Catching up

Some of these links will be a little long in the tooth by now, but this first proper post is by way of a catch up of some of the reading I've been doing while setting up.

Robert Scoble's post from last September is a good place to start with a neat round-up of the pros and cons of videoblogging. As the vice-president (we should have more of those over here) of something or other at a company called Podtech, a company which exists to encourage people to make and share audio and videocasts, we might have slight doubts about his objectivity, but nonethless it's a good primer.

More recently, the mighty Adrian Monck, a former columnist of mine when I edited Press Gazette (for which he still writes), delivers some vital stone tablets for the video newcomer here. They're worth repeating, just so that I can tick Monck's Maxim's ® off as I break them in the various bits of video experimentation that will be appearing on this site:

1. No newscasters. News anchoring is a presentational trope borne of the complex organizational demands of analogue TV studios. The newscast is to online as Top of the Pops is to YouTube.
2. Make sense. Reporters need to deliver their own intros/lead-ins, to camera or over picture or graphics. Images and clips need labelling if they’re raw. The most important thing video clips online require is standalone coherence.
3. Stick to your part of the story. Reporters shouldn’t try and tell the tale in one giant wrap. Text, graphics and other sources can carry a lot of the extra context and narrative required.
4. Get graphics. Voice and video aren’t the only ways to skin the cat.

Meanwhile, Steve Bryant at the Online Journalism Review is asking: What works in online video news?

His answer is, well, a lot of things. After some eyewatering statistics showing how some traditional broadcasters have grown their online video offerings (CNN has gone from 4 million streams last year, to 11 million streams per week now), he suggests that it's not just breaking news stories that are pulling viewers in. "Evergreen" content - that is, not pegged to a particular news story - and in-depth exclusive interviews are also finding good audiences, as are the more quirky, viral video stories of the kind that do the rounds on YouTube.

At the New York Times, journalists are focusing on what they call "breaking analysis" - short contextual video packages that follow and explain the breaking news agenda.

Bryant concludes:

"Luckily for publishers, online video is in its nascent stages. The economics are still uncertain and the users still fickle. Unluckily, the challenge now is to be everywhere users want them to be ."

Then there's Kevin Anderson's piece, Rethinking video, rethinking journalism, rethinking priorities, which echoes points made by Paul Bradshaw. Both suggest that print journalists should stop thinking about the grammar of television news and start inventing their own rules of video engagement.

Finally Mark Hamilton, in his Notes from a Teacher blog, points out something that seems to be of encouragement to the nascent video-journalism-enthusiast-from-a-print-background:

"the conversation around newspaper use of video is one of the most vibrant corners of the media ‘net these days, which is rather astonishing when you think about it. And it seems to be starting to expand beyond the question of how do we use video to embrace the larger question: what, in an internet
age, is newspaper journalism?"