The Evolving Newsroom

ReadWriteWeb have done a nice end-of-year profile on Common Craft, the clever folk behind those RSS in Plain English and other videos which explain social media and web stuff.



It's a nice read and the part about why Common Craft deciced to move away from its custom video service into its current licencing business model is interesting:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved.

"People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

From the Mastering Multimedia blog, in a post about the quality versus quantity debate, comes a list of 10 questions to ask yourself about how you're using video on your news website.

It's an instructive list, I think, and the post's worth a read too.

• What is the overall vision for video in your newsroom?
• Why are you doing video in the first place?
• Is quality video valuable to your viewers?
• Has video gained traction on your website over time? If not, why?
• Has your paper invested in training that empowers your video producers to be able to tell and edit a story effectively?
• Do you have (need) a web-savvy management structure in place to filter out bad video ideas and is an advocate for video based storytelling?
• If you are producing lots of video, do you have a website that showcases this valued web-only content?
• Can viewers find your videos quickly if they land on story page and not of the home page?
• Can lower levels of video quality be acceptable if they meet a high news value bar?
• Should small papers with dwindling resources really be adding poorly produced video to their already bleak shovelware websites?
  

For the nostalgics among you, here's a cracker of an educational video from the days when women worked on the social pages, typesetters ruled, sub-editors wore visors and syndicated copy was mimeographed.

Speaking of the need for news organisations to find and distribute stories out where people naturally congregate online, CNN is taking a leap along that pathway by allowing its video to be embedded.

ReadWriteWeb writes:

With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. Judging from the wording of the announcement, CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

The embeddable viewer is pretty standard and currently only allows playing one single clip at 384x216. We weren't able to determine if CNN is restricting this service by geography, but at least our Canadian friends have reported that they could play play the embedded videos without a problem.

Well, let's see.



Seems to work okay in this part of the world. The embed button is pretty small - tucked away at bottom right of the media player - and it might have been an idea to highlight it YouTube style until the idea took off.

But it works and the idea to allow users to embed video on their blogs is a great one.

Just wish they'd add crumb trails to their site. I clicked on a Business story and tried in vain to navigate back to the homepage by clicking on Home. Eventually realised I was now in CNN Money and had to use a CNN.com button at the other end of the navigation bar to get back.

If you've ever wondered how many trees will be sacrificed to keep you in newspapers during your lifetime, wonder no more.

National Geographic have come up with a nifty multimedia feature called Human Footprint, which lets you see how much you use of given commodities in a lifetime. You can see a lifetime's worth of milk bottles, the eggs and potatoes you'll eat, the petrol you'll use. Each comes with some useful comparators to help give perspective.













It turns out I'll be responsible for 220-odd trees getting pulped so I can read the paper each day, although I'm not too sure what to do with that piece of information just yet. There's a 'behind-the-scenes' video about what happens to all those newspapers after they go in the bin. At least I think that's what it's about, the video lapsed into a weird staccato when I tried to watch it - that'll be my local broadband infrastructure straining at the seams again. Sigh.

Viewing problems aside, the interactive feature is nicely done and worth a look.

"If the news is important enough, it will find me."

That quote kicks off this video from San-Francisco-based entrepreneur and blogger Loic Le Meur. He's the (French) man behind Seesmic, a community video site that's currently in alpha testing and getting a fair amount of attention on places like Twitter.

It's a nice wrap of how we can (and do) use social media to write and distribute content, share it, find it and read it.

Reportr.net caught up with my former colleague Chris Lloyd, assistant managing editor of Telegraph Media Group, at the Online Journalism Symposium in Austin, Texas. He talked about the challenges the group faced in integrating its newsroom, including structural and cultural changes. Worth a listen if you haven't heard much about the process of integration before.

I was taken with TED's media player this morning as I was listening to Richard Dawkins trying to drum up support for an "I'm an atheist and I'm proud" campaign in the US. (Thanks to @FND for the Twitter link.)














The clean horizontal container appeals to me (I can't wait for more web designers to embrace the horizontal form), with the clear information on the right-hand side about the video itself and about the speaker, and the nod to the sponsor kept proportionally small and bottom-right.


I like the way you can see (top left) when the video was recorded and when it was posted (saves me having to start playing something I've already seen elsewhere or that's too out of date for my purposes).

















I like the way I can fast-forward using the well-proportioned scroll-bar, and that text markers pop up as I hover over the scroll-bar with prompts telling me what the speaker's talking about at that point.

The smart people at Common Craft have turned their talents to explaining Twitter 'in Plain English' to people who've never heard of it.

The video misses some of my favourite things about Twitter, such as being able to see what people are reading and follow the link they've posted so you can read it too - in other words that it's another window onto the online world. (In fact, thanks to @FND who posted this link on Twitter).

Nor does it mention the way you can build up communities of people who share your work or personal interests and pick their brains.

But it does a good job with the basics (as ever):

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.

There are a few nice notes in this post about online video strategies from Liz Foreman, a former TV manager who jumped to a Gannett newspaper site, WCPO.com in Cincinnati.

