The future of video journalism: What will audiences be watching?

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Still from 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera directed by Dziga Vertov, via Wikimedia Commons

I was asked to give a talk to a BBC Global Video away-day on the future of video, looking at what their audiences will be watching in the coming years.

The Global Video department was launched last year and makes video to run cross-platform in multiple languages on all the BBC’s Global News outlets: World News, BBC.com and 27 World Service language services. The team never makes a video just for one language or site, changing the voiceover and translating the film into two or more languages.

The future of video journalism

Below is an outline of the talk I gave on the day:

What will audiences be watching?

There are countless examples of innovations in video journalism, including many from the 40 videos a week produced by Global Video.

Here are a few examples of trends in online video journalism and innovations using emerging technologies.

Documentary:  Just as long-form journalism has a place in the digital sphere, so too do long-form video documentaries using TV and cinema conventions of storytelling.

For example, here is the Guardian’s 32 minute ‘I will never be cut’: Kenyan girls fight back against genital mutilation, which recently won a Webby award.

Web native: As online video has developed, it has found its own style and some filmmakers are telling stories using a new set of rules. Multimedia producer Adam Westbrook has written many articles arguing for online video to encourage subjects to look directly at the camera, abandon the “noddy” (the way video often hides an edit by showing a clip of the interviewer nodding) and instead add a flash to white or black, acknowledging the edit to the viewer.

Storytelling: With the advent of online came new storytelling techniques such as audio slideshows, graphics and ways of visualising data. The BBC Global Video unit has its own fantastic examples, including this video made by Tom Hannen using Adobe After Effects and brilliantly telling the story of blood doping.

The Economist too is experimenting with storytelling in words. Here is an example.

Videos filmed on small, cheap cameras: The Global Video unit itself is equipping its journalists in the field with video news gathering skills. Elise Wicker from the department has written about how she has been training staff overseas to use Kodak cameras to capture footage.

Here is an example of an Al Jazeera documentary filmed entirely on an iPhone. Syria: Songs of defiance is a first-person film made by a journalist who spent many months in Syria but could not risk being seen with a video camera. This film, complete with time lapses shows how a great film can be made in the process of the edit.

Contextual video: Advances in web browsers allow new possibilities. Here are three examples made using Popcorn JS, a JavaScript open-source library from Mozilla allowing video to link to real-time web content such as tweets, Google Maps and Wikipedia entries.

History in the Streets is an audio recording uploaded to SoundCloud with locations linked so that when the audio refers to a place, the viewer is taken to that location on Google Street View and can navigate and explore.

Open Images, Open Data is a Dutch film showing a video surrounded by real-time links to content from several sites, including Wikipedia.

This example of a film about freedom of the press in France links to the source documents, demonstrating how journalists can link to data or research to back up a claim.

Development of Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker tool could allow video journalists without coding skills to produce similar video.

How will audiences be finding and sharing content?

Social sharing is key to the future of video and the format lends itself to a social experience with YouTube demonstrating how videos can go viral.

Social is overtaking search as a way to discover content. Facebook overtook Google in March as a traffic driver to the Guardian, largely down to the news outlet’s “frictionless sharing” Facebook app.

New audiences will be finding and frequently watching video on social networks, whether they be Facebook, Twitter, or Chinese site Renren.

Video is often a component of a wider narrative too. Storify is a free tool allowing anyone to curate a story by dragging in tweets, Flickr photos, SoundCloud audio and video from YouTube and Vimeo.

And platforms such as Storify, YouTube, Vimeo, Bambuser, and many more have their own communities and networks too.

Here is an example of what Mark Boas, one of the Knight-Mozilla Fellows, is doing. He is embedded within the newsroom of Al Jazeera and looking at how you can socially share content without detracting from the experience of viewing a video.

Boas told me that part of what is driving this is social, partly the second screen, partly web-enabled TV, partly browser technologies.

He is experimenting with social sharing text from within The fight for Amazonia. Content is pulled live from a Google Doc, he explained.

