How the regional papers use video: The Liverpool Echo

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Andy

After a look at the way the tabloids and the broadsheets use video I’m looking at the UK regional evening market and next on my list is the Liverpool Echo.

The Liverpool Echo, owned by Trinity Mirror, is the daily evening paper for Liverpool and Mersyside along side it’s sister paper The Daily Post, a daily morning paper. (The post has recently been making a name for itself with a live blog and video of its editorial meetings) The paper has had video on the site for a few years and at one point the company also ran a cable TV channel , Channel One. Channel One is no more and after a few brushes with joint ventures (The occasional Echo TV branding is a legacy of this) the paper is producing its own video in house.

The platform.

The front page video feature box

The video on the Echo website is combined with stills in a Pictures&videos section where pictures get first billing (nothing wrong with that). But the front page does have a sizable video feature box just below the scroll. In keeping with the whole site design the video feature is big, bold and clear. It displays the latest video with a clear headline and tease. It offers a list of the most current videos along with the latest video.

The video is served from youtube via a flash player and does suffer the occasional mix-up in aspect ratio. The video is shot widescreen but the 4×3 youtube player won’t handle it unless it’s letterboxed before upload. The stories I spotted this on had an air of user submitted about them so perhaps it’s pre-existing.

Another problem with the widescreen video is some tearing at the bottom of the screen. This is usually caused by problems with digitising from tape and seeing ‘more’ picture than you normally would. A little masking would help here but it doesn’t happen on some videos

The video player itself is useable but there is no obvious backlink to related articles so linking through to video from the frontpage feature takes you away from the articles. I say obvious because the tags do work as functional navigation to related content but I’m not sure how intuitive that is.

Video is often presented in a sidebar as well as embedded

Video is embedded in articles and also presented as a related video sidebar. Given the general lack of images on a lot of stories perhaps embedding video and using it as an image as well would kill two birds. But the option to embed or go in the sidebar is nice to have but the same from the video player, given its front page prominence, would be a bonus.

The presentation.

The majority of the content on the site is self-produced packaged video with the occasional user or third party submitted video. Subject wise it could be best described as feature based. Local events, interviews and interesting stories with the odd video showing the scene of a shooting. The format is pretty standard with voice over, general views and a smattering of interview and vox-pop but the quality of the video is variable.

Being the paper of record in Liverpool it’s no surprise that sport plays a big part in the video. Divided in to three sections – Sports, Liverpool and Everton, the content comes in much the same style as the news stuff and some of the same problems surface. Mike Torpey’s preview piece Open Championship at Royal Birkdale is okay but it contains an almost textbook example of how not to shoot an interview and proof of just how valuable a shotgun mic can be.

How not to shoot and record an interview

And there in lies the biggest problem with the Echos video. The shooting is generally good and whilst the video is clunky in places it holds together but the audio is very patchy.

The video of the threatened closure of local brewery Cains is a good example. The voice over quality is poor, some of which could be youtube’s notorious audio mangling but it sounds distorted from the start. The interview sound is worse with the voice lost in background noise. I think some of this is likely to a problem with stripping out audio tracks but lack of a decent mic could also be to blame. Lack of mixed audio also kills a piece on the annual Brouhaha parade. Great pictures but none of the fantastic location sound. Its squashed in the background,

The Cains piece also highlights a problem that all newspapers face with journalists making the change from print style interviews to ones that work on video. If you listen through the Cains piece you can here the problem. Questions that suit reported speech and a constant ‘yes’. This often makes the video longer than it needs to be as the question, which can often seem labored on video, needs to be left in. Some more open questioning and maybe (ethical police look away now) a little more direction of subjects would tighten things up.

Overall
The range of video on the Echo website feels slightly limited. Light features and lots of vox pop seems to be the order of the day. That’s not a problem in itself, given the amount of work they are doing with live blogging and other initiatives to better cover breaking news stuff. But there is an opportunity there to stamp more of an identity on that style. A move away from the package to more clipped stuff for vox pops and interviews with better embedding/linking in stories would put more of Liverpool in the story and could cut down on production pressures. That way the heavy packaging could be left to more evergreen features.

