UK newspapers using Youtube

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Andy

Inspired by Mark S. Luckie and his fantastic map of US newspapers using youtube I thought I would give it a go for the UK. The result (nowhere near as nice as Marks) is a real mix of pipes, maps and google docs. So it isn’t neat but it kinda works. If you notice that there is a paper missing then you can use the form at the end of this post to add it.

View Larger Map

The map includes regional and national press and there may be some accounts linked to more than one paper as the publisher may only have one website for that area. There may also be some accounts listed that are no longer used or vary rarely updated. They still carry content so they i’ve kept them in as a ‘presence’.

I was interesting to find a number of individuals using their accounts to host the papers video. Nice in the sense that they were having a go but also a little disappointing in the lack of support. Still, I suppose that’s innovation for ya!

I’m slowly formulating a ‘state of the medium address’ on video which I’m hoping to get headspace and time for before xmas and this has added a bit of food for thought. But, in the meantime, you can judge the quality and the effectiveness yourself by taking a look at the the latest 20 videos from these sites below (another pipe which takes a while to show up) which at some point I will try and append with view stats etc.

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Why do people listen to Michael Rosenblum?

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Andy

Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.

Michael Rosenblum has been doing his ‘sky is falling in’ schtick again this time at the recent society of editors do. Thanks to some spiffing video from Paul Bradhaw Rosenblum’s view has been stirring up some nodding comments of agreements.

One of the things I like about seeing Michael talk is not because of what he is saying. I like it to see which arcane ‘industry’ from the past he’ll pick to compare the industry to. Last time I saw him it was the ice industry. He’s great value.

But is that why people listen to Rosenblum?

Say what you like about Michael, his message is always pretty consistent and in the best tradition of a good sales pitch contains an unarguable truth - you can’t carry on as you are. But there is nothing unique about that message. A lot of people have been saying for a long time especially with respect to video.

So is it his success rate?

Well, there are certainly those who have benefited from his way of doing things but there are plenty of other projects that have had mixed reaction and success. Michael has as many doubters as fans. I’m a fan but I don’t think he has an answer that works across the board.

So what is it? Here’s my theory.

Like for like

Micheal gets listened to, especially at events like this, because he looks like the majority of people in the room. He is a senior-management/executive talking to a room of senior-management/executives about what they should do.

Is that a poor reflection on Michael? Of course not. He has a view to pitch and aims it really well. It’s more a problem with his audience.

Many people are listening to Rosenblum because they are hearing the message for the first time. That doesnt mean Micheal has anything new to say. It means that, too their shame, the people in the room have not been listening up until that point.

As suprising as it may be to them, there are people in their organisations who are as knowledgable and passionate about video as he is. They may have more experience of the particular problems in their company and more direct suggestions to help solve them.

They may not give as good a show but they may give as good advice.

NCTJ create Video training resource

Posted on October 6, 2008 by Andy

I’m back in work after a stint of what’s known around here as freshers flu. (all the new students bring more than just eager minds to class)

I know I have a lot of things that I need to post to make good on stuff I started before a bit of a work induced blogging hiatus. But I had to pass comment about this.

According to Hold The Front page the NCTJ (UK based newspaper training body) have created a video guide for all journalists struggling with video.

The eight-minute film has been produced by Lloyd Bracey, chief examiner for online and video journalism at the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

It’s essentially a 101 on how to shoot a neat interview and a sequence with some other stuff thrown in. Go and have a watch, it’s pretty good.

Good as it is though, I have a problem.

The overriding claim is that this is aimed at reporters making the shift to video – newspaper people and in that respect I don’t think it succeeds for a couple of reasons

It’s over 8 minutes long – Why isn’t it broken in to easy bite sized chunks? One for each section
It has no supporting material – Where is the ‘multimedia’ why not text and images and video on the same page.

From what I’ve seen, right across the board of all newspapers, people have moved well beyond this. By looking at what other newspaper journos are doing you get a better feel for what is required.

The skills and advice the video offers are sound and very well presented. It would make a great basic tutorial for starters. But it isn’t the only one out there. To stand out and really offer that advice to newspaper reporters it needs more application.

The truth is it’s a way behind where the industry is at and I would have expected the NCTJ to be reflecting a better application of the medium in their practice based on what their industry is already doing.

How the regional papers use video: The Bradford Telegraph and Argus

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Andy

Lots of things have got in the way if finishing my little review of what the top regional papers are doing with video but, battling through, I’m at the end of the list. Last but by no means least is the Bradford Telegraph and Argus

The T&A is owned by Newsquest (in turn owned by Gannett and the 2nd largest regional newspaper group in the UK according to their website). They’ve recently rolled out a new design for their local sites with a mixed but generally positive response. It’s a design that still needs a bit of work on the design front for me. I like the use of images but the use and formatting of text is still a bit loose for my liking – a bit too much trapped space. But one possitive is that the new designs put video right at the top of the site.

