Video to star in Time Inc's digital future

Some interesting detail at Online Media Daily of how video is featuring at the heart of Time Inc's magazines strategy. The company has a new TV studio dedicated to moving image content, and magazine sites including CNNMoney.com, SI.com and Essence all have doing interesting video-based success stories to tell, according to the executive vice-prez.
It all, of course, chimes poignantly with the same company's recent closure of one of the world's best-known print magazine brands, Life.

OhMyNews goes video

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that citizen journalism pioneer OhmyNews is to invest heavily in a revamp that will include a greater emphasis on video reporting. Reinventing news / Korean 'citizen journalism' site faces challenges

Taipei Times - archives

I've just been sent a link to a rather familiar looking piece at the Taipei Times. Wouldn't mind, but they didn't even include a link back to me.

Anthony Loyd interview

If you have time to spare, drop by the Frontline Club's site to watch this streamed interview with Anthony Loyd, foreign corresondent for the Times, who discusses becoming a war reporter in Bosnia with no journalism experience, his memories of mentor Kurt Schork, and how he fought his addiction to heroin.

If you have less time to spare, drop by chez Adrian Monck, who has embedded a very funny video skit on TV news, courtesy of Jibjab.

Binge blogging

My blog backoffice is awash with unpublished drafts and lists of links - some of them pretty old - so in the best traditions of British binge drinking I'm chucking all the still-vaguely-relevant ones here in one go. It's an erratic selection of shorts, and will probably end up rather blurred towards the end.

First up, I'm really grateful to cartoonist Matt Buck for this brilliant illustration of where many of us are at:


I probably go on about the Washington Post too much, but today they've revamped the web site to Increase Emphasis on Video. Always worth a look.
Meanwhile here's something it published a while ago. It's one of those cool uses of googlemaps that works beautifully. Clinton's Golden Voice Bill Clinton's Paid Speeches washingtonpost.com .

Via Andy Dickinson's blog, here's proof that radio journalists are also waking up to the power of web video: Why video is a must for radio stations


Martin Stabe reckons I'll eventually work out why he and others are so excited about Twitter, although it seems his argument may have taken a hit at the British Press Awards. Sorry Martin, but this graphic courtesy of Wired says it all for me...



Like many other people I followed the Scoble-hosted debate about the death of the newspaper. I also like this from Information Architects Japan: 10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed

A completely irrelevant post for here, but I'm excited to find that the guy from Askaninja.com, one of the World's Finest Bits of Web Nonsense, is unmasked on a site called The Vloggies Show.
Actually it's not totally irrelevant. Ninja is a fantastic example of how a community can be built (and advertising dollars earned) from a simple idea, brilliantly executed, in which you involve the audience all the way along.

Now here's a great bit of regional journalism storytelling from the Bay Aread News Group in the US. Ripples of a Homicide tells the story from multiple angles of the death of a 23-year-old local man, using audio, stills photography and video. It allows the users to pick their way through the story of how an apparently unremarkable death impacts on family, friends and the wider community. Beutifully done. I'll try to squeeze it on to my next videoblog. There's something similar, although not quite so complex, here: Democrat & Chronicle: Audio Slideshow

This sounds encouraging: Online videos pull in ad money - Editors Weblog. Although by contrast, here's the story of how Rocketboom (one of the web's apparently most successful videocasts) is finding the commercial going tough despite having 200k daily viewers.

I found this little tutorial pretty useful. Particularly now I've discovered the joys of the H264 codec... MultimediaShooter » The Dark Art of video compression

An explanation from Silicon Valley Sleuth: Broadband finally gets its killer app on the power of video.

Frederator has been a regular on my video ipod for months, but I've only just discovered that the people behind it have other web shows too, including Threadbanger, Fast Lane Daily and PulpSecret. Worth keeping an eye on to see whether web 'formats' can really take off: next new networks: our networks


And finally I've just discovered a whizzy little start-up called Mixpo, which I'm testing out for my next videoblog. It might just save me having to relearn Flash...

Oh and by the way, it took the Guardian a further 24 hours or so to work out how to post the video (see post below) on to the relevant page. But they got there eventually. Perhaps some of their £1m video investment will be spent teaching the 'cut' and 'paste' commands...

