Tag Archives: YouTube

AP pushing 250 stories a week through its newly launched YouTube channel

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The Associated Press is pushing up to 250 news videos through its YouTube channel every week, according to Beet.tv.

Though it launched little over a month ago the channel already has 1,671 videos, edited packages and raw footage of events, stored online for users to watch and drop into their own sites and blogs – although breaking news seems to be kept off the channel.

Kevin Roach, executive producer of AP Online Video, told Beet.tv: “Licensing content to these outlets is a way of protecting the value of AP’s news in an environment where it is easy for a user to post our content without permission or payment. Showcasing video clips on You Tube is in keeping with AP’s board-approved commercial strategy to protect our intellectual property and to help AP offset the costs of its global newsgathering operation. We’re monitoring our foray into social media closely.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw8GZifExFk]

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. Continue reading →

Social Media Journalist: ‘You have to be selective, keeping across all sites dilutes the value of the good ones’ Vicky Taylor, editor BBC Interactivity

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Journalism.co.uk talks to journalists across the globe about social media and how they see it changing their industry.

image of Vicky Taylor, BBC Interactivity editor

1. Who are you and what do you do?
Vicky Taylor, editor of Interactivity for BBC News. I run the team which produces the Have Your Say section of the website and the UGC hub which takes all the fantastic content the public send us and passes it on to all other BBC programmes and sites – internationally and in UK.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
Apart from Have You Say on BBC news website (on my pc but also on my phone as read only) I get news email alerts on my phone and on my PC about upcoming BBC programmes.

I’m also on Facebook, but use that mainly to contact old friends now in Australia (not from BBC of course), and LinkedIn, which is more useful for business contacts.

Your net worth is your network as the guy who set it up said recently! I started off using del.icio.us to bookmark interesting articles but never have enough time to do it justice. As a team we look at Youtube, Shozu, Seesmic, MySpace and some team members are on twitter so we monitor that too.

3. Of the thousands social media tools available could you single one out as having the most potential for news, either as a publishing or newsgathering tool?
Facebook has been fantastically helpful to our team in finding people with specialist interest.

When the Burma uprising was happening, a colleague found the Friends of Burma group and through them got in touch with many who had recently left the country and had amazing tales to tell.

Journalists now have to know how to seek out information and contact from all sorts of sources and social network sites are key to this.

4. And the most overrated?
I wouldn’t pick out one as overrated as they all have different uses for different audiences. I think though you have to be fairly selective, as keeping across all the sites and emails you may get if you go into everything is just not possible and dilutes the value of the really good ones.

Why you should always pay the writer

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To go with the series of features on online copyright on Journalism.co.uk, thought I’d share this ‘rant’ with you on the subject.

Writer Harlan Ellison sums up the issue of publishers using content without permission and/or thinking it should be free.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE]

(The clip, posted to YouTube, is part of the trailer for film Dreams With Sharp Teeth)

I suspect what he says about Time Warner would be echoed by freelancers and agencies dealing with online publishers: “They want everything for nothing. They wouldn’t go for five seconds without being paid and they’ll bitch about how much they are being paid and want more.”

Multimedia collaborations provide Super Tuesday coverage online

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Yesterday was just plain pancake day in the UK, but over the water it was Super Tuesday, as 24 of America’s 50 states voted on which candidates should be put forward for the country’s presidential election in November.

The coverage of the day’s events online saw some innovative multimedia and collaborative efforts from new and existing media outlets:

Mapping

Results + different time zones + different states = a great opportunity for breaking news displayed on mashed-up maps.

Google got in on the action with a map displaying live results and, with the help of Twitter and Twittervision, ‘tweets’ from across the US to give instant reactions from voters.

In another partnership with YouTube, as part of the site’s You Choose ’08 channel, Google is aggregating videos and clips from news organisations, candidates and users about Super Tuesday and plotting them on a Google map.

Elsewhere the BBC’s results map, which features as part of a broader election section, gives an easily navigable, state-by-state guide to the figures.

New collaboration

Publish2 launched a bookmarking system for newsrooms, bloggers and journalists, to create an aggregation service. Interested parties were asked to register for a free account and create a specific tag they would use – these tagged items can then be turned into a news feed by Publish2 to be repurposed on the tagger’s site.

Here’s an overview of the Networked Newsrooms idea or, to see it in action, visit the Knoxville News Sentinel or the New Jersey News Herald.

Video

Newsweek and The Washington Post teamed up for a five hour live webcast, encouraging viewers to react in a live webchat. Meanwhile The Huffington Post produced handheld footage from a Barack Obama rally in New York in the build-up to Tuesday and a live blog of the actual event.

