A typically sensitive piece from my colleague across the pond on the fears of speaking and the preference for the written word. A wise starting point for anyone looking to encourage journalists into podcasting or video journalism.
Excellent post from Colin Mulvany on the bipolar arguments regarding quantity vs. quality in newspaper video production including an excellent set of questions to ask yourself about why you are doing video in the first place and what the value of it is.
I'd like to believe that one could choose which way you go based on the priorities of the story you are covering. But I haven't tried phrasing such flexible values. Answers on a postcard please.
Yes, I went to the AOP Conference yesterday.
No, I didn't blog it live.
Why not?
I LOVE this.
The University of Nottingham (no, stick with me) has created a video on each of the elements in the Periodic Table (I suppose technically that's poor English as there aren't any out of it).
Anyhoo. I love it because:
Andy Dickinson's post Time to get your head round fair use is more than fairly useful. Read it. It summarises the English (and Welsh? or UK?) law.
And it has also set me off on something of a tangent.
While the laws relating to copyright and fair use have not changed substantially, "custom and practice" undoubtedly have.
In the blogosphere it is pretty much acceptable to quote the majority of another person's post providing you "pay" for it with Googlejuice (a link).
Most of our websites make their video embeddable which is implicitly an invitation to use it for free (in return for Googlejuice, natch) although I had an interesting conversation the other day with Debbie from "reprints & eprints". The roots of this department lies in our print history. Advertisers delighted to be written about in an article often purchase reprints which they send out to their clients. We charged for the privelege, of course.
Anyway, Debbie had a client which was featured in one of our videos and they wanted to put it on their own website. How much should she charge them?
My first instinct was to say "nothing" and then I wondered why that was? When did I stop thinking of content as having value? Has the value of content actually diminished? If so, how come? Perhaps I've been brain-washed by the social media free-for-all and have lost sight of it?
Indeed, our purchasing department has just struck some incredible deals with image libraries and it's not surprising that Getty is trying to claw something back from the free image explosion.
Yet bizarrely many of the photographers we commission persist in clinging on to the copyright of what they produce for us. Freelance writers long ago recognised that the world was changing and that it was in their best interests to give us all rights to commissioned work, much to the NUJ's chagrin. But really: who would you rather buy a frying pan from? Someone who would only let you fry sausages in it once or someone who acknoweldged that you had paid for the frying pan and were entitled to do what you wanted with it?
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yes. I'm wondering:
Are you still in doubt about the magic of video? My thanks to colleague Nicholas Coombes for drawing my attention to this fantastic video on YouTube which attempts to get to the essence of just how engaging online video can be.
I've ordered an immediate outsourcing of all our in-house video production to Fred and Sharon.
Serious lesson: you can never be over-dressed for video.
Essential reading for people looking for tips on creating online video shows from Mike Butcher aTechCrunchUK. Nice to have a focus on UK productions.
While taking a gander at the European Journalism Centre's Video for Newspaper Journalists course, I came across this report from the recent DNA 2008 event.
It's interesting for the detail of an ideal schedule for how the Daily Telegraph would handle breaking news:
The Daily Telegraph is considered a front-runner when it comes to the implementation of video on the web. Edward Roussel, a digital editor for the Telegraph Media Group, outlined several strategies his company has implemented to best benefit from the digital storm.
The Telegraph encourages video by holding editors accountable for the corresponding section of the website – even compensating editors financially for jobs well done.
For each breaking story, a “story owner” is assigned. It is this person’s job to plan, commission and monitor each story across all platforms.
Roussel said his vision of a successful website is one which has it all. He displayed an ideal schedule for how the Telegraph would successfully handle breaking news:
* 11:15: Send out alerts via SMS/e-mail/desktop widgets
* 11:25: Have 150 words online, begin soliciting readers’ help
* 12:15: Update story, add images and audio
* 13:15: Add analysis, topic page
* 15:15: Have multiple angles, analysis, opinion (from readers), multi-media (picture galleries, video, graphics)
“In four hours you want to feel you’ve covered multiple angles of the story,” Roussel said.
My intrapreneurial colleague Martin Couzins ran an in-house seminar this morning. It was a combined digital journalism/career development programme in which he entreated people to embrace the digital age for the sake of their own careers if nothing else. Very brave to stand up and do that.
I was touched that he employed the Digital Journalism Manifesto evolving through comments on this blog post of mine.
But I digress. The point of this post is to draw attention to this short video he showed in which he interviews Kevin May, editor of Travolution.
Kevin has built this e-travel brand - and his own reputation in the field - quickly and effectively and in this video he talks about the importance of getting involved in other people's online discussions.
Doritos are running a user generated content video competition in the UK. They've done it in the US before with some fantastic results, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first time in the UK so it will be interesting to see the up-take and the results.
Create a Doritos ad, upload it to the site and you could win £20,000 and have it shown on TV.
More details on their deeply annoying Flash website.
Goodness. I should get this title tattooed onto my forehead to save my voice. Robert Montgomery's post belies a similar frustration, I feel. His argument is well put.
OK, so this panel discussion might not be the most watchable or listenable-to (?) piece of video you've ever seen but that's not really surprising.
What is quite mind-blowing is that it was taken with a 3G mobile phone and was streamed live (and recorded for posterity) using a service called Qik.