Unlike a lot of papers where video is the visible nod to digital the Echo has a huge amount of digital content to play with – Maps, blogs, liveblogs and widgets – fitting video in to this portfolio is a challenge. It seems that video at the Echo, as it has been in the industry, has had a varied history. Joint ventures and TV channels have given way to a in-house team working hard to establish an identity. How they develop that identity and integrate video in to that rich mix will be a challenge. But a bit more work on tightening things up and working out better integration with articles could see them in an even stronger position.

Note: In writing this I made a mistake which must be a regular bug bear for the Post and Echo people in confusing some of the stuff the post are doing – live blogs etc – with the Echo output. There is obviously a lot of good stuff happening in Liverpool full stop. But credit where credit is due to the Post staff. Sorry for the confusion.

Also, in the same vein as the Express&Star review. In return for letting me waffle about your efforts I’m happy to offer an open post for anyone at the Echo (or post) to tell readers about anything they like. Let me know.

How the regional papers use video: The Express & Star

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Andy

This week I’m looking at what the UK regional evening newspapers are doing with video. I’ve selected (using a highly scientific method) seven papers to look at and I’m starting with the Express&Star

The Express&Star is the daily evening paper for the West Midlands in the UK. It’s owned by The Midland News Association Ltd and is generally acknowledged as the biggest selling regional evening paper in England.

The website got a re-design a few years ago and I have to put my hand up and say I’m not a fan. It’s cramped and the contrast of text sizes is wrong for me. But its usable and they have certainly thrown a lot at it over that time.

The platform.

When it comes to video the Express&Star is nothing if not obvious. There is a clear navigation tab at the top, a horizontal feature bar just above the fold and an occasional image teaser on the left-hand-side of the page. Go through to the news section and you get another menu item.

Confusingly the tabbed navigation and the vertical navigation on the news index takes you to two different places. The tab links to a standard Brightcove powered jukebox – chunky and functional. But the menu takes you to a video index. Given the choice I would link to the video index exclusively. It’s more usable, feels richer and sits better ‘in’ the site.

The Express&Star video index page is full of video stuff

The video index offers a great range of content that links directly to article pages with embedded video content which is fantastic. The downside is that the video player is too small, cramped in to the corner of what is already too narrow a column for content. I would cut back on the graphics and controls around the player. Double the size and run it at the top of a page rather than right-justified. It also works as a picture that way.

The page design swamps the text and squashes the video

Back in the video index, there is a nice archive and you can page back through previous video articles. It’s a shame that the thumbnail disappears after the first page. The headlines need the image to help sell the story. The other problem with the video index is that you don’t need to go back very far before most of the video is unavailable (a problem that cropped up every now and again on newer content too). I’m guessing that this is due to a shift in player at some point or perhaps technical problems full stop. That’s a shame would have liked to have done a comparison between old and new video.

The presentation
The video is a mix of self-produced packages and third-party content, commonly user-generated but there is the occasional agency stuff. There is also a healthy smattering of youtube content on the site which appears in the Your Video section of the video index. This tends to be in the entertainment area. This is worrying in the sense that a copyright crackdown on youtube would effectively remove half the content on the site. The Kasabian article is a good example of this .

But stepping away from that particular minefield its safe to say that it’s the self-produced packaged content that makes up the majority of the content and there is loads of it. It tends to be 2-3 minute packaged content mixing talking heads, GV’s(b-roll) and voice over. The occasional piece to camera does creep in which sometimes works but more often than not doesn’t.

Overall the production values are good and generally the packaged stuff is shot well. The sound suffers from occasional wind noise and mic handling problems but the ever present shotgun mic generally produces good results.

