoiled by a few red herrings.
I just found that Cyndy Green (who we hired a while back to do video training in Canton, Ohio) produced a red-herring-free rebuttal.
I applaud Andy for his creativity in tackling the “make it great” vs. “just do it” debate, but Cyndy’s rebuttal is spot on. Be sure to listen for the tag line.
While I do agree that photographers are uniquely qualified to enter the video world, I know for a fact that reporters can do it too. I did it myself! Reporters must learn how to tell visual stories, but they already know how to craft a narration to tell a story. Photographers already know how to tell visual stories, but they must learn to play a more active role in using narration to tell a story. Everyone has something to learn. We can all do it. (Bold added)
Of course, Angela is right — up to a point.
Every time I read Angela or any other video blogger talk about “telling visual stories” or being “narrative,” I recoil.
Screw the story.
Show me something interesting.
It takes a damn lot of talent to tell a good story, and to really make a story sing, you’ve got to get into that whole production value thing, which as we know, has damn little ROI on the web.
If you’ve got the talent, great, but even getting to the point where you can unlock that talent takes years of practice. We’re not there yet. What we need right now is lots of video that people actually want to watch.
As YouTube and other video sites have proven, they’ll watch something interesting, whether it has a story or not, whether it has high production quality or not.
Compare web video to music. In the music business, tens of thousands of songs are cut every year. A large percentage of them are very, very good songs. Unfortunately, only a very small fraction of those great songs ever become hits.
Fortunately for the music industry, even in these more constricted economic times, a few hit singles can make a few people very rich (and not just from the song sales).
So all of the effort on songs that never will become hits is still worthwhile. The ROI on one hit is so tremendous, that it makes the gamble worthwhile.
Your newspaper-produced web video has a very slender chance of becoming a hit (even less than a song in this analogy). And even if it does, it’s not going to lead to riches for you or your publisher. We haven’t built, at least so far, the economics around video to make that possible.
Storytelling video takes a lot of time and talent to produce.
“Show me something interesting” video — well, anybody can do that. All you need is a cheap camera and enough smarts to go, “wow, that could be really interesting on video.”
Think relevance, immediacy and fascinating. Things like beginning, middle and end are not intrinsically interesting or valuable to a web audience.
Keep it short and sweet, and do it often enough, you might actually get people to start visiting your newspaper.com regularly for video.
And FWIW, before anybody starts in with the old red herring about promoting crappy video, don’t bother. If you think that’s what this strategy is about, you’re approaching this idea with more ego than business sense. I don’t buy into the false dichotomy.
Just show me something interesting with your video.
If you’re in the Rochester, NY area on Thursday, stop by the Hyatt to hear me and Chuck Fadely discuss video strategy. It might be entertaining.
Previously: Video can’t win on production quality alone
Here’s another shot over the bow of all those web videographer bloggers who make a religion of quality.
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, on the role of quality in media:
It turns out there are two dimensions of what we think of as quality. So quality wins. But we think of quality as production quality, you know, lighting and sound film and script and acting – those kinds of things. But there’s another dimension to quality that is as important, and that’s relevance.
YouTube. Nobody thought YouTube would succeed, because it was such low quality. But because YouTube is so full of contant that is narrowly targeted on people’s specific interest, they don’t care about the production quality. … You can’t win on production value alone. How do you remain relevant in a world that is fragmenting?
The full interview on Charlie Rose.
It is a reasonable question: Why isn’t there a Google News for news video?
And the answer is: An entrepreneur in Norway has launched NewsClipper (via TechCrunch).
In light of my previous post on innovation, it’s fair to ask, why didn’t a newspaper company come up with this idea.
It’s a simple idea — take the example of an existing product (in this case, Google News), and imagine a new use for the same concept using available tools and build a product that is just good enough to launch.
So nobody is confused: I’m not saying this is the kind of idea that should necessarily come out of a newsroom (again, in light of some comments on the previous post), but that if newspaper executives freed up their programming talent to work on innovative ideas, then maybe they would come up with sites like these. The talent and staff is out there, and some of newspaper programmers are doing innovative work. But there’s an aspect to this NewsClipper idea that is, “duh!”