It was taken by Robin Hamman at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels yesterday.
It kind of reminds me of the earliest television broadcasts (not that I'm old enough to remember them of course) - not brilliant quality but the potential is mind-blowing.
As Hamman says:
The potential for this is incredible. From now on, every journalist will have the ability to get usable video content on air almost instantly using nothing but a mobile phone that fits easily in their pocket. Activists will be able to stream live from protests. Concert goers can share their front row seats with friends at home. Privacy concerns aside, the ability to stream live video from a cameraphone, and for that video to be instantly available around the world via the internet, really is awesome.
Kind of. Am really pleased with this latest video from Farmers Weekly Interactive who - under the albeit somewhat anti-cliffhanger title of "2CV beats all eggs-pectations in battle with Citroën's new C-Crosser 4x4" present the video below.
The conceit is that in 1948 Citroën's chief designer Pierre Boulanger decreed that their new car (the 2CV) should be able to carry a French farmer and his wife plus 50kg of potatoes and a small barrel of wine along bumpy country roads and that it should be able to cross a ploughed field with a basket of eggs on board and not break a single one of them.
It led them to wonder which was better for the task - the 60 year old design or the new C-Crosser 4x4.
The detailed article alongside the video is from Farmers Weekly magazine. The video tells the story in five minutes and shows you what you would be desperate to be able to see if you were reading the article in the magazine - a great incentive to follow up your magazine reading on the website.
Do organisations such as The Guardian and the Reading Evening Post (stick with me on this) offer counselling support for their contributors?
My god, the Internet's a rough place. First there was the whole Max Gogarty flame wars thing which - whatever you think of the Guardian's wisdom and or Gogarty's writing "style" - must have been pretty crushing for a 19 year old. He's probably sh***ing himself even now.
Anyway now the Online Journalism Blog is slagging off the Reading Evening Post whose admittedly rather lame News in 60 Minutes video earns his scorn.
Says the blog:The 1980s-era production style remains, with the same stock music, garish graphics - and this time, some appalling spinning, zooming, transition wipes.
Stuart’s challenge: to read out the day’s headlines “in just 60 seconds“. Yes, that’s some challenge. Perhaps someone should suggest that idea to BBC3.
One problem: when you take out the credits it’s not actually 60 seconds, which may be why Stuart is drowned out by the closing music at the end, just as David Wright was before him. Do they ever watch their own videos?
I’ll be more barbed: Stuart has the flat delivery of a 12-year-old reading ‘What I did on my summer holidays’, while his eyes flit below the camera like he’s checking his emails as well as reading the headlines. Presumably he’s reading a script. Doesn’t he know what the news is?
All of which may be true, but is it kind? We're trying to get our journalists to experiment with video and forms of video and when you're just starting out you've just got to tell them it's great even if it's complete Gogarty. They are learning, exploring with trepidation. The book (or video) on this kind of journalism isn't written yet and most young hacks have been ill-prepared for this kind of thing for this kind of activity.
Yes, Stuart White - how shall I put it - isn't quite yet in his stride as a video presenter, but I say "good for you for giving it a go, Stuart".
I hope that Surrey and Berkshire Newspapers Limited are doing what we are doing: patting him on the head, encouraging him, training him, pointing out how he might improve his videos. But not flaming him.
Oh and maybe offering him some counselling.
And who knows? Maybe this sort of thing goes down well in Reading.
Anyway, here's his video:
More on the BBC's multimedia experiment with mobile phone video. I'm going to be urging all of our journalists and editors to take a look at the results of the BBC's experiment.
Rory Cellan-Jones explains here the process they used when video blogging from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
As RCJ admits, opinions are divided over what is the "appropriate" level of quality but that may be mostly about the "appropriate" level of quality for the BBC.
He thinks a tripod and a better mic would probably have worked wonders.
Interesting, though.
Thanks to Trevor Goodman for bringing my attention to this... The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters will be video blogging using their mobile phones from the Mobile World Congress.
It's obviously a bit of a gimmick, but for the BBC to be effectively saying the quality of the picture isn't the same thing as the quality of the post should be reassuring to the journalists who still believe that every video report requires expensive kit and technicians. If the BBC is up for it...
Here's the introduction:
The Monte Carlo hotel in Las Vegas went up in flames last week and prompted an interesting analysis by Rob Curley who suggests a web/print strategy for covering developing stories like this.
He suggests:
We occasionally have this kind of story in our markets too - Foot & Mouth or BlueTongue and "incidents" at Heathrow . We tend to deal with them pretty effectively, but it's nice to see a process laid out in bullet points like that. Thanks Rob.
When it's a collection of stills, apparently. No, it's probably not the gag to open your next presentation with, but it is an interesting idea.
The Indy Star has been getting round a video ban by putting lots of photographs together.
Apparently:
We wanted to do something special from our Indianapolis Colts football games with multimedia, but hit a wall with the NFL rules against newspapers shooting video on the field. Several of our photographers ... had experimented with time-lapse projects using a still camera and motor drive bursts, putting the images together with Quicktime to give people a video-like experience.
Cunning and it begs the question: "How many frames per second can you use before it becomes a video?".
Unfortunately, I can't find an example on the IndyStar website. Do let me know if you fare any better.
