Over on his 10,000 Words blog, Mark S. Luckie has pulled out the multimedia elements of this year’s Pulitzer prize winners, showing how “traditional print stories can be married with multimedia and online projects to create a more dynamic and enticing story package”.
Many newspaper-produced video stories are boring. The best stories have surprises sprinkled throughout the timeline, which helps keep the viewer engaged. This is mature storytelling that most newspaper video producers have failed to master.
Colin Mulvany offers some excellent advice on what newspaper publishers doing video can improve, including tips on storytelling, editing and the basics of subject matter.
The venerable old day of leg-pulling and pranking is upon us again, and British news institutions are doing their bit for the fun. Some better than others, it must be said. Here is a short round-up of some headline hilarity from the web.
The Guardian went big and bold with a mock-election campaign designed to show the rough and ready side of our beloved PM:
Brown aides had worried that his reputation for volatility might torpedo Labour’s hopes of re-election, but recent internal polls suggest that, on the contrary, stories of Brown’s testosterone-fuelled eruptions have been almost entirely responsible for a recent recovery in the party’s popularity.
While the traditionally rowdy readers of the Guardian were treated to this new bar-room-brawling Brown, the refined readers of the National Union of Journalist’s site woke up to the news that the bruiser and the posh boy, along with that other one Clegg, were all joining the NUJ executive council as part of a new “affinity programme”.
Through our new affinity scheme NUJ members will now be able to join the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties at a reduced rate. In fact, from now on they can also get membership of all three parties for the price of one, which we believe will appeal particularly to our members at the Guardian and elsewhere.
Harmony was prevailing elsewhere too on The Register’s site, with the equally unlikely news that highly improbable bedfellows Associated Newspapers and the Guardian Media Group would join forces to share a common editorial facility.
Using the latest technology, a single team will produce stories for both groups flagship titles, the Daily Mail and the Guardian, in a process that will be largely automated.
The Independent went with some highly unlikely technical advances to the Circle Line, claiming that London Underground was in talks with the boffins at CERN about using the 23km tunnel to house a new particle accelarator, similar to CERN’s Large Hardon Hadron Collider. Provided, of course, they can iron out the “geo-magnetic ‘kink’ in the circuitry at Edgware Road”.
It would mean that two beams of protons would be travelling in clockwise and counterclockwise directions at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light, within feet of Circle line passengers stuck in perpetual immobility.
(Meanwhile the boffins were up to some riotous hilarity of their own over in Switzerland (in that charming science-humour sort of way…), declaring that high-energy collisions within the newly restarted LHC had unearthed a “paleoparticle”. In other words, “a hideous particle from the prehistory of the Universe”.)
Also on the science side, the Daily Mail, with news (and video) about the AA’s new rocketmen, able to fly out to the hard-shoulder at high velocity in your time of need. Unfortunately this corker has come down off the site already.
Rather than muck in with its own side-splitting falsity, BBC News ran with a bit of an also-ran in the form of a collection of true stories that really should be April Fools. Although, tucked away on the Radio 4 site is this deadpan gem about the possibility of William Shakespeare being half French, based on some pretty dubious analysis of his mother’s family tree:
It’s a lock of hair, it’s quite faded, which would mean it’s potentially a lock of hair from Mary Queen of Scots.
Lastly, as this is only just a taste of the press’ Herculean April Fools’ effort, the Telegraph, who claimed this morning that ferrets were to be used in the government’s plans to begin broadband to all:
The animals have been used by Virgin Media for over a year to help lay cables for its broadband service, the company has disclosed. The ferrets wear jackets fitted with a microchip which is able to analyse any breaks or damage in the underground network.
What the Telegraph’s story lacks ever so slightly in humour, it more than makes up for with this deftly mocked-up picture of a ferret on the job. Of laying cables, I mean.
Back to frowning at your desks until next year then folks.
