Star-Ledger launches video newscast - ‘This is not local TV news’

The Star-Ledger, based in Newark, New Jersey, debuted its new daily online news show yesterday - the first stage in creating an interactive video news experience on the paper’s website.

“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear from the outset: This is not local TV news,” says John Hassell, the Ledger’s deputy managing editor (online), in a blog post.

“This is local video news for the web. It’ll be conversational, interactive and draw constantly on the community of users at NJ.com [the paper's website] and bloggers, vloggers and podcasters across New Jersey.”

Presented by news reporter Brian Donohue, the newscast will be broadcast live and later made available to embed and divided into sections by news item.

The final test version of Ledger Live is below (and yes, the phone will be unplugged next time):

In developing the newscast, the paper participated in a video ‘boot camp’ lead by Michael Rosenblum and opened up discussion on video blogging site Seesmic.

Tags: Brian Donohue, John Hassell, Michael Rosenblum, Newark, online news show, The Star-Ledger

Images from a newsroom: the Star-Ledger gets webcast ready

John Hassell, online editor at the Star-Ledger newspaper, has posted pictures of the Ledger’s newsroom as it prepares for its new webcast news show.

The noon bulletin, which will be launched this summer, is being developed with help from Michael Rosenblum, who helped build Current.tv.

Check out Hassell’s pics on Flickr.

Tags: John Hassell, Michael Rosenblum, Star-Ledger