The journalists seem to have settled on a workable format for their video. It tends to lead with interesting video or a snippet of interview and then a voice over comes in. Some of the packages go on a little too long with one too many vox-pops the most common reason. Take the Disney Cars feature (above). The kids are cute and well done to the reporter for getting something usable out of them. But there is too much. This package also highlights an issue with sequencing. There are a lot of cut-aways here. A shot of a wheel etc. But they are cut one after the other. It’s quite disorientating. Shooting enough cut-aways is always something to remember but they have to tie together. Get a wide shot that will make sense of the cut-away. I don’t think I saw more than one wide shot of the cars through the whole package.

If remembering cut-aways is good mantra when shooting then cutting ‘best pictures first’ is one of for the edit. It’s a concept that the journos at the Express & Star seem to gave taken to heart and it works for them. It fits the print story construction well and you can almost read the text of an accompanying article and follow the voice over. As well as trying to grab you in the first few seconds of the vid , this must cut down the turn around times for the production.

But this tie in between article and video isn’t always consistent. Take the story about people using pawnbrokers. Instead of the people featured in the article there was a video of a jeweler talking about the value of gold. I really missed seeing the people in the article who had some real human stories to tell. Where was the guy selling his wedding ring. A definite case of a story that didn’t need video.

Elsewhere the content shifts from packaged to interview based stuff shot in the newsroom. It’s been a while since the E&S has had a video news bulletin on the site but much of the content takes its cue from that format. I’ve always been an advocate of the bulletin approach as I think it is as much about building capacity as it is content. It’s nice to see the E&S have developed. But where a bulletin is easy win video, much of this stuff feels like visual podcast. The video of Peter Rhodes and Internet News Editor Tim Walters is a great example of video that should be a podcast. But it’s really the sport that takes this format to the limit – Fan forums and weekend round-ups. I’d love to see some stats on the this stuff to see what the take up is.

I suppose that the use of video in this way says more about the uptake of technology like podcasts by the audience than the appropriateness of the delivery platform. And it’s clear that there is some clear evidence of developing style there. This development also manifests itself in experimentation with live football reporting.

Last year the E&S announced Sportingstar.co.uk a live football site. Not that you would know it on the site. Following the URL takes you to a subsection of the site with no obvious difference from the rest of the content. I will have to check back on Saturday to see the full action. But the little snippet of Qik video from reporter Tim Nash after the recent Plymouth game is good and it will be nice to see what other content appears alongside it.

Overall
I could write a lot more about the Express & Stars video offering. There is a lot of it and the content is generally technically well-produced. That said, some of it feels stretched editorially -it’s too long – and some of the content just doesn’t need video. I get the feeling that there is some kind of quota for video that someone has in the back of their mind – x number of videos a day please. But rather than push video too hard it may be better to let photographs carry the story.

The TGI fire story was a case in point. The video was okay but the pictures in the Gallery where better. They could even have run both. I don’t think the layout of the page helps with presentation, it isn’t multimedia friendly. I wonder if a bit more space to play with might encourage more of a useful presence.

That aside this is a strong start for the regional press. Let’s see what The Liverpool Echo can offer up tomorrow.

Do you work on video at the Express&Star? If you want to reply to any of the points in this review, talk about what you do or call me an idiot then feel free to leave a comment but I’d also like to offer you (and anyone from any of the other papers I review) an open post response. A post on the blog to say what you want. Interested? Let me know

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Mail

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Andy

It’s Friday so it must be the last day of my review of the way the UK tabloids use video and I’m rounding things off with the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail sits alongside the Daily Express in the tabloid ‘mid-market’ apparently setting it an order above the Red top Sun, Star and Mirror. It’s actually one of the more successful online newspaper websites considering how late in the game they where in setting one up. The Mail have made a particular point of targeting women web users which you can see from the tone and structure of the site.

The platform

The Daily Mail's video player. Hard to find but nice information when you do

When it comes to video there was no obvious sign of video on the front page of the site either through the navigation or flagged stories. A search on the website (please get rid of that offer of an embedded search tool or add No) revealed two articles in a video category. Clicking through took me to the Daily Mail’s video section. Fully formed, large as life but not linked.