Writing on his blog, Boas describes the possibilities of social.

Technology is available now to allow people to chat and comment over the web. Certainly this is an experience we could build in. Imagine if you could see all the people currently watching the same programme as you and interact with them.

Boas believes this social layer is key but that it should not “significantly distract from the main content”.

He thinks the social experience benefits from integrating existing social networks and will “perhaps create new ones surrounding the video medium”.

People like to share their experiences in general and this certainly seems to hold true of video and media in general.

He has ideas for future implementations, including “the use of word accurate hyperlinked transcripts, full support for mobile devices and second-screen synchronisation.”

In an email Boas told me:

I think many like me are experimenting just now. I myself am very interested in making experiences that don’t distract too much from the principle act of watching video but I feel that the challenge here is to allow the viewer to choose the level of interactivity and make that choice as plain as obvious and seamless as possible.

3. What will people be watching video on?

Web-enabled TV: Web technologies and television are converging with the advent of web-enabled TV.

The New York Times earlier this month asked “Why can’t TV navigation be more like a tablet?” That looks likely with the next generation of viewing options, including video on demand available on games consoles and an increasing number of TV apps.

Web-enabled TV is expected to offer users an experience more like navigating using a tablet, with viewers able to control the screen by a series of touch screen gestures and swipes.

If rumours of the new Apple TV are to be believed, this may take the form of a Siri voice-activated TV made by Apple (a later development than Apple TV, a box which is plugged into a regular TV to stream iTunes content).

It is also reported that set-top manufacturer LG will be offering televisions with Google TV later this month, with features including voice activation, the ability for viewers to watch video-on-demand content and web videos and control of content by touch screen and swipes.

Google TV will also allow friends or contacts in different locations to watch video together as it will incorporate Google Hangouts, the Skype-like video option from Google Plus.

Desktops/laptops: BBC Global Video’s audience may access content on different connections than those that spring to mind when you first think of web video.

The number of home broadband connections are low in some of the countries covered by the 27 language services, with large proportions of audiences connecting with dongles and other 3G connections in some countries. Video may be easier to stream on a 3G connection at certain times of the day, and impossible at busier times.

Audiences may also use proxies to circumvent internet restrictions in countries such as China, which can give a slow connection.

Tablets: Tablets are increasingly popular in some of the countries served by BBC Global Video, and take-up is low in other countries.

Whether they become an important platform in poorer countries remains to be seen but there is no doubt that they have already become important for more affluent audiences.

And tablets can provide a beautifully tactile viewing experience, with readers encouraged to use the touch screen to play a video embedded within a news story.

Mobile: The popularity of mobile and likelihood of possibilities for video viewing should not be ignored.

It is worth noting that 87 per cent of the world population has a mobile phone, compared with just 8.5 per cent having fixed broadband. According to stats on Mobithinking, there are 5.9 billion phones compared with half a billion fixed broadband connections.

In Jordan the number of mobiles exceeds the population with 6.2 million phones to 6 million people, according to Ayman Salah, a technology expert based in the Middle East.

In Egypt there are 74 million mobiles for a population of 84 million, Salah said, with mobiles being introduced commercially in 1997. That compares with 11 million landlines, first introduced almost 100 years ago in 1920.

The BBC World Service sites and BBC.com are well served by mobile sites that recognise the phone type and format video accordingly.

But of course mobiles are not all Androids, BlackBerrys and iPhones. Smartphones are less common in poorer countries, and different brands dominate. According to the Economist, Nokia ranks with Coca-Cola as Africa’s most recognised brand.

So what is the future of video in Africa if smartphone penetration is low? I asked mobile expert Peter Paul Koch (also known as PPK online).

“Don’t focus too much on smartphones,” he warned.

Today’s feature phones are getting more and more functionality, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they add video in the near future. The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring, and pretty soon we’ll see “feature phones” (as in cheap) with “smartphone” functionality.