The good news is, NewsClipper isn’t fully developed. It’s only scraping a few top news sites. It’s a nice proof of concept, but it needs work. It needs more content. It needs more meta data. It needs a better UI. And it’s going to run afoul of major media legal teams because it strips ads from the content.
A product that can get to market first that over comes those limitations could stand a chance at success. Building it won’t be easy, but NewsClipper provides an example of where and how to start.
Long ago, I disavowed my former praise of TimesCast.
As I dove deeper into web casts, I found a number that were stunningly good, and realized the bar was much higher for episodic video than daily news video. If you want people to watch the same show every day or every week, it better be good. An audience will forgive less technical and product quality for something they’ll watch only once for a minute or two, but to keep them coming back for an episodic show of three-to-six minutes, it needs to be good.
Webcasts are something where good enough isn’t good enough. They need to be good. Period.
Examples of good:
What do the good have in common:
So far, I don’t know of any newspaper webcast production that hits on all four attributes — many hit on none of them. The best of the lot, Miami Herald’s What the Five and Naples News Studio55 suffer from less-than-personal on-screen talent. The hosts on What the Five come across as a morning radio team dropped unexpectedly in a video studio, and Studio55 tries too hard to be TV.
And if I wanted to take the time — and be that insulting — I could surf around and find links to many truly horrid newspaper webcasts.
The most common fault is either trying to be like TV, or trying to shoehorn the newspaper (”Let’s read the headlines and ledes on camera!”) onto video. There is also the problem of putting people on camera who have no business on camera, or at least need a lot more training and coaching before they should be doing this professionally.
(I should mention, there is another class of webcasts — the lone reporter who has camera and access to YouTube and one day goes, “I’m going to make a news cast!” These productions rarely make it past the third episode before the reporter loses interest, but I applaud the entrepreneurial, willing-to-experiment-and-learn attitude. We need more of that in our industry.)
It’s not just newspapers that get it wrong, either. There are supposedly professional video companies trying to enter the webcast/video podcast space, and their results can be just as bad.
Consider Fountain Head Studios — supposedly a serious effort to produce great webcasts, and every one of their efforts so far fail miserably (hat tip to NewTeeVee). Compare Stock Rockets, for example, to WallStrip … clearly a ripoff attempt, but it suffers painfully from bad writing and bad talent and lacks WallStrip’s defined theme, except in a broad, unfocused way (it’s about stocks, not about stocks with an interesting story to tell in an interesting way). All of Fountain Head’s shows demonstrate the same lack of clear focus, plus poor writing and less than stellar hosts.
Let that be a lesson to you.
If you’re going to do a webcast, you should spend the money and take the time to get it right. You may get only one shot at getting right — and as music and television producers will tell you, it may take hundreds of shots to find one hit — this is tough stuff.
Interesting bit of news related to podcasting this morning.
eMarketer announced that the 2007 podcast audience reached 18.5 million active users. It’s good to take any projection with an ounce of skepticism, but the same study estimates the 2112 podcast audience at 25 million.
When you start segmenting that audience, however, it’s hard to see how the average newspaper podcast garners enough regular listeners to drive sufficient revenue.
That’s no reason not to try, however, but more on that below.
One question not answered by eMarketer is how they define podcast. To many people, podcasts are more than audio shows, but include episodic video as well.
Could video be driving podcast growth?
I know I prefer video “podcasts” to audio, but that could be just me.
Video, however, seems to represent great revenue opportunity because of the larger overall audience for online video and the visual nature of video advertising.
Either way, newspapers should tread lightly here. It’s one thing to take the lo-fi approach with illustrative video, or even periodic story video. It’s an entirely different matter with episodic audio or video.