Its the standard jukebox player but, unlike the rest of the tabloids who use Roo, this is a Brightcove player. The player isn’t the only thing that’s different. The page layout is more in keeping with the article page layout on the site rather than the ‘TV’ box style on others. Sections are presented in one long thing sidebar. It’s a layout that, like some of the other pages, hides too much content below the scroll. I think filling boxes with reams of links is a habit the Mail need to get out of.

One nice thing to see was the content box below the video window. There is the usual headline, short description but there is also a byline. A nice, human touch. Better still is some useful meta. A date, time and most impressively a source for the video is given. It is often missing which makes me think Brightcove are supplying the information for some of this data. I think the presentation could be better (bigger) but it’s good to see.

But it’s a step in the right direction. I didn’t see any of the other papers crediting the Bournemouth News & Picture Service for the Mini Hendrix footage. In fact, most of the agency footage is credited which slowed me down for a half-hour or so as I looked at what other stuff they had. I suppose that’s the lot of a news agency but it was nice to see.

If it's a screen grab why not just embedd the video?

If it's a screen grab why not just embed the video?

Most encouraging though was the presence of links back to articles. At last! When you do follow the links through the video is usually embedded towards the end of the video. I think this is shame as it often duplicates pictures on the page. A story about violent yobs (good Mail fair) features a heavy number of screen-grabs from CCTV video that is embedded further down the page. One of the pictures at the head of an article is a screen grab. It is exactly the same as the poster frame of the video. Why show both?

The presentation

Unknown source or the BBC? You decide

The thing that really struck me about the video on the Mail is the lack of news feed content. There is no dedicated news feed of PA or Reuters content. In fact there is nothing approaching a news feed at all on the site. All of the content can best be described as illustrative or feature based. Like the other tabloids it’s rounded up entertaining clips from the web that it thinks will appeal to the audience and the editorial line is firmly in the middle of the paper not the news pages at the front. So we get news it’s a mix of besieged middle-Englanders battling yob culture or birds that sound like ambulances and Herons learning to fly.

The only exception to that when I looked was a video of teenage Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr. It’s illustrative video, it supports the news story. But I single it out as it’s clearly BBC footage grabbed from TV – I’m pretty sure that’s Frank Gardner voicing it- but it isn’t credited. Having seen the Mirror pull this trick I wonder what the form is here.

There is some homegrown content on the site. Mark Lawford’s interview with Monte Panesar was interesting but the lighting was poor and the shot could have been tighter. Listen to the interview though as a good example of a print person doing a video interview. That isn’t a criticism. Listen the way he qualifies statements, jumping in, looking for stuff that can be used as reported speech later on. It’s a questioning style that gives you print stuff but it won’t stack up for long in video.

Drop one presenter and half the time

The other, consolidated, bit of video content was the Live magazine tech-review video. James Mannion and Rob Waugh do a double-header reviewing the latest gadgets. Its shot in what seems to be a photographic studio using two cameras – or some pretty meticulous single camera set up. The idea is okay but the production and format don’t work for me. The editing is too tricksy and slows the pace. The presentation is also too stilted. They have a bit of a star in Rob Waugh and my view is that they should let him do the slot without James (no offense James). That way it could be half the length and have a lot more pace.

Overall.

I get the impression that video is fairly new to the Mail. It feels cautious and the fact that the video section is so hidden away just emphasises that. But that could be a smart move on the part of the Daily Mail.

They are not selling the site as having video and then backing that claim up with feed video. This is more a site that has the capacity to use video and the video section is just a bonus. I’m not sure I would go as far as to say that they use video well; there isn’t enough of it to tell. But where it is used it seems appropriate. It could be used better on the article page and I don’t see a clear editorial line. But it’s there.

How they move forward from here will be interesting to see. My money would be on a movement more towards The Sun where the video is a mix of stuff that may appeal to the audience rather than a more broadsheet style of authored pieces. I think they may end up doing it very well.

So that’s it. A week of tabloid newspaper video. So what did I learn from looking at The Sun, Star ,Mirror Express and Mail? Find out on Monday.