The Bradford Telegraph and Argus puts video at the top of the page

The platform
The video content on the site is obvious from the front page. A large video player takes pride of place on the page with a selection of other stories underneath. It’s embedded using Newsquest’s own, flash based, media player. It has a nice big thumbnail with a play icon that is not too distracting and plays on the page. There is a headline under the main thumbnail but it’s just too small and lacks emphasis. This is a shame. If they moved the text to the top of the player and upped the font size to something similar to the other headlines, I think it would sit better on the page.

The featured video also had a link to the story, which is great, but it isn’t consistently used and when you get to the story the video isn’t embedded in to the page. It is presented as a link back to the sites dedicated video/pic page. That’s a shame as there is clear space for video on the page. The story about the dad delivering his bay in the back of his car for example has a nice big picture, almost identical to the video thumbnail. Why not use the video?

The Video/pic page is well laid out

The dedicated video/pic page is also clearly linked in the main menu and is further split between local video and national video. The national video is provided by the Press Association although it isn’t branded and it generally falls in to sound bites and clipped content model. It is nice to see that this video comes linked to related articles on the site rather than just warehousing a clip library.

Regardless of the section, the display is the same. It’s structured in the familiar player/archive style with the main story presented as a sizable thumbnail image. There is a nice clear headline, time and date and description alongside which is automatically generated from the lead paragraph of the article.

There is also a link to the article which is more consistently employed than on the front page but the back links from article to video player are often missing and those that are there often don’t work.

The hacking back of headlines and intros cripples the content

The archive is managed through a tired system of thumbnails for recent stories and then a text list of older videos. The thumbnails are nice but the player seems to truncate the content of the headline and intro, cutting the text and adding ellipsis. So Flats residents ‘lived in terror of arsonist’ is shortened to Flats… This is rubbish, spoiling the usability of the page and taking any useful meaning out of the teasers.

The presentation
The majority of video on the T&A falls firmly in to the packaged content category – scripted VO, interviews and GV’s – across news and feature content. It’s a format that hasn’t really changed. Going back to the first video in the archive and apart from a short intro sequence (now dropped) the stuff has come out of the gate pretty much fully formed.

There is some nice sequence work in some of the packages which help cover script or interview sound well. The sequence at the start of the interview in a piece on the medical use of maggots is a good example (a later GV of students is poorly picked though). But the frameing on interviews is often too loose and the much of the camera work is very shaky.

A recent piece on plans to move a memorial to victims of a suspected IRA bomb opened with archive pictures which had obviously been shot freehand. A tripod and a little more restraint would have made the images more useful. This problem pops up in a number of places. The article about railway closures suffers from a lack of ‘static’ shots and verges on the seasick.

The T&A use script well

The station closure story does illustrate a nice handle on scriptwriting at the paper. Using ‘sparks fly’ in the script as you see pictures of sparks flying could be seen as heavy handed but at least there is some thought about scripting with pictures rather than simply reading the article over pictures. The delivery of the script across all of the packages is good so it’s a shame the quality of the pictures

Mixed in to the packaged content is a range of clipped content that is more illustrative than editorial. This ranges from footage of a UFO, from a reader to corporate stuff like the University redevelopment video. Here the inability to embed video in an article page shows .

The video accompanying the story of the conviction of Aabid Hussain Khan turns out to be home video footage seized during the investigation. This needs to be embedded with the article to really fly. In the stand alone player it doesn’t really work, mainly because of the automatically generated description so it can’t be changed to add the context needed for video to work.

Overall
The style of the video on the T&A site is limited but like most of the other local sites I’ve looked at I can’t fault the range. The choice of story is generally good with plenty of visual opportunities to explore. I feel the hand of photographers on a lot of the video with some interesting staging of interviews, many of which feel like the set-up for a picture. It can often feel a bit artificial but it works more often than it fails.

Technically the only thing I would offer in terms of shooting is “USE A TRIPOD!”. Failing that find a way to introduce archive images in the editing process via archive/scanning rather than shooting on location.

But for me the biggest improvement is one that Newsquest could make to their video player. The automatic elements of the player display are restricting the editorial impact of the content. Stripping the headlines and description from the article may feel like a time saver but it means that they often unsuitable as stand alone descriptions for the video.

Being able to write proper leads for the videos in the stand alone player and tweak the headlines (how SEO is ‘Guilty’) would pull a good effort even closer together.