Any time you expect an audience to develop a habit for a regularly scheduled shows, quality is paramount — and it’s not just production quality. The content must be engaging and the talent behind it must be finely honed. The demand for top-notch on-air audio and video talent will only grow as podcasting grows.
That talent isn’t likely to come from traditional broadcast, because of the more informal nature of online media, which is a mystery to highly trained professionals from traditional media.
In other words, these growth numbers, if true and they hold, represent opportunity for newspaper companies and journalists willing to try new things.
When I started this video of the week thing, I said it would be hit and miss … as time permits and I think about it, sort of thing.
To make up for several weeks of not doing it, here’s three videos.
Local music: It’s a logical avenue into reaching a younger audience. It helps reflect what’s really going on in the community you’re sworn to cover. It ads depth of coverage to your newspaper.com.
And who doesn’t love a good music video? I’ve long suspected that the reason many reporters get excited about shooting video is they’ve watched a lot of MTV.
But you don’t see many music videos on newspaper sites.
The reason is simple, really. To do music video well takes time, and lots of it, good equipment, and costs can add up quickly, as well as real talent.
What you’re really looking at is significant expense and time away from doing the core business of covering news.
Yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to make a music video?
The Canton Repository (a GateHouse Media paper) found a great lo-fi approach. During the photo shoot for its upcoming Battle of the Bands (a competition open only to bands comprised of high school students), the Rep filmed band members milling about the newspaper building, and in the photo studio.
The results are simple, elegant and engaging. The keys to success are good editing and well-composed shots of kids aspiring to the spotlight. All the videos are a reminiscent of Hard Day’s Night.
Some of the music ain’t bad, either.
Here’s my favorite:
Ya Dig? by PJ & The Whistlers
In a piece about data portability, John Battelle shifts into a discussion about the difference between a business that competes on price vs. a business that competes on service. He says:
An example. My local market charges far more for a good bottle of wine than many shops that are nearby. But there’s a wine guy who works at that market who knows wine cold, and who I trust. Also, the market is close to my home, and I have a personal relationship with the fellow (OK, here’s the reference to the book I’m working on - I have a “conversation” going with this merchant). Those factors, combined with a certain ambiance at the store that I really like, all lead to one result: I buy my wine at the more expensive store. Why? Because the store competes on more than price.
Ironically, I just found a booze store near my house that not only has great prices, but also great service — an owner who knows his booze (not just wine) cold. But that’s beside the point.
Battelle is absolutely right. He’s talking about differentiation. He’s talking about competitive advantage.
The newspaper industry is awash in talk about disruption and innovation. I do it, too. It’s important. We’ve had API do NewspaperNext. But there’s more to saving this industry than coming up with new ideas. I want to know when API is going to do NewspaperBetter.
All of the evidence suggest that ever since the Woodstein era began, readership and circulation have been in decline. Now, there are lots of reasons for that (subject of a future post), but there’s also little doubt that there is something about American newspaper journalism since the 1970s that is turning people off.
We’re not even winning the content battle on the web, so it isn’t just about delivery, convenience or changing lifestyles. It’s also about something that we’re doing or not doing.
Through all of the debates we’ve had about video, there is a “quality crowd” that seems to think the only thing I care about is slapping up a bunch of crappy videos just to make video.
That totally misses the point.
The point is about reinventing newspaper journalism, and I believe video is going to be a big part of newspaper journalism from here on out, and reinvention is all about doing it better.
The quality crowd doesn’t seem to understand, or doesn’t seem to care, that quality isn’t about the camera you carry, the software you use or how much time you spend in an editing bay (if you’re using an editing bay, by the way, you’re in overkill mode). Quality is about the skill, knowledge, experience, understanding, talent and intuition that helps you get bits of interesting stuff — the stuff people really care about, want to read about, or want to see and hear.
It’s the content, not the presentation, that matters most.
Again, I point you to Ira Glass on getting good.
Getting good at any creative endeavor is hard work. It takes time. I don’t care how smart you are, it takes time. Getting good isn’t about equipment. It’s about heart and soul.