Guardian video/vlog#4

This week's vlog is a bit of a cheat. I've done a piece for today's Guardian and it has a video to go with it - although for some reason the video is not yet appearing on their web site. Am trying to discover why. Anyway, I'm posting it here too as this week's videoblog.

It features:
Friendly Fire cockpit video - The Sun (click on ‘see moment brits were hit’ in right hand menu.)

Red Hot Rails - San Jose Mercury News

Travis Fox's Darfur report - Washington Post

Challenge Lup - The Sun

Daily Telegraph

New York Times

Vlog#3

The difficult' third videolog is now live here.
Featuring:

Comic Relief
Belfast Telegraph TV
Welwyn and Hatfield Times
Nottingham Evening Post
Ananova (sort of)
Twittervision
and ZeFrank

Audio clean-up

I'm having some technical difficulties with the sound-track to a video I'm working on for a client. I didn't have my external microphone on for one bit of footage, and so the only audio is from the camera's built-in mic. The result is there's a horrible background buzz that's really intrusive. If anyone happens to know of any good audio software that will help me clean it up, I'd be grateful for a pointer.

Poynter Online - Thursday Edition: Learning From an Expert in Online Video

The Washington Post's Travis Fox has done it again, says Al Tomkins at Poynter Online . The award-winning 'backpack journalist' has just returned from Darfur and produced a powerful report featuring video and some amazing panoramic stills. It's really worth a look, not just for the story itself but also for the quality of presentation that the Washington Post brings to this kind of interactive feature. I haven't yet come across a publisher or broadcaster that's doing it better.
I've featured Fox's work both here and in the videoblog already. But as Tomkins says, this may just be his best yet.

Vlog#2

My second effort in the, er, vlogosphere is now available.

Have had some technical problems with the compression, but got there in the end, I hope.

I'll come back to add the links to the clips I've used in the piece shortly.

More feedback gratefully accepted.

I was planning to get to the AOP video conference tomorrow, but have to go to Paris to interview a supermodel instead. Such a pity.

Guardian CCTV scoop

The Guardian's done pretty well out of its CCTV video footage of the police's heavy-handed arrest of Toni Cromer outside a Sheffield nightclub. After featuring on Wednesday's Newsnight, it was still leading the BBC Ten news tonight (Thursday), with suitable branding and acknowledments to the newspaper.
(Incidental question: did the Guardian run the footage on its site before Wednesday's Newsnight broadcast it? The story is dated as Thursday - the day it appeared on the newspaper's front page).
Another newspaper scoop in what would once have been tv-only territory.
It seems to have acquired the vid from a Sheffield pressure group called The Monitoring Group North, whose aim is to eliminate racial harrassment in the area, and which is also running it on its site.

'All will be lost if we end up doing TV on the web'

The winners from the video photography category of the National Press Photographers Association has sparked a debate among US journalists about whether newspaper web video should be judged by the same criteria as television journalism.
Al Tomkins' post at Poynter sets the tone:
Poynter Online - Tuesday Edition: 2007 Best of Television Photojournalism Contest
And here's a sample of the ensuing debate from the Newspaper Video discussion forum:

I see online video and multimedia as more like underground cinema. More grit, more edge, your grandfather would not understand it type of thing. Arty. Like a quaint one of coffee shop. Not starbucks. Edgy. The story is told, but not by the numbers like the TV dudes are used to doing.Technically I am sure the best TV Journalists are better at this, than I can ever hope to be. I would hope I am a much better print photojournalist than they are. But both mediums are losing to a changing market place. A hyper fragmented market place, so they don't have the answers either.All will be lost if we end up doing TV on the web. It has to be more like short film. Maybe they would like us to do stand up interviews in front of a darkened courthouse under streetlights in the snow. I guess my bottom line is its not TV and never will be. This is why I have never got bogged down in the whole contest thing. Its all about a couple peoples tastes. The public will be your judge.

The winners from the video photography category are listed here
http://www.nasites.net/projects/1296/newsfeatureweb.asp
And it's certainly well worth taking a look at the winner of the news feature section, from the Washington Post, here. It's quite something. I'll be featuring this in the next vlog - which i hope to do tomorrow (once I've got through a vast mountain of judging of my own, from the rather more linear PPA awards).