MTV sent 23 of its ‘street team’ of citizen journalists to cover the polls and upload footage from video cameras and mobile phones. The clips are being distributed through MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and the Associated Press‘ online video network.

And finally – a slideshow…

…well, it’s much more than that really – De Volkskrant created an all-singing, all-dancing ‘slideshow’ with music, text, links, audio analysis and video giving an overview of the candidates, as well as a live results page for Tuesday’s results.

‘Journalism without journalists’

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“Network publishing is the natural ally of traditional media,” concludes Michael Maier, founder and CEO of Blogform publishing, in his essay ‘Journalism without Journalists: Vision or Caricature?’

In the essay Maier, who founded Germany’s first online-only newspaper Netzeitung and the Reader’s Edition – a site entirely constructed from reader-submitted content, examines projects that have experimented with collaborative journalism projects from citizens and journalists such as the LA Times’ ‘wikitorial’, Dan Gillmor’s ‘bayosphere’, and the Chi-Town Daily News.

In summary, the lessons Maier took with him from these experiments to the Reader’s Edition were:

  • There needs to be a hierarchy of control over reader’s input;
  • Collaboration means working together – reader’s should be encouraged and motivated by journalists not neglected in carrying out their work;
  • “Readers who write hardly think about other readers. They are driven by self-realization.” – the content that readers submit must still address the audience’s interest;
  • To traditional media – do not view blogs as a quick-fix solution: “Several attempts have been made to integrate bloggers into old institutions in order to inject fresh air, but it was not the traditional media that changed through these efforts. Rather, the bloggers lost their spicy language and became tame to please their old-news bosses.”

Perhaps the greatest barrier to successful collaboration between traditional media and what Maier describes as network publishing, he suggests, are profit margins.

“Every day we hear the latest reports of sinking profits for newspapers. Traditional media are trying to remain profitable largely by cutting costs. New journalistic projects are—either willingly or unwillingly—nonprofit.

“The enormous pressure of the market encourages compromise, and I truly hope that NP’s [network publishing] experimental character can be saved from that. A clear focus on the reader is key to a lasting success.”

Citing the success of the Associated Press’ merger with NowPublic.com and Reuters work with Global Voices, Maier argues that it is such collaborative efforts that will shape the future of journalism – for the better.

“Ultimately, it won’t be the angry bloggers or the clueless citizen journalists, not the crazy kids from YouTube or the dark forces behind MySpace who will decide the fate of journalism. Ultimately, readers and advertisers will show what they are willing to pay for. Network Publishing is the natural ally of traditional media. Even in a completely new media world, together, they can help ensure that society gets the kind of journalism it deserves.”

Sky News development competition and its royalty free use ‘in perpetuity’ of finalist’s work

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Earlier this month Sky News launched a competition offering £10,000 in prize money for developers to come up with new and novel uses of its RSS feeds.

Text, images and video are all covered in RSS and hoping for a innovative use of its feeds the news provider has put no limit on what developers can potentially come up with.

The competition closes this Friday and those with the best ideas will be asked to attend a ‘Dragons’ Den-style Judgment Day at the Sky News studios on Thursday 20th December.’

According to the terms and conditions of the competition:

“Sky will select approximately ten contributions whose applications show the most potential, from the points of view of design, usability, innovation and originality, to be deployed into a live environment, and could most successfully distribute Sky News content via new methods, web or otherwise.”

Aside from reward of actually developing a useful application for these feeds, Sky News plans to give at least £1,000 to the winner and at least £200 to each finalist.

However, in return Sky News will take quite a bit:

“Sky will keep details of, and retain a licence to use the Contribution of each Finalist, whether or not that Finalist is selected to be the Winner or a Runner-Up. Sky will require each Finalist, and, if a Finalist is under 18, a parent or guardian, to sign a separate agreement confirming Sky’s rights to use the Contribution.

3.2 All Finalists agree that the copyright (if any) and all other rights, title and interest, in and in respect of their Contribution, will be licensed by the Finalist to Sky as follows:
(a) Sky shall have an exclusive royalty free worldwide license in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution for a period of 3 months from the date of the submission of the Contribution by the Finalist;
(b) after that 3 month period, Sky shall have a non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license in perpetuity in all media in the Finalist’s Contribution.
All Finalists must agree that no payment (other than Prizes where awarded) shall be due to them nor shall they make a claim for any further payment against Sky or its licensees or assigns in respect of the license of such rights.”

Nothing particularly new in this, the approach is fairly typical of other commercial/creative competitions, Channel 4 is pretty much setting the same conditions for its own RSS widget competition.

