FT.com has started embedding video footage in its news story pages (example here).
Prior to today’s launch of the smaller embedded player users were directed to a specific page for video content.
FT.com follows the BBC in embedding video in its news pieces and more widely across the site.It stared in March and soon after claimed the move had led to a doubling of views.
Norway’s newspaper of record, the Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, is to start webcasting parts of its editorial meetings.
Following of a newspaper debate on media transparency where American regional newspaper Spokesman-Review, which has webcast its editorial meetings since June 2006, was upheld as an ideal in terms of editorial transparency, the paper’s editor-in-chief Hans Erik Matre told attendees it was time to open up more of the editorial process to public view.
“We are considering webcasting our editorial meetings, starting this autumn. However, instances were we broadcast these live online, in full, will probably be limited,” he later told Journalism.co.uk.
“What we have concrete plans for, is publishing parts of our editorial meetings online to get feedback. This could either be to get reader perspectives on the evaluation of our stories, in retrospect, or to involve readers more upfront in the planning stage of big stories – say on healthcare.”
Steve Smith, the editor-in-chief of Spokesman-Review, visited Oslo recently. He told Journalism.co.uk webcasting editorial meetings was a minor programme in the scheme of things for the newspaper, which also use reader polls and journalist-written blogs actively.
“Our webcasts have 40-50 viewers in the morning, 20-25 in the afternoon. It’s mostly our competitors or people who have, or think they might have, a stake in what is being said. We attract few viewers simply because these are boring meetings. It’s symbolic: the fact that it is there, that it is an option, is important. We also break out pieces of the webcast and put them on blogs when we are dealing with controversial issues,” he explained.
He added: “The whole transparency costs next to nothing. The challenge is time: I would much rather spend all my time blogging than being an editor.”
In May, Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) became the first British newspaper to webcast an editorial meeting. Mark Comerford talks to LDP’s editor Mark Thomas about their “transparency” experiments here.
For his latest Vanity Fair article, Believe me, it’s torture, Christopher Hitchens underwent a session of waterboarding to test whether it amounts to torture (hat tip Greenslade)
Here’s the video:
Here also is the video of a investigative reporter from Current TV’s vanguard journalism strand beating him to the punch by undergoing the procedure for a piece that ran on the peer-to-peer news network about eight months ago:
Video platform Seesmic is partnering with Six Apart, developer of blogging platform Movable Type to provide its users and their readers with the ability to integrate video comments alongside traditional text-based comments through a new plug-in.
Movable Type customers and their readers will also become part of Seesmic’s lively community.
The introduction of the Movable Type plug-in follows Seesmic’s integration with other blogging services.
The US celebrity tabloid ‘news’ TV show and website TMZ has started using mobile phone technology to live stream video of celebrity goings-on.
And it’s all a great success Alan Citron, general manager of TMZ tells Beet TV.
And the real crowd pullers?
A courthouse appearance by Hulk Hogan’s son and a two hour stream of a car park where Britany was expected to arrive.
‘Hypnotic effect’ of the car park kept viewers interested says Citron.
Glam – this celeb business.
Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.
In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.
Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.
Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.
The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.
So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.
The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.
And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.
For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.
Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.
What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.
One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.
We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.
As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.
We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.
The Chicago Tribune has reportedly signed a deal with digital video recorder manufacturer TiVo that will see the selections of its TV critic Maureen Ryan automatically delivered to the sets of subscribers to the service.
Have to admit this had passed me by (so thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the point) at launch, but YouTube has unleashed on the world a channel specifically for citizen journalism called…wait for it…Citizen News.
It has also hired a news manager to oversee the whole affair. Here she is:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQkON7NN6WY]Strangely, there is something blissful about it…
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4pY3QtiGyo]The Liverpool Daily Post will later on today become the first newspaper in the UK to broadcast its afternoon editorial conference live on the web.
Journalism.co.uk will be carrying the stream. Watch it here.