The Evolving Newsroom

A couple of lines of advice about getting video to work on news sites from US photojournalist Colin Mulvaney, as found on Newsgang.

1. Fix the players. Too may newspaper websites have crappy video players that take too long to load, don’t work with all browsers, have no full screen mode, don’t allow you to embed code or share with social media sites. Video need to be tagged so search engines can find them.

4. If people can’t find your video, then it’s not worth the time or effort to produce. Some videos or slideshows take off and become viral months or years after they are produced. Why? Because they are findable in an archive. Too many newspapers post a video for a day or two and then it drops off the radar.

5. Invest in a decent content management system. Too many websites, like mine, have been cobbled together with legacy code that doesn’t allow you to use Web 2.0 tools to enhance media distribution.

6. Propagate your video. It doesn’t have to live just on the “multimedia page.” Embed it in your newspaper’s blogs, stories and home page. Upload it to You Tube, iTunes.

7. Invest in technology that will speed up the editing process. There’s a whole new generation of video cameras coming out that are tapeless and allow you to cut the capture time by 90 percent.

8. Train, train and train some more. Multimedia quality won’t improve if producers don’t know how to do it better.

There's more in there. Also worth a look is his video blog about life in Spokane on SpokesmanReview.com.