And video is growing on mobile. Cisco predicts that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.

Mobile video will increase 25-fold between 2011 and 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.

Mobile is intimate. It is in your pocket, it is personal and is there when you have a spare five minutes to watch a web video.

What is the future of video? With a growing trend in social sharing, an ever-expanding range of devices and internet connections, including to mobile, the future is bright.

Video: what the Journalists’ Charity does and how you can help

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Video by the Press Association. Presenter Anna Botting (@annabotting)

This two year-old video shot by the Press Association helps explain the work of the Journalists’ Charity.

The charity usually raises money at high-profile dinners and speaker events, but now you have the chance to support your fellow journalists (and your future selves) in a much easier way.

Just a fiver (or more) will help speed me, Journalism.co.uk publisher and owner (@johncthompson) on my way on an epic 1400km solo and unsupported cycle from Brighton to Oslo, Norway on 8-19 June 2012 (see earlier blog post for full details).

My sponsorship page is here.

 

 

If no one likes journalists, then we need to look after our own

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Journalists' Charity

Earlier this year, a US study claimed that becoming a journalist is the fifth worst career choice. As well as citing factors such as stress, industry outlook, income levels and general working environment for the ranking, the study quotes a reporter as saying the younger generation “doesn’t care about the news”.

This is against a background of continuing decline in public trust of communications professionals, no doubt exacerbated by the ongoing findings of the Leveson inquiry as it investigates the underbelly of journalism and politics.

Of course it’s not all bleak. In many ways, this is a time of renaissance for journalism as our ways of gathering and disseminating news proliferate online. And journalism will always offer rewards that outweigh the financial ones for the majority of us.

Nevertheless a life of low salary and high stress can take its toll, if not on you then for some of your colleagues. So why not do something small to help that collectively can amount to something big?

The Journalists’ Charity “started in 1864 when a group of parliamentary journalists met up in a London pub to set up a fund to help their colleagues and dependents who had fallen on hard times. In the days before state benefits, grants were made to meet the costs of providing some of the necessities of life”. The Victorian novelist Charles Dickens was a founder supporter.

These days it has widened its remit to include all journalists and is always ready to help them and their dependents with advice, grants and other forms of financial assistance. The Journalists’ Charity also runs a care home for journalists, Pickering House, in Dorking, Surrey as well as sheltered and extra care housing.

Given that most of our pensions are not going to add up to much, that’s quite a nice safety net isn’t it?

On 8 June I’m going to cycle solo and unsupported from Brighton (home of Journalism.co.uk) to Oslo, Norway to raise money for this under-appreciated charity. I will be cycling approximately 850 miles in 11 days, an average of 77 miles a day, cycling through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark.

You can do your bit by sponsoring a fiver or more on my sponsorship page and helping to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook etc.

Sponsors who do not wish to remain private will be rewarded with recognition and thanks on our @journalismnews Twitter channel (58k-plus followers) so that’s pretty decent exposure, especially if you sponsor on behalf of your media-related business.

And if you’re still not convinced that the Journalists’ Charity is a worthy cause, I will also be raising money for two cancer charities – alternative sponsor page here.

John Thompson (@johncthompson), cycling to raise money for charity

Journalism.co.uk owner John Thompson (@johncthompson), who will be cycling Brighton to Oslo in 11 days to raise money for the Journalists' Charity

The route I plan to cycle from Calais (once I have cycled to Dover and taken the ferry)

The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 4-10 May

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1. Al Jazeera to relaunch citizen media platform Sharek

2. Eight top tips for those stepping into data journalism

3. ‘It is time to take storytelling seriously’

4. #jpod – Open data and journalism: How and why journalists should be digging for stories

5. Mail Online editor: Knox verdict report due to ‘human error’

6. Channel 4 scoops three gongs at One World Media Awards

7. BBC accuses China of ‘deliberate’ jamming of World News

8. Vogue editors sign international pact on model photos

9. Arabic rolling news channel Sky News Arabia launches

10. Al Jazeera English closes Beijing bureau after visa refusal

#followjourn – @mbradbrook Malcolm Bradbrook/journalist and lecturer

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Image by shawncampbell on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Who? Malcolm Bradbrook

Where? Malcolm is journalism course leader at the University of Gloucestershire and a freelance journalist

Twitter?@mbradbrook

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

Journalisted Weekly: Hodgson, elections and a select committee

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Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations. Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources.