For a start, Liz sees newspapers as being more serious about online than TV:

"My boss’ mantra: ‘Write for online, update for print’ permeates the newspaper newsroom but the online thinking also extends into other departments for a very good reason - online is a serious money-making component of the business. Although many TV stations are getting more excited about the web, their websites just aren’t bringing in the bucks like newspaper sites are (I know, there are exceptions,) and consequently they just aren’t as serious about it."

She notes that while video is gaining popularity with online news sites few have a coherent strategy for it:

"As a result, newspapers need folks not only to shoot and edit video but also to help the staff understand what types of video will work online and how to monetize their video efforts."

She summarises her job as being an ambassador for video:

"Reminding staff that we 'do' video, suggesting video ideas during the story planning process and politely saying certain ideas won’t make good videos, motivating newsroom staffers to shoot video and disseminating video statistics so that people can observe traffic growth.

"Based on my experience, the job is akin to my early days of running a TV news website - you must be a good salesperson, good at collaborating with other departments and religious about communicating what works and doesn’t work."

She offers some good pointers for anyone moving into a video management job, and let's hope a few such jobs will be created in New Zealand soon.

The ever-readable Paul Bradshaw kicked off a series on online journalism basics recently with the importance of brevity - both for writing and for multimedia.

It's a good point that can't be made too often so here it comes again - as succinctly articulated by Paul:

• The web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio. So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?
  

• Shorter articles tend to work better online because most people struggle to read long documents on screen, or find scrolling too much hassle if they’re looking for something specific or succinct.
  

• Within the article itself, paragraphs should be succinct. Stick to one concept per paragraph. Once you’ve made your point, move on to the next par.
  

• Brevity is equally important when producing multimedia material. For the medium that brought us YouTube, anything over three minutes is too long.
  

• Brevity works well online because it allows for more effective distribution: others can link to the specific element they are commenting on, or even embed it on their site.

• What’s more, it provides the raw material for further journalism: a user might decide to re-edit the material to provide a different narrative; or mash it up with maps or databases; or they might incorporate it into further investigation into a particular issue - all of which further distributes your good name, and provides further material for you to build on.

Found a great range of video guides on RSS, wikis, social networking and other Web2.0 tools in plain English. They're by Lee LeFever of Common Craft.

Try one... (this explains wikis)

Wired science reporter Alex Madrigal is interviewed about his exploits so far in beat blogging.

He's trying some interesting things, among them:

running a Facebook group for people who read science stories; posting pieces to the group ahead of publication (such as a list of 'top 10 new organisms') to keep people interested, posting video of reporters and editors at work in the office so readers can see what it looks like

looking at running debates: reader versus reader, or reader versus expert. Then perhaps create Reddit widgets so people can vote on who won the debate.

looking at asking readers to tag science journal articles that they're interested in, maybe using Del.icio.us, which Wired can then monitor and incorporate into their reporting.

Emarketer reports that six out of 10 broadband users watch video online at least once a week. The good news for broadcasters is that "70% of internet users surveyed who watched television online did so because they had missed the programme when it was on TV. Nearly one in five said they watched TV online to watch programmes again, after having seen them first on a television set."

The report is based on research by US company Horowitz Associates, who noted: "The data suggest that broadband video is not cannibalistic to linear video, but rather an enhancement to consumers' traditional TV experience."

Editors Weblog are running a series on video and how much newspapers should use it.

The New York Times and CNBC have done a deal to share content on their websites. The CNBC site will carry Times stories and nytimes.com will carry CNBC video stories. The deal helps position the pair against the coming onslaught from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal - Fox Business News nexus.

This is the first reciprocal print-TV collaboration I've seen of this kind. Most deals have been more about print companies buying editing and archive services from TV. But it was only a matter of time. The concept makes sense: the print sites get a steady supply of broadcast quality video and the TV sites get written news in volume, each without having to invest large sums in equipment and training.

Nice piece of advice from Howard Owens about being a mobile video journalist (MoJo):

"The classic image of a MoJo is a reporter sitting in his car, filing a story. Certainly, you must spend time doing that, but the less time you spend actually driving that car, the better. You need to be out and about, on foot, with people.

"Your job isn’t to find scandal or hard-hitting news. Your job is to unlock the life of your town in a way that print journalism hasn’t done consistently for generations.

"It’s all about people."

Howard Owens talks about video taxonomy and what makes good video on online news sites: "raw is good; heavy editing is a waste of time". He's posted while reading Glut, Mastering Information Through the Ages, which I haven't read yet but have on standby for when I go to the beach for two weeks at the end of the month (smile). Here's an excerpt:

"Story video may have its time and place, but unlike some, I don’t believe that is the sum and whole of what online video can or should be.

"The point of quick-production, reporter-shot video should be to illustrate in a way that words alone cannot. Raw is good. Heavy editing is a waste of time. Context is a distraction. The point is not to capture the whole story. It is to illustrate a story."

I hadn't read Howard before but found him through Shane Richmond, the Telegraph's Communities Editor (and thoroughly smart guy), and like him because a/ he writes about interesting things and b/ he thinks George Jones's version of He Stopped Loving Her Today is the best country song of all time, which makes him okay in my book. I'm not sure it is the best, but it can't be far off, and I agree completely that no one could do it as well as George.

Give users a list of videos and they'll choose the 4-minute version, and bail after just two minutes of streaming, according to Brightcove chief Jeremy Allaire who was speaking to Silicon Alley Insider.