A good editor can make something out of almost nothing. Boring video? Pick up the pace in the edit and the viewer may not even notice how dull the shots are. A bad editor, on the other hand, can ruin even the best video. I remember–not fondly–the experience of working with an editor who always [...]
Who’s the best solo video journalist in the country? If you ask the NPPA, the answer is Dave Delozier, the winner of the first-ever solo VJ of the year award. That would be the same Dave Delozier of KUSA-TV in Denver who won the TV news photographer of the year award in 1988. In other [...]
Very cool! The BBC is experimenting with a new prototype in data visualization called Dimensions “to bring home the human scale of events and places.” A better name for it might be what they’re using for a URL: “How big really?” It’s a pretty simple concept involving a map overlay and (as Ron Popeil used to [...]
Ian Shapira leads a double life. By day, he’s a reporter at the Washington Post. By night, he’s a graduate student in interactive journalism at American University, learning a whole new way of telling stories. And it hasn’t been easy. Shapira is no rookie; he’s been at the Post for 10 years and was the [...]
The Web was supposed to help news organizations expand their reach and make it easy for people to find the news they want when they want it. But when it comes to local television, it seems, that’s just not happening. According to a new report from the consulting firm AR&D, the vast majority of visitors [...]
Take a mobile phone and a broadcast quality microphone and the world is your storybook. That’s what multimedia guru Stephen Quinn believes. Quinn, who teaches at Deakin University in Australia, shared a bit of his enthusiasm about mobile journalism at the World Jounalism Education Conference in South Africa. Quinn calls mobile phones a “Swiss army [...]
Editor & Publisher has released its annual list of Eppy award finalists. The Eppy honors the best of the Web and it’s always interesting to see which local TV news sites make the list of nominees. This year, as in the past, the list is short — only a very small percentage of nominees come from [...]
Brett Akagi surprised more than a few people when he left a great job as director of photography for KARE and moved to what his TV colleagues called “the dark side.” As senior video producer for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Akagi’s mission was to help the newspaper become competitive in online video. The goal, in effect, [...]
For years, many local TV websites were just promotional vehicles, featuring smiling anchor photos and broadcast schedules. No more. The latest RTDNA/Hofstra survey finds local news is now front and center on TV sites, including the websites of many stations that don’t even have news on the air. But while there’s been progress on the [...]
What distinguishes a TV news website from a newspaper or magazine site? If you said video, think again. According to Scott Woelfel of Armchair Media, news sites still haven’t really embraced video “even though it’s a differentiator.” At the RTDNA convention in Las Vegas this week Woelfel ran a fascinating exercise, calling up the home [...]
With a newsroom staff of just 23, WIBW-TV in Topeka, Kansas, has a wide reach–and not just over the air. The station is a longtime market leader, drawing more than twice as many viewers for its late newscasts in November as the other two stations combined. But that’s only part of the story. General manager [...]
For a long time a lot of smart people have been talking about the need for news organizations to deliver more content to mobile devices, but most of time, the discussions are a little light on how the move will actually change the job of a journalist. Writing for Poyner’s E-Media Tidbits, Steve Buttry offers [...]
As more and more journalism professionals find themselves working both in front of and behind the camera, many are looking for suggestions on how to do it all well. Marc Schollett of TV7-4 in Traverse City, Michigan could be the poster child for this dilemma. Schollett not only shoots his own stories, he anchors three [...]
Tired of aggregators “stealing our content,” News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is threatening to make his sites invisible to Google and other search engines. “They shouldn’t have had [our content] free all the time and I think we’ve been asleep,” Murdoch told Sky News, in a conversation focused on his plans to put his sites behind [...]
Paywalls are back but will they backfire? That’s one of the biggest questions surrounding the move by some big media companies toward paid content online. Last week, Cablevision-owned Newsday made its full content accessible only to subscribers. Bloomberg News is considering charging up to $1,000 a year for some of its online content. And Rupert [...]
While there’s still some disagreement about what kind of video works best online, especially in terms of length, there’s no debate about the value of raw. But not just any raw video will do. It has to be compelling and visceral, says Andrew Fitzgerald of Current TV, giving users an angle on a story they [...]
If hyperlocal is the future of news, as we keep hearing almost daily, what can we learn from sites that have gone belly up? Mark Potts, who founded one of the original hyperlocal sites, BackFence, shared his top lessons for keeping a site afloat at a workshop for international journalists in Washington, DC, last week. For [...]
Should news organizations try to train non-journalists to provide content for their Web sites? Lots of them are trying, but some experts say it’s a total waste of time.
USA Today puts together some amazing online interactives with a surprisingly small staff. Just five people are typically involved in putting together major projects, says Chet Czarniak, managing editor of USAToday.com–a designer, programmer, producer, IT person and database editor. The results are often impressive, like this searchable database of US war casualties in Iraq and [...]
New results from the RTNDA/Hofstra University study (pdf) show only 38% of TV and radio news directors say their staffs are “really on top of new technology and where they’re headed.” The rest have “a long way to go” (48%)or are “mostly winging it” (13.7%). The study shows 99.1% of all TV stations surveyed have [...]