So the best thing to do to get good is to do it. Get started. Explore and discover and feel free to fail. You must make yourself create things and not be afraid of some of the crap you will create along the way.
That’s also what my posts encouraging journalists to dive deep into the online social life and conversation are all about.
To be a great modern journalist, you MUST be a wired journalist. You must GET online. That doesn’t mean you just know how to do a Google search, read a few blogs and send a few e-mails. It means you get the culture, the attitudes and the expectations of the online crowd.
Until you do it, you’ll never understand that there is a difference. That’s why I don’t take very seriously the critics who say this call to action is a lot of bunk. They haven’t done it. They don’t know what they’re talking about, or what we’re talking about.
During one of the football games I watched last week, the announcer referred to an interview he did that week with a first-year NFL coach. When asked what was different about the NFL than he expected, the coach said that what he expected to find in the NFL was a group of professional football players, and he was shocked to find just how few professionals there were in the league. Very few players in the NFL, he said, are professionals. They don’t go about their jobs and their routines the way a professional would.
I submit that if you’re a professional journalist, you’ve already done most of what I put in my suggested MBO plan. And if you don’t think you need to do those things, than I question whether you’re really a professional.
It is time for newspaper journalists to set up and start creating the competitive advantage that will help us win. Current newspaper journalism is pretty much a commodity. When what you produce becomes a commodity, you can no longer win on price (and some journalists think we should be charging a fee for what people are already telling us doesn’t much interest them). You can only win on a competitive advantage. For journalists that should be doing a better job of story selection, presentation and interaction with the people in their communities.
If you don’t believe me, go read Mindy McAdams. She’s got it exactly right. I wish I had written that post. It could be the primer for an API NewspaperBetter project.
It’s not unusual for me to eat my lunch at my desk and watch some video. It turns out, I’m not alone.
The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.
Not surprising.
One of the things none of us who pontificate on video ever talk about is how to get a good quote.
As any experienced reporter knows, getting a good quote usually requires asking a good question. Good questions come when a reporter is both a good conversationalist and well prepared (either by dint of preparing for the specific interview, or knowing his or beat really, really well).
As an advocate for short, quick-production videos, I also believe that what works best for online video, as for most good journalism, is people, people, people — get tight shots of people talking about something of interest and you have engaging video … if you ask good questions.
I’m infamous for saying most newspaper video should take no more than an hour to shoot and produce, but here’s where I think some ROI can be achieved by stretching that time — in preparation.
If you prepare, not only will the couple of minutes of video you shoot have a better chance of being engaging, you will also need to spend less time editing.
Prepare like Charlie Rose. Prepare like James Lipton.
Watch this video:
(via Peter Zollman)
I’m reading an interesting book right now called Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.
How we label and categorize things is important to how we understand our environment.
Nearly a year ago, Andy Dickinson did a post labeling three types of newspaper video: Disruptive, channel and multimedia. At the time, I suggested “attached video” was a better label than “disruptive,” being that disruption is a strategy not a category.
That post influenced a slide in my internal video training presentation. My three categories of video have been: Attached, story, and webcast.
Attached is that short video meant to embed on a story page. Story video is the full story, no text needed, and webcast is that sort of thing that usually has an anchor/host and covers more than one topic.
A couple of weeks ago, Victor DeRubeis left a comment on a post highlighting a couple of GateHouse Media videos.
Nice raw video, yes. But where’s the journalism? Where’s the editing? Where’s the context?
And somewhere, though I can’t find the comment now, somebody said of one of our videos that it was nothing more than a moving photo illustration.
That’s the comment that stuck in my head. It’s a V8-moment! The proper term is not “attached video.” It is a “video illustration.”
To me, these comments intended to be criticism are actually high praise. This is exactly what we’re after with quick-production, point-and-shoot video.
Story video may have its time and place, but unlike some, I don’t believe that is the sum and whole of what online video can or should be.
The point of quick-production, reporter-shot video should be to illustrate in a way that words alone cannot. Raw is good. Heavy editing is a waste of time. Context is a distraction. The point is not to capture the whole story. It is to illustrate a story.