 

Hodgson, elections and a select committee

For the week ending Sunday 6 May:

  • Roy Hodgson named England manager
  • Local elections in Britain, presidential elections in France and a Commons select committee were covered lots
  • Russia warns US, fighting in Congo, explosion in Russia and passing of Protection of Freedoms Bill covered little

Hacked Off is reporting live from the Leveson inquiry again this week via twitter @hackinginquiry and hackinginquiry.orgThe Orwell Prize awards ceremony is on May 23rd. All welcome, email katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org to reserve your free placeFor the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbeCovered Lots

Covered Little

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

Celebrity vs Serious

Eurozone leaders (top ten by number of articles)

Who wrote a lot about…the Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee

Long form journalism

Hacked Off is reporting live from the Leveson inquiry again this week via twitter @hackinginquiry and hackinginquiry.org

The Orwell Prize awards ceremony is on May 23rd. All welcome, email katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org to reserve your free place

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

Editor of the Liverpool Echo on the branding benefits of distributing a £1m Regional Growth Fund

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Alastair Machray, editor of the Liverpool Echo, applied to take on distribution of a Regional Growth Fund in the hope that it would improve the paper’s brand and “place them at the heart of the community”.

The RGF is a government fund designed to be help create jobs through small businesses; the Liverpool Echo applied to be a partner and received £1 million to distribute locally.

Speaking at the Society of Editors regional conference yesterday (Thursday, 10 May), Machray gave some pointers on the process, and outlined its pros and cons.

“Applying to partner with the RGF is not a simple process, and is not to be approached alone,” Machray warned.

The 60-page application for the RGF is time consuming and technical. He advised considering whether the necessary time to complete the application properly could be afforded and building a team and electing a bid writer – someone that knows the buttons to press for government departments, a secretariat, and an investment company to manage the money.

When the Echo was successful in securing the £1m, they launched it in print, supported it online, and tried to pique interest using social media. Machray condensed the process:

  1. Ask for entries
  2. Get judges from the private sector
  3. Shortlist entries
  4. Award the winners, and then track the progress of these businesses
  5. Reap the rewards for the paper

The benefits of the fund have been numerous for the paper, with “great editorial coming out of it”, Machray said, “but securing the fund was more about brand than selling papers or increasing web traffic”.

Machray also highlighted that they were approached to apply for the fund, indicating that the government still recognises the value of local papers.

We have a place at the heart of government; our brands resonate, and this is a good place to be.

Machray warned about dealing with trolls throughout the RGF process, and said to be prepared for criticism: “People were convinced we were trying to milk the wad”.

A rumour circulated that the the Echo was taking a 60 per cent cut of the million pounds, when in actuality the paper did nit even take back the £4,000 it cost to put the bid together, he said.

Machray also warned against involving third parties, such as businesses that offer “application stimulation”.

When questioned if he would repeat the process, Machray said that while the move had been beneficial for the paper, he would want to see the outcome of the RGF on local businesses before investing time into it again.

Mike Rawlins on how Pits n Pots offers ‘a proper good pub discussion’ around politics online

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Mike Rawlins, founder of the Stoke-based political hyperlocal site Pits n Pots spoke at the regional Society of Editors meeting today, on the site’s origins and where it plans to move to in the future.

Born out of a desire to “see the city improve”, Rawlins argued that the site aimed to cater for a what he felt was a need for more discussion around local politics, adding that the site’s highly active comment threads today are like a “a proper good pub discussion”.