MSNBC.com and embeddable video

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Andy

MSNBC.com President and Publisher Charlie Tillinghast talked to Beet.TV last month about the new msnbc.com player and it’s embedding capabilities.

I hadn’t seen this before I wrote my tips for newspaper video but it compliments nicely. The take-away message for me is that embedding and allowing others to take your content away and embed offers more control.

Thanks to Angela over at Newsvideographer for the heads-up

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Express

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Andy

This week I’m looking at the way the UK tabloids use video and today it’s the turn of the self proclaimed best newspaper in the World, the Daily Express

The Express takes us out of the ‘red-top’ territory of The Sun, Star and Mirror and in to the tabloid ‘mid-market’ which it shares with its rival The Daily Mail, which I’ll be looking at tomorrow.

The Platform

The Express front page has a number of video links

The Express flags it’s video clearly on the front page with a navigation item for video, currently marked as new, and a little graphic on the right-hand side of the page. A click on either one will take you through to the video page and (once you have cleared the really annoying overlay ad) the standard jukebox player powered by Roo.

The Express player. Dull, glitchy and full of third party stuff

When it first loads up, I have to say it looks pretty dull. The categories are all presented as ‘accordion’ style navigation but they are all rolled up. So you are presented with a generic splash screen on the player and no nice thumbnails to entice you in. It’s almost as if you click through and discover that Express video is closed for the summer. But I’m not afraid to click around and it’s a good job too.

Clicking news presents you with another set of roll-ups, again shut tight, and more menus. This is just too many clicks. But when I did eventually get some thumbnail action – I clicked UK news – I was greeted by the familiar swish of the Press Association and then it froze. Something that happened quite a few times on the site. The controls failed to work for me using Firefox and a mac when it first loaded. All the way through the player skipped, stuttered and jumped videos. A bit of clicking around got it working but it was frustrating.

There is no back linking to articles from the video and they don’t do embedded video. If you want to cook along with Gary Rhodes for example, then you better make a note of the ingredients first because clicking the link will take you away from the recipe page.

The Presentation
The news content on the site is a mix of Press Association, AFP and Reuters. Most of the other content comes courtesy of the Roo network. The computer games content for example comes via Aussie company Control Freaks and entertainment (and lots of other stuff) from WatchMojo. Not much in there that looked in-house. Some of the sport stuff is unbranded but it still feels like agency footage.

So I used the search function to have a look for Exclusive and Express Exclusive content. The majority of it was exclusive but to the third-party suppliers the Express uses. Where it was obviously exclusive to the Express it was either branded stuff like Gok Wan’s competition offer or submitted stuff like the London Zoo promo. The Hungary Grand-Prix preview is another apparent exclusive. Don’t let the branding at the end fool you. You can see the whole thing at any of the other tabloids. Try it over at The Sun for example. The player is better.

Overall
The technical implementation of video on the Express is really poor. The player’s isn’t user friendly and it’s buggy. Linking to video rather than embedding in article pages is shoddy considering the Roo player offers that technology and even when they do link, the technology lets them down. The player often jumps the linked video for a video a few items down.

The actual content of the video on the website is OK. If you are in to games then Control Freaks has a nice range of stuff and WatchMojo has so much stuff on so many subjects you will always find something but I can get that stuff anywhere. There is nothing here that is produced by the Express and that means there is nothing here that says Daily Express or shows any commitment to building a video brand. And no, paying that little extra for a PR company to get the tame celeb to say Daily Express or add a graphic is not a brand strategy.

You may ask “Why does the Express have to have a video brand?” It doesn’t. It doesn’t even need to make it’s own video. But it has chosen to have video on it’s site and it needs a better strategy than simply buying all the content options from Roo. If it’s going to have it it could take the route of selecting the best, relevant video for their audience.

One thing is for sure, at the moment the video is a very poor bolt-on and has nothing to recommend it.

So tomorrow I’ll take a look at The Express’ competition – The Daily Mail, and see if it does any better.