That’s not to say that we’re doing all that well at that goal yet, but it’s still a style of newspaper video I believe in passionately. I believe we will learn. I believe we will get better. I’ve seen enough glimpses of how well this can work to believe that as quality and understanding (reporters developing the appropriate sense of when and how to use this type of video), it will prove a very useful tool both journalisticly and strategically.
UPDATE: Andy Dickinson does a nice job of responding to this post. He clarifys, expands and explains what I’m trying to explain.
If fishing and hunting is your thing, you can find more GateHouse coverage at Prairie State Outdoors.
If there’s one statement I’ve made about video that has drawn the most fire it is that reporter-shot video should take no more an hour to shoot and edit.
For most news videos, any more time than that is just a waste because you’re not going to get enough views from any one video (there are exceptions, of course) to justify the time commitment, especially when you’re talking about reporters who also have print responsibilities.
I think this line of thinking is especially important at small newspapers (the kind I deal with every day) where publishers will NEVER hire a full-time videographer (or at least not until video advertising becomes a major revenue stream).
Andy Dickinson points us to a newspaper web crew in Nebraska that is regularly doing quick-production video and starting to get some traction with the local audience.
Online producer Eric Eckert tells Andy,
This year alone, we (3 staff) have produced over 450 videos which have received over 120,000 views. Most of the videos are, as you stated, 2-3 minutes long. The numbers differ though when you look at how long it takes us to make the videos. We usually spend 10-15 minutes shooting the video and I usually spend 15-30 minutes editing the video. In breaking news situations, like car accidents, we are generally shooting photos as well. We probably average getting a 2-3 minute report and 100 photos onto our site in less than an hour.
And in a follow up, Eric says,
Melanie has been instrumental with helping to get more videos out fast. She takes flack from time-o-time because she might say “uh” here or there, but we generally get the shot done in one take and that’s what we want. Our number one concern is to get the information out there.
Sure, we could spend a day making a report, but when it comes down to it, it looks real, you can tell she’s not robotically reading off a prompter and once again, we can have it online faster.
There are many advantages to putting the emphasis on speed-of-production:
Eric’s newspaper is the York News Times. There are two interesting things about that. First, the York paper is a GateHouse Media property now; second, while it’s a GateHouse property, we’ve never had a direct discussion with anybody in York about our video strategy. York developed its approach while still owned by Morris. It’s great to see York being successful with its own homegrown strategy.
UPDATE: Good follow-on post from Zac Echola.
Vivian Schiller, GM of NYT.com, who comes from a TV background, says that doing video for the web at the Times has been real learning experience. “I basically had to unlearn everything I knew about making television,” she tells Beet.TV.
Here’s another example of the advantage of journalists always being armed with video-capable cameras.
There was a dramatic fire in Gloucester, Mass. Saturday morning. GateHouse Media photojournalist Kirk Williamson shot both stills and video (for the video, he used one of the Casio’s we issue).
Video:
Editor Chris Biondi posted this interview with Kirk.
How did you juggle between still and video? What was your thought process? As with all spot news it’s important to shoot the overall as you are going into the scene. This I did with my still cameras, shooting wide with one camera and long with the other. Once the paper and Web site are covered with stills (about 10 minutes in) I pulled out the Casio and started doing video overalls following the same routine. Wide overall, then tight action. In this situation it’s important to follow a pattern and not get all flustered with what is going on. After I had some video I went back to shooting stills and alternated back and forth until I went, looking for different angles, etc.
I would contend that Kirk would have had a lot harder time doing both stills and video if, after taking his stills, he had a complete video camera kit to set up (bigger camera, tripod, lights, mics, etc.). And having all that, there would be a real temptation to turn this into a “visual journalism story,” instead of simply showing what’s going on. And the whole process, including editing, would have taken exponentially longer. For this event, just being able to whip out the Casio and get a few frames to show the fire live-action is all that is needed.