So the position is a news company owned by a billionaire is asking for someone else to design it a cutting edge technological development, for it to use for free, forever.

But Dragon’s Den is all about entrepreneurs striking deals to make long-term money with their ideas, isn’t it?

Has Sky not missed a trick to apply the ethos of the competition to the prize?

If it really wants to be seen as a cutting edge company could Sky News have experimented with a little ad-share from traffic to the site from these new applications (if it’s possible to work this out)?

The same with Channel 4?

Collaborative production is the founding ethos of social media – YouTube and Flickr are nothing without their communities.

Similarly Facebook, for which the technological contributions of its members and partners is paramount. But at the moment, on the whole it’s done for free.

So why not also share about the cash created by these partnerships? After all, if you had a bit of video Sky News wanted, they would pay you for it. Why not for the delivery mechanism too?

For disaster reporting – change your site template and turn on social media mode

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The wildfires that are raging through California and have caused half-a-million people to be ordered from their homes have encouraged news providers to ditch their normal website formats and go into wholly innovative crisis-reporting mode.

Having a design format for breaking news that’s significantly different from the usual run of breaking news helps draw attention to the scale and importance of the story.

Cluttered websites like 10news.com and KNBC.com – Cory Bergman at Lost Remote points out – have failed to get over the magnitude of the events.

Adopting a unique layout for the home page – Corry adds – can also allow more content to surface:

“If you build a breaking news layout ahead of time, it’s not that much work to execute it when the story breaks. Just flick the switch. TV sites should own breaking news, and a flexible, content-driven design plays a big part.”

It’s something BBC News also does for big stories. It abandons the usual format of running a lead and to sub-lead stories, replacing them with a single large image to direct attention to a specific story.

Sites like the LA Times and MSNBC have adopted a similar approach for the fires. The Times has a photo gallery on its front page, along with links to its interactive maps, evacuation info and quick stats on the carnage the fires are causing.

Homepage design aside, devices for reporting the breaking news On The Fly have caused some news providers to ditch the usual tools and wing it with social media.

As we posted yesterday, radio station KPBS is using Twitter to do ‘Real-Time Updates’ on its website and to direct readers to local authority announcements, its Google Map of the fires, traffic updates and addresses for evacuation centres.

News 8, a CBS affiliate in San Diego, has even (thanks to Martin Stabe @ the Press Gazette for the point) taken down its normal website and replaced it with a rolling news blog, with links to YouTube videos and necessary/emergency information.

One of those uploaded videos is from journalist Larry Himmel, who reports on his own house being destroyed:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKGF2bbxQ6E]

Google’s fight against copyright infringement continues

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Launched yesterday Google’s newest tool has nothing to do with maps, search or news alerts.

Instead its latest device is aimed at preventing lawsuits, or to give it a less windy title, it’s the YouTube Video Identification gadget.

Demands made by Viacom earlier this year led to over 100,000 clips being removed from the Google-owned website, because they had been used without permission.

But the new tool will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube, and choose what they want done with it, whether this be removal or licensing.

“Like many of these other policies and tools, Video Identification goes above and beyond our legal responsibilities,” says a post on the Google blog.

If this wasn’t hammering it home enough – the post also lists the series of steps taken by Google to protect copyright, from limiting the length of uploaded content to 10 minutes to blocking accounts of ‘repeat infringers’.

Content owners interested in the video id programme will have to sign-up first to ensure their footage is protected by this tool.

What happens when someone hasn’t signed up – will the implementation of such devices provide sufficient defence against accusations of infringement? or will this tool make no difference if does not actively apply to all YouTube users?

UPDATE:

As if in answer to some of the questions posed above, Viacom have said the new tool won’t have any impact on Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google.

Simply put – “The new technology obviously has no bearing on the past and we don’t even know if the technology works yet,” Viacom spokesperson Jeremy Zweig is reported as saying by MediaPost.

Worth a shot though.

No Comment TV

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Digital Spy reports that Euronews, a television news channel covering world news from a European perspective in seven languages, is launching its own online news channel on YouTube.

A quick glance on YouTube shows that EuroNews’ No Comment TV channel has existed on the site for some time (since April at least), but it’s still worth a look.

No Comment TV, an extension of an existing EuroNews strand, provides footage of news events without any commentary.

Takes a while to get used to and there is a danger of playing guess the story, but there’s also an immediacy to the clips that the edited bulletin format complete with news reporter can lack. Elevate your gaming session at shark casino , where every game provides a splash of fun and the chance for big rewards. Make your way to the top of the food chain with exciting slots and games.

The clip of the recent riots in Burma illustrates this nicely.