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Mirror

Posted on August 6, 2008 by Andy

This week I’m looking at the video efforts of the UK National Tabloids. So far I’ve been surprised by the variety of The Sun and depressed by attitude of The Star and today it’s the turn of The Mirror.

The Mirror has recently undergone a redesign which takes it more towards the in-your-face style of the Sun and Star. Lot’s of pictures and a scatter gun front page. It does feel a little more restrained than the Sun in terms of content- but not much. So is looking in the Mirror looking at the Sun?

The Platform

The front page version of the player

Video has got a good position on the front page with a clear link in the navigation bar and a bright and a sizable embedded player off the the right-hand-side. It’s nice and clear but the thumbnail strip across the top suffers from being too small and, because of the use of some generic thumbnails, means there is nothing to tell you what the story is about. The featured video appears in a reasonably sized window below. The usual overlay information reduces the impact of the picture but it isn’t as bad as some.

The player sites below an embedded video ad – thankfully with muted audio. I havn’t seen much video ad content on sites until now but the Mirror is filled with it. Sometimes the audio doesn’t mute and if you roll your mouse over the ad the audio plays – gave me a shock. I guess that’s the best you could hope for.

Click through to the video page and you are greeted with a big, bright video player. All candy blue and neon colours. It’s a standard Jukebox configuration, powered by a Roo player. The sections are clear and there is also an ‘editor recommended’ section – something that’s missing from other tabloid jukeboxes. The use of video ads continues here with an ad placed underneath the video window. This is actually pretty distracting at times.

The Mirrors video player

The Presentation

The bulk of news content on the player is provided via ITN. You do see the occasional ITN watermark but all of the content is pre-rolled with the Daily Mirrors own bumper which is nice and short. Some of the video, marked Raw Video, comes from the AP. This is generally covers international stories and the olympics. I was expected straight feed stuff but it’s actually just packaged content with the voice over removed.

When the video loads a little caption appears in a confusing New box. It’s too small and cramped and doesn’t work as a caption. I also think it looks messy in the design. As usual don’t expect any links to article pages.

The Mirror has taken a crack at embedded video but it does suffer from small player syndrome embedded halfway down an article page. Although they aren’t averse to embedding Youtube content. Whether they should do or not is another matter.

Looking for homegrown content I though the Mirror Exclusive category of the player was a good place to start. It has a mixture of styles dominated by sport content. It tends to be press conference stuff but there is some presenter led stuff. David Yates does a neat read to camera for his video horse racing tips. It’s shot against bluescreen but Yates delivers well.

Talking to camera can cause Squeaky bum for some jounos. Not these boys though

Football Spy is also worth a look. It’s is a presenter led bulletin style round-up of the football news that runs off the back of a blog. It’s usually presented by Mirror journos from the Mirror office but more recently it seems to have moved to someone’s back garden. Who says video producers cant’ work from home. It’s nice and jolly and the delivery is confident. But it’s Alan Mckinlay in the August 1st football spy who gets a special mention as he describes the football transfer window as “squeaky bum time” for managers.

I liked the feel and the fact that they also refer to readers comments. Maybe this would work better as a podcast, downloadable to a mobile.

The one thing that did annoy me was the large amount of useless graphic material around the screen. Why not animate the graphics, make it work for you. That way you could re-frame the shot and get more face in the screen. Just a it more thought and it really could work well.

Less successful is some of the opinion. Brian Reade on Graeme Souness was video of someone reading out loud. Interesting article but not as snappy as the gossipy style of Football spy.

Moving away from sport you get the odd feature that follows the same presenter led model. The film reviews by David Edwards are nicely done but need tighter framing given the size of the player. The rest is a mix of interview and video grabbed around Mirror stories. The Return of David Cameron’s bike (nice to see some original footage of the theft as well) was fun for the banter but too long and the camera was too far away. They owned the story, they should have got in there tight. A case of video behaving like a photographer.

And that photographer behavior kicks in for some of the other content with a pap like snap and grab on footballer Joey Barton Leaving prison.

