Why every independent news site should have a YouTube channel

John Hillman is editor of PC Site and head of publishing and projects at Net Media Planet.

With video in the ascendancy many independent online publishers and bloggers are beginning to feel that offering video content is a necessity rather than a nice optional extra. Yet creating editing and hosting a video can be an expensive and time consuming business that isn’t always easy to get right.

However, building a YouTube channel to sit alongside your indie website, whether it’s a blog, online magazine or hyperlocal, is much easier than many people would think. You can build the channel out to look exactly like your existing site, and with some good content and clever use of title tags you could find yourself attracting lots of new readers that may never have found you otherwise.

The figures speak for themselves. People searching for videos on YouTube make up a staggering 25 per cent of all of Google’s search volumes; it stands to reason therefore that anyone serious about increasing their readership should be tapping this rich source of traffic. When you also consider that Google now automatically displays a selection of YouTube videos in its search results, the opportunity for drawing new readers to your site should be obvious

As an independent online publisher we’ve found that YouTube has a lot to offer, providing us with a platform on which to publish unique video content, increasing our readership levels and helping us build our reputation as a quality online technology site.

Video equipment

Fortunately online video is valued more for its content than its production value, so while big news organisations may spend thousands on AV equipment, any indie publisher can get going with tools as basic as a Flip video camera and an open source video editing programme. This amounts to a total cost of around £150.

At PC-Site we use Flip video cameras all the time. They are cheap, small and fully optimized for the internet. This lets you get on with making basic videos without having to worry about such unfathomable tech conundrums as codecs fighting each other on the timeline.

When it comes to editing software there are lots of open source options out there, but Camtasia Studio works exceptionally well as both a movie editor and for creating screencasts. It costs about £220, which is excellent value for money. It also lets you automatically upload directly to your YouTube channel once you’ve finished the production process, saving you time. Alternatively we use TubeMogul to upload our videos as it enables us to do it across multiple sites, such as YouTube, HowCast and Vimeo simultaneously.

Branding your YouTube channel

This is a very important part of the process. It takes surprisingly little to give both your videos and your YouTube channel a quick makeover so that they reflect your blog or website.

Using Adobe Fireworks, for example, you can quickly mock up a little logo, if you have one, which will sit nicely in the corner of your screen during playback. Those of you with Adobe Illustrator skills can even create an ident to give your videos that real ‘TV Channel’ look. All of these things require a bit of extra effort but they really make a big difference to the finished product.

Your YouTube channel itself can also be branded by uploading a suitable background image that fits with your blog or website, and by going through the YouTube registration process you will be able to choose how the URL ends, also giving you that extra brand uniformity.

Once you’ve customised your videos and YouTube channel you can use the ‘sharing’ button to automatically syndicate your videos through your various online social networks, and you can embed your videos on your blog or website. You can also link your YouTube channel directly with your blog using the ‘blog setup’ button, this way your videos will post straight to your website from YouTube.

Getting it all up and running does take a small investment from you in terms of time, problem solving and creative thought, but the benefits that come from it are well worth the effort. One of our videos got nearly 30,000 views in a couple of months, all from just a cheap video camera a free video editing platform and the benefits of YouTube’s vast army of viewers. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

More from John Hillman on Journalism.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @johnjhillman

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#followjourn: @sbisson – Simon Bisson/freelance

#followjourn: @sbisson

Who? Simon Bisson, “travelling technology journalist, blogger, vrai Jerri, and all round geek”.

Where? Simon blogs from “the bleeding edge of technology” on his site, Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff.

Contact? @sbisson

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – filming with small cameras

The BBC College of Journalism website features advice and tips from Charles Miller on how best to use a small camera to get shots for video content. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Currybet: BBC News redesign demotes external linking

Following a series of posts looking at external linking on news sites, Guardian information architect Martin Belam uses the BBC as a case study for outlining how the company has experimented with linking over the years.

In an earlier post, he outlined cases in which news publishers should ensure links are included:

There are several clear use cases where additional links on news stories should be added as a matter of course, though – stories that reference medical or scientific reports, stories that reference published consultation papers, stories where quotes and pictures are sourced directly from the web, and stories specifically about websites.

In the latest post on the topic, he discusses how links on the BBC’s news website today appear a low priority.

So far, with the recent BBC News redesign, it remains the fact that external links are kept away from the body of an article. Actually, arguably they have been demoted, since whereas they used to appear in the side panel of a story, they now appear at the foot of the page.

Earlier this month, director of BBC Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers pledged to double the amount of external linking by BBC News Online.

