Peter Horrocks, Director of the BBC World Service, speaks to digital news platform Beet.TV about the World Service’s online offering.

As well as emphasising that the BBC “remains committed” to a “high level of spend” on its international news offering, Horrocks also speaks about the “huge importance” of online video provision to the BBC.

Horrocks also talks about the importance of social media, both as a source of news and as a content distribution channel through social sharing.

He says: “We know that audiences increasingly trust the news they receive directly from friends and family above the news they receive from international news brands.”

• Peter Horrocks’ new job as BBC World Service Director
• Viewmagazine hosts ‘vlog butterfly’ for BBC head interview
• Accidental Tweet announces senior BBC appointments (but are now official)
• BBC review of online activities: a better deal for local media?
• MediaPost: Online newspapers – ‘The trusted brands will survive’

Beet.tv has an interview with Ann Derry, editorial director for video and television for the New York Times and Shawn Bender, editorial director for video for the Wall Street Journal online. They explain “why readers click the play button” to watch videos on the two news sites.

Bender feels readers click play in order to feel a connection.

I think that there is a feeling of excitement about the news that you don’t get in the static environment of print that you can get in video.

Derry says that both news sites have had to educate their readers in order to consume news in video form online.

We’ve had to train our users, both at the Journal and at the Times, that if you click on something you get a good experience.

Bender goes on to say that concise videos where the reader/viewer can learn two or three points are the most successful. Derry adds that news video should offer the reader/viewer a quicker, more “efficient” way of accessing the story than if they had chosen to read it as text.

The Beet.tv video is at this link and below.

• Video: NYTimes’ Ann Derry on going multimedia – video is key
• AP pushing 250 stories a week through its newly launched YouTube channel
• NBC provides code to embed news shows
• News sites can remove YouTube logo for embedded video
• Citizen journalist videos through op-ed pages of NYTimes.com

Open source mapping platform Ushahidi is now offering a customising service to users of its platform, in an attempt to earn its own income from the technology.

The platform, which maps reports on an event or occurance geographically, will still be free to download and run.

Speaking in a video interview with Beet.TV, executive director of Ushahidi Ory Okolloh discussed the next stage of development for the site.

Our focus up to this point has been just on getting the code out there and refining the tool. We’re now starting to work on sustainability and ways we don’t have to rely so much on foundations, but generating our own income.

The tool will always be free but now we do customisations for a fee.

Ushahidi has also recently launched a tool to help with translations of reports, a video plugin for those unable to report in other ways and there is a “revamped” iPhone app coming out soon, she added.

The idea is to just keep going and to keep always being on the edge of innovation.

• Nieman Journalism Lab: How Ushahidi can be use by media organisations
• Crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi launches new simple service
• What the BBC learned from using Crowdmap tool to cover tube strikes
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – mapping crowdsourced contributions
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Interview with KNC winner Ushahidi

Beet TV reports:

“About.com, the online network of special interest communities, enjoys ‘unbelievable margins’ from Google AdSense, said Martin Nisenholtz, who heads digital operations at The New York Times Company, which owns About.com.”

“He says that companies who create low cost, highly verticalized and contextualized content will get ‘very rich’ from AdSense. He adds that AdSense does not perform well for New York Times news coverage.”

Nisenholtz makes the comments in the video below (reference to AdSense at 2:45 in the clip):

Full post at this link…

• Guardian.co.uk adds ‘clippings’ bookmarking feature
• Reuters: Athletes can tweet at 2012 as long as not in manner of journalists
• Radio 4 Today: ‘Crisis in the economics of media industry’
• NY Times exec ed Bill Keller sparks online comment with Darfur remark
• Video is just start of online for Sport, says MD

Time.com managing editor Josh Tryangiel in a video interview with Beet TV: he describes online news tactics, why print style journalism doesn’t work well on the web, and reveals that 95 per cent of Time.com stories are original to the web.

(Hat-tip Crikey.com.au)

• James Beard Journalism Awards and Associated Press bylines go platform-neutral
• Oh the irony… were the Australian’s subs trying to tell us something?
• Crikey.com: Viewers ‘flock’ to television coverage of Victoria fires
• Beet.tv: Video news start up raises $1.5m in funding
• Non-profit news site ProPublica goes live

This from Beet.TV, an interview with CNN.com and CNN International. By 3pm US time, the sites had received 88 million page views this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, executive vice president of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. In this clip:

• CNN.com Live (with has four simultaneous live streams), had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally – seven times higher than an average full day.
• Grant expects today’s (Wednesday’s) traffic to be even higher.
• Grant said that election day concerns were centred on the site’s capacity to handle the traffic, but that it was coping fine so far.
• Grant also discusses CNN’s mobile offerings and its live video feed available through AT&T and Sprint.

• Japan quake sends record audiences to broadcast and online news
• Newspaper Society: Round-up of record web traffic for local media titles covering riots
• Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads
• LA Times breaks web traffic record with 127m page views
• CNN wins battle of online inauguration broadcasters, according to Omniture stats

In an interview with Beet TV, the senior VP, for online content and development at National Geographic, Rob Covey, said that user generated content plays a central role in the publication’s multimedia coverage.

• Users can share their videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, which was recently released in beta, and built with online community builder KickApps.
• User can upload photos to the ‘My Shot, Your Shot’ photo-sharing community and share music on the World Music Hub
• More interactive elements are in the pipeline …

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – five photo types for audio slideshows
• Radio 5 Live’s Big Mexican Wave digital project
• Innovations in Journalism – one-click image uploading from Skitch.com
• Twitter photo sharing service Zuu.li to pay citizen photographers
• Nuts launches social networking channel – MyNuts

Yesterday, Beet TV flagged up that a record number of users seeking online media information led to a seven per cent spike in traffic for Akamai, the delivery network which carries the internet flow for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and other news sites.

The current economic turmoil, hurricanes and the presidential campaign has helped boost the need for online information. At their peak, Akamai were registering 3.7 million requests per minute.

The spike follows a trend for online news sites doing well in times of financial strife: last month site traffic ‘exploded’ at the FT.com, as a result of the drop in share prices.

The need for information was felt on Wall Street, coinciding with a redesign of the Wall Street Journal Online. “Monday set an all time record of two million visitors”, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high.  “These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million,” she said.

The irony is that financial disaster, hurricanes and presidential elections seem to be a good thing for the world of online media.

• Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads
• Portfolio: WSJ quietly making big traffic strides
• Talking Biz News: Dow Jones restructuring
• Beet.tv: WSJ to expand live news video online
• Wall Street Journal: New York Times to start charging for online in January