Pits n Pots holds a simple ethos:

  • no editing in audio interviews
  • no editing of video interviews
  • no spinning stories: it’s always just straight down the line
  • any political parties get to use the platform

As Pits n Pots is run by enthusiasts, rather than journalists, it focusses on providing the information, and allows the community to read into it. Not editing interviews also minimises the need for technical expertise.

The site has seen a rapid growth in traffic, moving from around 1,900 unique visitors a day, with 6,000 pageviews in December 2009, up to approximately 12,000 unique visitors and 30,000 pageviews a day in April and May of 2011 as the site provided far more comprehensive coverage of the local elections than the local press. Other successes for the site include providing live coverage of a Stoke on Trent EDL rally, and posting videos from their coverage of the day which resulted in them being the 2nd highest news channel on YouTube globally for two days.

Now supported by the Journalism Foundation, April 2012 saw Pits n Pots attempt a print format, produced by the journalism students at Staffordshire University, printing 50,000 copies. Journalism.co.uk reported that this one-off print edition, which was created as a marketing tool, helped to double Pits n Pots web traffic.

Rawlins says that the site will never be a full time job for him, but he hopes to employ a journalist in the future to progress the site, to facilitate better use of data, more investigative content, and allow better scrutiny of the local council.

He concluded that hyperlocal sites like Pits n Pots would never replace the local paper, and that they can coexist.

#PPAconf: Why cover design matters for the Big Issue

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In the past year, the Big Issue has changed dramatically, regaining its reputation as a “magazine with teeth”, according to editor Paul McNamee.

Speaking at yesterday’s PPA conference in London, he said: “We are a very different magazine than we were a year ago and a radically different magazine from 24 months ago.”

The Big Issue has seen big changes since it teamed up with Dennis Publishing. With editorial now run from Glasgow and one national edition of the magazine, McNamee concentrated on  “the four Cs”, cover, content, columnists and community, to give the magazine some bite.

He told delegates: “The cover was the most important. [A bold cover] could attract a lot of attention and make a lot of noise.

“We had to find a way to find our own space again.”

Simplifying the cover’s design to one element, McNamee showed the delegates how the front page was markedly different to what it was before the magazine’s relaunch. He said: “[The cover has] one, single element to it every week that has power and impact and something to say.”

Along with enlisting footballer Joey Barton as a columnist and strengthening the magazine’s relationship with its vendors, McNamee said he believed the end product is something which will stand the test of time.

“We’ve been going for 21 years now – hopefully, we’ll be around for another few yet.”

#PPAconf: How the Stylist got to know its readers

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For its 100th issue, women’s magazine Stylist wanted to try something completely different.

In a risky move that eventually paid off, the magazine put out a call to its readers to supply the content. What followed was an issue which got to grips with exactly what the readers wanted in a way quite unlike anything which had done before.

Lisa Smosarski, Stylist’s editor-in-chief, told delegates at yesterday’s PPA conference: “Through this process, we got to know [the readers] better than we could have in any other way. We were absolutely delighted with the product in the end.”

Handing editorial decisions over to the readers was a daunting prospect, but one which inevitably paid off for the women’s magazine. Equally daunting was handing over the reins to celebrity chef Nigella Lawson for an edition which took eight months to put together, a time-scale almost unheard of in the world of publishing, Smosarski said.

“We hadn’t expected that she’d spend eight months working on this issue – at times we thought we’d absolutely lost the plot. But spending time means you get something that bit more special,” she said. The issue was a commercial success and the caramel-covered Nigella on the cover made national news.

Just as the 100th issue changed Stylist’s dynamic with their readers, the Nigella issue changed their dynamic with celebrities. Smosarski said: “We learnt that there would be a few projects throughout our year that we should spent that much time on.”

Branding themselves “Britain’s thinking women’s weekly”, Smorsarski explained how Stylist’s risk-taking will take them to the next level in the coming year. She said: “We’re pretty confident this is going to be our most important year yet.”