The Boston Globe has launched a daily news video update. The 90-second broadcast is available on the paper’s homepage, Boston.com, between 11:45 and 1:45 pm EST. As reported here earlier this week, the Globe’s sister paper the New York Times has also launched a midday video news update, TimesCast.
Globe Today is more of a traditional news broadcast than TimesCast, which takes a behind-the-scenes approach, and is significantly shorter, weighing in at less than a quarter of the length of the Times’ feature.
The other significant difference is that Globe Today also appears on YouTube, making it embeddable, meaning I can embed it for you right here:
The Guardian has the full results from last night’s British Press Awards: the Telegraph took the big one, for newspaper of the year, while the Guardian’s Paul Lewis walked away with reporter of the year. Overall, the Telegraph won six prizes for its expenses story, including journalist of the year for its editor Will Lewis.
Heather Brooke got acknowledgement for her role in the expenses exposé, with a judge’s award. The Guardian reports:
The judges’s award went to freelance journalist and freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke whose tireless campaigning did so much to keep the story in the public eye. She praised the Telegraph for doing a brilliant job but appealed to Fleet Street to be more co-operative on major stories.
“I don’t begrudge the Telegraph and I hope they don’t begrudge me. The fact is I’m fucking proud,” she said.
There’s a Guardian Twitter liveblog too, if you want to catch up with it as it happened.
Last week technology firm Blinked.TV demoed its mobile phone app for livestreaming audio and video to delegates at the Digital Storytelling conference (#ds10).
[Disclaimer: Blinked.TV was a sponsor of Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired conference in January]
The app, which will soon be available for iPhone users, lest you record and stream audio and video, and send text updates. Users can create channels archiving this multimedia content and different permissions, which can be embedded in their sites. Users can also switch between broadcast, audio and text modes without losing connection to a server during the stream, said co-founder Andrew Cadman.
The problem that digital journalists have is constantly swapping between applications to do multimedia work. Switching between applications is time lost.
The app’s interface is illustrated in this roughly-shot video below:
According to founder Andrew Cadman the app allows for “digital storytelling with a single broadcast” – an important part of this is the metadata attached to each piece of material. By itself a broadcast won’t tell a story, said Cadman, but with captions and location data attached to it, it can. The app also allows for multiple users to contribute to the same channel from different handsets and locations.
Providing high-quality livestreaming is the company’s ultimate aim – current 95 per cent of content uploaded via the Blinked.TV site is streamed live, said Cadman. Blinked.TV will also be trialled by a big UK media group in the next few months and is looking a charging larger companies for use of its embedded channels or charging on a bandwidth use basis.
Competition
As part of the Digital Storytelling event, Blinked.TV is running a competition offering prizes of £350 for the best individual and best team broadcast produced using the application. The deadline for entries, which will be judged by Blinked and digital journalism collaborative not on the wires, who organised the event, is 3 May.
The New York Times has launched a new daily video feature on NYTimes.com.
TimesCast, which is available on the newspaper’s homepage between 1:00pm and 2:00pm EST Monday to Friday, falls somewhere between an ordinary television news broadcast and a short behind-the-scenes documentary. Viewers see segments of the daily page one meeting, followed by various reporters and editors in conversation about stories they are working on.
Previous days’ episodes will be available via the Times’ online video section.
Follow this link to see the first TimesCast episode in full.
“This is another example of our continuing emphasis on video, which represents one of the largest growth areas in digital media,” said Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer, The New York Times Media Group and general manager, NYTimes.com.
Last December the Times launched TimesSkimmer, a new format for organising online content that allows users greater control over layout.
Last week Journalism.co.uk attended a roundtable discussion about the future of video – for publishers, journalists and advertisers. Those gathered around the table, including representatives from the BBC, the Financial Times, the Economist and Thomson Reuters, were adamant that online video news and analysis is an important part of the multimedia mix and can be a source of revenue for “publisher broadcasters”.