See his full post here…

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Nieman: How the FT’s business model is more online retailer than publisher

Fascinating article on Nieman Journalism Lab from Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, looking at how the Financial Times, its website and its business model take inspiration from internet retail and not publishing.

Internet retailing — think Amazon — seems like a very different business than publishing. In the endlessly measurable digital age, though, the parallels are striking. It’s not in what you are selling – books, electronics, or news stories – it’s what you know about your customers, their habits and wants.

(…) In addition, analytics support the FT’s eight-member strategic sales team as it customises marketing approaches for firms and their agencies. Grimshaw says that by early 2011, advertisers themselves will get some access to FT audience data.

Full post on Nieman Journalism Lab at this link…

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Rarefied truth at rarefied atmospheres: the in-flight magazine that tells all

Safi Airlines’ in-flight magazine tells it like it is. Not for Kabul’s start-up airline is the rose-tinted journalism of the traditional in-flight magazine: Safi’s reading material typically includes the likes of “an article on Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles”.

Says Christian Marks, the magazine’s cheerfully blunt German editor: “I would like it to be a magazine where you can read interesting things, not just get brainwashed by some marketing agency that says you can’t show problems.”

And Marks’ is a truly warts’n'all approach, as the magazine’s hotel guide shows:

The rooms are individually air-conditioned, accessorised with amenities you will find in 4-star hotels abroad, sheets are clean, view from the room is nice, and – after the suicide bombing that took place – security measures have been implemented.

Full story on the Wall Street Journal at this link…

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#jpod: The week’s biggest media stories on Journalism.co.uk, 20 August 2010

Listen below for this week’s news round-up from Journalism.co.uk editor Laura Oliver and sign up to our iTunes podcast feed for future audio.

Podcast: Download

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Sharing and signposting: Younger Thinking for news organisations

Research carried out by university student Christopher Sopher as part of his Younger Thinking project has produced a series of recommendations for news organisations trying to reach a younger audience.

The biggest mistakes being made by online publishers at the moment? Overuse of sterotypes, publishing new content on old platforms and a lack of sharing facilities, according to his project blog.

His final ten recommendations for news outlets includes improved signposting, personalisation and explanatory reports giving background and understanding to confusing topics – which they term “wisdom journalism”.

Young people would also benefit from a more active, interpretive approach to journalism, sometimes called “wisdom journalism”. Knowledgeable journalists with a background in their subject matter could offer readers insight into what events really mean and break through the superficial he-said/she-said balance that dominates coverage of serious topics. This methodology acts on the idea that, in many news situations, it is better to be helpful and explanatory than it is to be first.

Hat tip: Editors Weblog

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Poligraft: the transparency tool set to make investigative journalism easier

The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new tool – Poligraft – to encourage greater transparency of public figures and assist journalists in providing the extra details behind stories.

By scanning news articles, press releases or blog posts, which can be submitted to the program by inserting the URL or pasting the entire article, the technology can then pick out people or organisations and identify the financial or political links between them.

Discussing the impact of this technology, Megan Taylor writes on PoynterOnline that it is a simple yet powerful tool for the news industry.

Anyone can use this, but it could be especially powerful in the hands of hands of journalists, bloggers, and others reporting or analyzing the news. It would take hours to look these things up by hand, and many people don’t know how to find or use the information.

Journalists could paste in their copy to do a quick check for connections they might have missed. Bloggers could run Poligraft on a series of political stories to reveal the web of contributions leading to a bill. All this information is public record, but it’s never easy to dig through. What is possible when investigative journalism is made just a little bit easier?

See a video below from the Sunshine Foundation posted on Youtube explaining how the technology works:

Hatip: Editorsweblog

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Could technology actually be a gateway to long-form journalism?

There’s a useful post on PoynterOnline this week in which author Mallary Jean Tenore details some of the best tools and technologies available which support the future of long-form journalism on the web.

These include Nate Weiner’s Read It Later, which can “save, share and organize URLs”. He explains that this means users can return to the whole article offline at their own leisure, rather than simply bookmarking the URL.

“Read It Later is essentially the article’s second chance. It actually improves the likelihood that the article will be seen,” Weiner said via e-mail. “If any article is there, the user put it there. And in order for a user to have put it there, they would have to have visited the publisher’s site.”

Other examples include Marco Arment’s Instapaper, which not only saves web pages but also creates RSS feeds of saved stories and an ‘Editor’s Picks’ feature based on the most bookmarked content and Twitter account @LongReads, created by Mark Armstrong, for a constant stream of long-form journalism examples.

See her full post here…

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