Clip of the day

Meanwhile, here's a great example of how the medium can be used to tell simple, powerful stories - in this case it's an emotional story from the videographer himself: David Howell Studios - Video Vignettes » Archive » February 13, 2007
Via Mark Hamilton

NewspaperVideo: Who says web video has to be short?

In US newspapers, there's a growing band of what-were-once-called-photographers who are seriously exploring the video jungle. They're known as visual journalists now and many of them are pioneering the transition from still to moving images on their newspapers' web sites.
I've just discovered the Newspapervideo blog of Chuck Fadely, from the Miami Herald - who also runs a forum for like-minded photographers. Both are great places to go for people like me still finding their way at the fringes of the rainforest. Here's his latest post - which has a couple of interesting examples of editing tips: NewspaperVideo: Who says web video has to be short?

Judges Pick Winners In Best Of Photojournalism 2007 Web Video Photo Categories

The National Press Photographers Association in the US now has video categories in its annual awards. It has just announced its winners for the newspaper photographers who made the most impact on video last year. I'll hopefully be taking a look at some of them in a fortcoming vlog.

vlog#1

I've finally managed to finish my first stab at a vlog, after getting bogged down in various technical mires over the weekend. It should work (I think) in Internet Explorer and Firefox - but i'll be interested to know whether it actually plays out there in the real world... let me know if you can.
Similarly, it's not properly streamed, but is coming direct from my site. Please do let me know if it doesn't work properly.
For those that know about such things its compressed into flv format using Riva Converted - I'd also be interested to know if there are better methods.


I did suggest in an earlier post that I'd be looking for some constructive criticism for these first stabs at video, but as Adrian Monck so rightly pointed out, that's consultancy. Which I probably can't afford.

So I'll settle for the unconstructive assassination. Go ahead, make my day.

When 'show' beats 'tell'

I'm grateful to cartoonist Matt Buck, who has sent me this link from his own blog Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons. It's a Youtube video created by a professor of anthropology in Kansas, which cleverly shows the power of animation to demonstrate the principles of web 2.0. A good example of how 'show' can sometimes be better than 'tell' when it comes to explaining tricky concepts.

Rosenblum: just don't call him a guru

This post from Jack Lail's Random Mumblings: A crew of one lead me to the blog of one Michael Rosenblum, a man very well known in the television journalism parish. I interviewed Michael for Press Gazette about five years ago when he was running one of his legendary 'bootcamps' for the BBC in Birmingham. In fact, I seem to recall borrowing the brilliant 'pencilguy' analogy that he recounts in his post today as my intro for the piece.
(Sadly, I don't still have that piece in my files. If any of the remaining PG crew read this, maybe they could look it up in the archive as a favour for their old boss and send it to me so I can put it up here.)
Rosenblum is a firecracker of an individual from the seven-ideas-before-breakfast mould. He was putting the wind up broadcast (and journalism) unions last century with his then-revolutionary ideas for putting more power in the hands of the indiviudal television reporter and encouraging them to get out and shoot and edit their own stuff.
Now of course, his ideas have been adopted widely and are coming to a newspaper and magazine web site near you as we speak.
Interestingly, he notes that his current experience of training print journalists is very different from training their television counterparts.

"The irony, at least from my own perspective, is the comparison between news organizations that have traditionally worked in print and those that have traditionally worked in video - that is, local TV news stations. The magazines and newspapers have far less problem adapting to video; at least in the VJ model - that is where the reporter carries their own small camera and laptop, and produces their own stories. The magazines and newspapers ‘get it’ right away because this is they way they have always worked. Newspaper journalists have never worked with a crew. They have never had to wait in a reporting situation for ‘the pencil to arrive’."

It neatly echoes what Kurt Anderson was saying in New York magazine the other day.
The journalists that emerged from those intensive BBC bootcamps did so with an almost cult-like zeal - it really did revolutionise the way they thought about covering some stories. If you're lucky enough for Rosenblum to be working for your publishing house, don't miss the chance to take part.
(Just one word of warning. Don't make the mistake of calling him a 'videojournalism guru'. I seem to remember him getting cross when I did, for some reason. I still think it's a good description.)