Contrast this view with that of several regional website editors I spoke with at a recent meeting of the Digital Editors Network in Preston: investment in kit and training done, many admitted they’d axed news channel-style video on their websites, because of a lack of demand and now resources to keep it up. Some admitted their approach to video had been wrong – e.g. trying to replicate TV bulletins on a newspaper website – while others said dwindling resources had removed video from their web priorities’ list.
But there is clearly demand from advertisers and viewers for web video as a format – look no further than YouTube and the week’s latest viral videos.
And those providing the technology and options for advertisers to get involved are part of a burgeoning market if an announcement today from Videoplaza, which provides technology for serving up ads in and around online video, is anything to go by: the Scandinavian company has secured a $5 million investment round.
The investment will mean that Videoplaza, which already works with Incisive Media and myvideorights.com in the UK and La Vanguardia in Spain, can expand into new markets – both geographically and technologically, founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli told Journalism.co.uk yesterday.
This week the company signed its first Russian client and moves into Germany and further expansion in the UK and southern Europe are also on the shopping list, he says.
When it comes to making money from video on new platforms, publishers need to be prepared and have the options in place to take advantage of these new screens and viewers when they reach critical mass, he explains, adding that Videoplaza has been working with publishers to produce business plans for their video strategies to show to management where the money lies.
“I think there’s only a few carefully selected publishers who are seeing return on video. There’s a lot do and only part of that do we help them with and that’s the technology. But technology is an enabler in the end,” he says.
“We have experience from a lot of different clients in a lot of different markets so we can help our publishers come up with a lot of interesting packaging strategies, for example, working with a local newspaper, we’re not working with Proctor & Gamble and national ads, we have to do something more creative that will get the local car dealership on board.”
Key to Videoplaza’s strategy is making clients look at where video fits in with their wider business strategy. As such, the firm helped one radio station customer to develop an in-house video production service for advertisers, using their existing resources; elsewhere, with a TV client, a system has been developed where TV programme sponsors must sponsor related content online – a good example of helping advertisers bridge the gap between old and new media, says Tavakoli adds.
Sometimes with video advertising ideas you have to go backwards and educate advertisers and clients rather than push them into ‘the next big thing’ – creativity can then be sneaked in, he adds. Video advertising can be disruptive by its very nature, he says, and creating a good user experience while making as much money for the publishers as possible is a difficult balance to strike. One solution the company has introduced to a client is the option for viewers to turn off a pre-roll ad on videos after seven seconds – giving the user control, but the publisher’s advertiser a guaranteed timeslot.
But perhaps more significantly the company wants to use fresh investment to develop its products for ‘new tv’ – the myriad of screens and platforms through which people are now viewing online video and in particular the idea of connected TV. While there may only be a few publishers currently seeing returns on their investment in video, with ‘new TV’ comes new opportunities, says Tavakoli. The firm has already experimented with some forms of interactive advertising on La Vanguardia’s mobile videos and Sweden’s TV4 iPhone app.
We see a big change in consumption of video from ‘old TV’ to ‘new TV’, where the old TV is a big black box that receives a broadcasted signal that everyone else receives as well; where new TV is something a bit more unique and screen independent and more plentiful in terms of types of content. The ‘new TV’ needs an advertising platform built for it and we’re trying to build that platform.
From the publisher’s perspective – here’s Stephen Pinches from the FT on opportunities for publishers and IPTV:
This presentation by multimedia journalist Tracy Boyer below looks at making the transition from photography to multimedia. While the slideshow is missing the original audio from her presentation covers when and how using multimedia can enhance your images:
After researching the strange story of a very wealthy, elderly American heiress, veteran Msnbc.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman decided to experiment with the presentation of his article. Rather than turn in a few thousand words of copy as usual, Dedman put together almost 50 photographs in a slideshow and accompanied them with captions.
The result, The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery, is not groundbreaking in its approach to storytelling, but the response to the story is testament to the power of visual reportage.
Dedman reported that he received 500 emails from readers about the story, more than he’s received about any other in his career, and it has had around 78 million page views, more than any other story on Msnbc.com.
Poynter’s Steve Myers has an interview with Dedman on the story at this link…