78 Picas

Visions of Video

Several of the blogs I read regularly, such as Rob Curley’s and professor Mindy McAdams’, have featured posts aimed at solving the enigma that is web video. In McAdams’ post, Reassessing Newspaper Video, McAdams discussed and agreed with Curley’s posting, Newspaper-Produced Video: Quality versus Quantity. 

McAdams quoted Curley and added her thoughts in this graf:

“Give them what they want and what they need,” Rob wrote. I agree wholeheartedly — that’s what good newspapers used to try to do (and some still do).

It’s a good thought, and I’ll go ahead and jump on the bandwagon and drink the Kool-Aid.

Giving readers information that they could and should use is the principle many newspapers were founded on.

Newspapers shouldn’t support Marxist views of reinforcing the status quo. They were designed by rouges like Benjamin Franklin (or should I say Silence Dogood) and Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris to dish out information the public needed to know, with stories about political corruption and injustices.

Why should newspaper Web videos be held to a different standard? Is my generation (I’m 28, by the way) so lazy and deceived that we cannot recognize a medium that is doing us a world of good?

Stephanie Romanski disagreed with this approach in this convincing posting. Romanski, who is the Web Editor for the Grand Island Independent, in Nebraska, wrote:

Focus on what the readers want and not what we think they want.

Romanski believes a more amateur approach is appropriate for shooting Web video at her small town paper. She said only about 30-40 viewers watch professionally-done Web videos on their site, while more than 200 tuned in to watch an amateur video she shot of snow outside of her home. 

Here’s what she wants:

1. Donate our expensive handhelds that no one is using to area schools with the stipulation that they use it to film videos we can put on our site…

2. Buy inexpensive FlipVideo cams for the reporters and show them it’s as easy to download/upload video as it is to pull audio from their recorders…

3. Study our view stats and try to discover and predict what it is our readers actually want to see.

I think both ways have merit. But, more importantly, what I think this proves is that there is no “magic solution” for how to do video.

Frankly, it’s absurd that we’re even looking for a grand theory in this area. After all, if someone told us there was only one way to do good journalism, we would laugh them out of town.

Toot Tweet?

(I absolutely LOVE that in the above quote the Army has grouped vegetarians and human rights groups in with anarchists and communists!)

According to this story on Breitbart.com, the U.S. Army has identified Twitter as a risk to national security.

WHAT???

Apparently, Twitter users get the word out about national disasters and police movements surrounding political figures faster than the new media can.

I don’t understand how, by this standard, the entire Internet isn’t a security risk.

What is this really about? Is the government nervous about social networking/citizen “journalists?”

And if this truly is a safety threat, what does the Army intend to do about it?

Twitter is rapidly gaining subscribers, and it will likely serve as a tool for many journalists and citizens in the near future. Whatever happens, this proclamation from the Army is worth watching.

The Good ‘Ol Days of ‘04

Arianna Huffington posted this column explaining how the Internet is making McCain’s attack campaign tactics obsolete. 

Huffington called McCain’s smear tactics “Rovian” — a nod to the cutthroat tactics used by the Bush administration during the 2004 election.

“McCain is running a textbook Rovian race: fear-based, smear-based, anything goes.”

Huffington credits the Internet for the leaning toward cleaner politics. Blog watchdogs, such as Andrew Sullivan and PolitiFact, and innovations, such as YouTube, have helped citizens keep track of facts and lies.

The Internet has, in essence, given power to the people. Even though we’re still relying on the news to tell us what we need to know (agenda setting), we now have an almost infinite number of sources from which to get that news from.

Just Enough…

One thing I do when my students are writing news stories is I ask them to imagine how much time they spend reading the news online (which is where most of them get their news, if they read it at all). Then, I tell them to remember that minimal amount of time when they’re writing their stories, reminding them they have only a few seconds to hook me, or they’ve lost me forever.

My knowledge of how much readers read was confirmed in this article in Editor & Publisher. Author Jennifer Saba found more people are visiting newspaper sites, but they are spending less time on them. 

Is this due to the diversification of news? The intrusion of niche sites and publications?

Perhaps.

One thing I would be curious to see is the time spent viewing smaller newspapers that have a hyperlocal focus. I would predict those sites get equal or more time, depending on how well reporters do at keeping things local.

Here are the numbers:

Time per Person (hh:mm:ss): Sept. ‘08 - Sept.’07 

NYTimes.com — 0:36:47 — 0:36:11
washingtonpost.com — 0:11:48 — 0:16:00
USATODAY.com — 0:16:32 — 0:16:31
LA Times — 0:07:03 — 0:08:02
Wall Street Journal Online — 0:13:34 — 0:15:42

Boston.com — 0:09:30 — 0:13:27
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 0:14:24 — 0:09:36
New York Post — 0:07:06 — 0:13:18
Politico — 0:16:20 — 0:05:53
Chicago Tribune — 0:08:09 —0:08:41

Daily News Online Edition — 0:05:36 — 0:06:02
DallasNews.com - The Dallas Morning News — 0:04:36 — 0:06:24
Chicago Sun-Times — 0:05:13 — 0:07:37
The Houston Chronicle — 0:39:15 — 0:19:52
Newsday — 0:04:22 — 0:08:15

International Herald Tribune — 0:03:44 — 0:03:18
The Washington Times — 0:03:04 — 0:02:23
Philly.com — 0:03:44 — 0:08:19
The Seattle Times — 0:05:16 — 0:11:04
Anchorage Daily News — 0:05:52 — 0:08:22

Atlanta Journal-Constitution — 0:19:55 — 0:16:40
Boston Herald — 0:05:47 — 0:07:05
Baltimore Sun — 0:07:29 — 0:07:08
Star Tribune — 0:32:11 — 0:27:49
NJ.com — 0:04:16 — 0:10:44

Seattle Post-Intelligencer — 0:11:32 — 0:08:39
Detroit Free Press — 0:11:44 — 0:15:09
MercuryNews.com — 0:02:52 — 0:07:59
MiamiHerald.com — 0:03:22 — 0:02:36
Village Voice Media — 0:06:01 — 0:03:49

Maddow Skills…

Arianna Huffington had this column/story posted on her Web site today. The story leads off with talk about new media technology, then segues into a commentary on the success of “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC.

— from www.jmbell.org

Steve Miller argues in this article that Maddow, with her average viewership of 1.7 million, has the answer to saving “old media.” (Seems like just yesterday that television was considered “new media,” huh?)

Miller believes that what Maddow does differently from many news show hosts is that she is fair to her guests. It is quite an outrageous concept in this day and age.

Here’s Miller:

“Ms. Maddow’s ascendance is a flicker of hope for an industry that grows in despair with each passing day. Her ever increasing audience shows the gods of the cathode ray that they can still latch on to those elusive eyeballs if they trust their intelligence and hearts.”

I don’t think the Internet is nearly as much of a threat to television news as it is to newspapers. But this article served as a reminder that we in the print industry are not the only ones suffering.

If Maddow has the answer, newspapers need to find a way to cling to her underbelly as she swims to the top.