Overall
The Mirror offers a more refined video experience than The Sun. The approach is less scattergun which, perhaps, makes it a little less appealing to the tabloid market. Maybe it’s the Mirror’s attempt to lift the tone a little to place it more in the mid-market tabloid. The large amount of news content, even though it’s third-party, may be driving that – if that’s what you have, that’s what you are – but I do sense a ‘kind-of’ strategy here.

The development seems to be in the area of packaging the columnists. They are in predictable but sensible sections. The content is neatly produced, although it could be a little more web friendly in presentation – tighter shots please. Im sure the Football Spy garden is nice but it’s the people I’m interested in. I can see this kind of content working well on mobile phones.

But it’s Football Spy that is really the defining bit of video for me on The Mirror website. Keyed in to the lively and active Football Spy blog, embedded using youtube. It appears on the main website because the media player can handle it but I’m sure that the majority of the blog readers get never visit.

This is the first time I’ve seen a real community supported with video in the tabloids. A niche served in the right way. The rest is standard fair. But as an example of a newspaper using video when it works for them, football spy is a real tabloid takeaway.

Tomorrow it’s The Express

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Star

Posted on August 5, 2008 by Andy

This week I’m looking at the way the UK tabloid newspapers use video taking one newspaper a day. Yesterday it was The Sun and today it’s the The Star.

Owned by Northern and Shell Media Publications who also own the Express, which I’ll be looking at later this week, the Star sits firmly in the mass market tabloid market.

The platform.

: The Star’s video player

The Star’s video offering is clearly available from the main menu with a ‘Star Videos’ link on every page. Clicking this takes you to a Jukebox player powered by Roo which splits the content in to sections but has none of the recommended or featured sections that others have. Many of the subsection pages have a small ‘featured video’ box highlighting two videos but the editorial selection of these is, well, questionable.

: The featured news – Gordon Brown does Wii fit shock! Maybe not

The presentation.
The video itself is mix of Star produced/commissioned content and bought in feeds which splits pretty much along the lines of news from The Press Association and Reuters and then anything with a ‘babe’ in it.

At least I can’t complain about the pre-roll ads at the Star. They don’t have any. Instead they have hit on the great wheeze of putting all the TV ads in the video player as content.

Credit where credit is due there is some in house video. This includes breaking the world record for eating six Ferrero Rocher in one minute and an interview with street magician Dynamo. The Dynamo piece is the only thing (outside the Reuters and PA content) that approaches a package and it’s not bad.

But that’s about it.

Overall.
No, that really is about it. Yesterday I commented that, if the broadsheets where a department store, the Sun was a Market. That makes the Star a seedy newsagents. Imagine a shop where there was one newspaper, a few days old, and the rest of the shelves where full of lads, TV and wrestling mags.

Not that it doesn’t aim at the right market. Like the Sun the mix of babes and celebs is where it pitches the paper, but the Sun does it better. It has a better mix of content and much ‘richer’ mix. The Star is just a nod to video, nothing more or less.

I actually found the whole thing pretty depressing. I know that in this part of the market that newspapers are morphing in to something else, like a daily gossip magazine, but this feels pretty cynical. When I see a video of a woman in a Bikini working out on a Wii highlighted as a top news story that’s a bit depressing.No offense to the lady I hope she got well paid.

Still, when a similar video appeared on Youtube even the mid-market papers picked it up so perhaps I’m being harsh. But at least they linked rather than ripping it off. And perhaps that’s the problem. The video offering from The Star is a very, very poor imitation of everything that the others are doing.

When you load the player a message appears it says

Online TV is very popular and can take a little while to appear, but its worth it!

No. It isn’t.

Tomorrow it’s The Mirror

andydickinson.net

online and digital journalism, newspaper video and digital media

Tag Archives: newspaper video

How the regional papers use video: The Liverpool Echo

How the regional papers use video: The Express & Star

Top tips for tabloid style newspaper video

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Mail

MSNBC.com and embeddable video

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Express

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Mirror

How the UK Tabloids use video: The Star