And that marks the end of the list. Tomorrow a round up of what I learned about video from the regional press.

How the regional papers use video: The Belfast Telegraph

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Andy

I’m back from my holidays refreshed (and a little fatter) so its time to restart my review of the way regional newspapers use video . You may remember that I started with a rather arbitrary list of papers to look at which started with the Express&Star and then the Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News.

Next on the list is the Belfast Telegraph
The Belfast Telegraph is owned by the Independent News and media group who publish the UK daily broadsheet The Independent (which I looked at before). It’ picked up a number of awards over the last few years and continues to be one of the top performers in the evening newspaper circulation listings (the reason it’s on the list)

It started publishing video in 2007 with a much trumpeted introduction of video news bulletins. I had a bit to say about that at the time and my views prompted a nice response from the Deputy Editor Paul Connolly. who outlined where they wanted to go with the video stuff beyond the video bulletins

The news bulletin is just a tiny part of our multimedia approach, don’t be fixated with it. We are forging ahead with our video and audio journalism and a range of other measures. First, we need to train our staff … then you’ll see the results.

So I was eager to see how far they had come.

The platform
The Belfast Telegraph brands its video as Telegraph TV and there is a Belfast Telegraph Television link on the main navigation. But try as I might I couldn’t see anything else on the page that flagged the video content – no links or other navigation. So I clicked through, via the BTTV link, to their video player page.

The Belfast Telegraph Video page - its all the same!

The player follows the thumbnail jukebox style, split in to tabbed categories, with an embedded flash player delivering the video. There where a lot of videos here but I’m sure there are more and I missed some kind of archive access. Unless that really is it!

The player is a nice size although the poster-frame often doesn’t display leaving a faceless black box. Luckily the display of the video headline and intro paragraph is clear and neat with a nice big headline to identify the story and plenty of space for text. This space is very rarely used well though. I’d like to see more text alongside the video to set the scene. But despite some nice layout the whole effect is let down by the way the thumbnails are displayed.

The first category you see is the BTTV news section, exclusively made up of bulletin style content. With Three bulletins a day there is a lot of content but it all has the the same thumbnail. It’s a thumbnail wall registering almost zero on usability. Dull. Even if the thumbnail was the same then a date wouldn’t go a miss. It’s a daily newspaper!

Looking at the special reports section everything begins to look a lot more exciting in terms of layout but the news section really needs work if its the first block you see.

Links to articles? No. But there are some links to other videos

The player does suffer the usual problem of a shortage of links through to related articles. There are some, including links to multipart videos like the What type of society do our children want? video which was split in to two. Others pointed to other content, like The Omagh fire: Murder hunt launched piece, but I couldn’t get any of these links to work.

There is embedded video on the site within articles but it’s usually Youtube – couldn’t find others. The article about ‘Adorable’ Derry teenager Eoghan Quigg and his appearance on X factor takes a youtube video showing an off-air recording of his audition. Once again you have to question how long this can go on considering the crackdown on copyright material.

The presentation
The Belfast Telegraph video can be considered in two halves. The main thrust of content is geared towards its bulletin which follows a very traditional news bulletin style. Produced by Macmillan Media, this is a very, very slick virtual newsroom style piece, presenter lead with video inserts. By all accounts the inserts and the studio work is all done by Macmillan and the fact that they also produce news inserts for GMTV it’s clearly visible in the style and approach. The content is technically very well produced but the whole thing is TV with a capital, well, TV.

It's TV news time

The three bulletin (four on a weekend) approach kind of makes sense. The evening and morning bulletins key in to the papers publication cycle (there is an AM version of the paper) and the lunch one grabs the lunchtime browsers. But the reality is there is very little to tie these bulletins to the paper.

There is a brief bit of scripted ‘in todays paper’ but it tends to be very generic or promos for the papers evening sections; jobs, business etc. Thankfully TV doesn’t stretch to anything other than promos. Ad’s are few and far between bar the odd short pre-roll ad and a sting for the Magners league before the sport.

The other rest of the site video falls in to the packaged feature category. Whether it’s sport, special reports or business, you can expect a nice vo, lots of b-roll and interview. Outside of the bulletins the major offering is in Special Reports. Rather than investigative stuff this is generally light feature based stuff. The only exception to that (that I could see) was Lindsey Armstrong’s Omagh piece, mentioned earlier. A solid package, confidently put together.

The packages can sometimes be too long and would stand an edit here and there. The Belfast bus tour was a case in point. The script sets up ‘chatting to those who are taking the tour and then goes in to a prolonged montage of the tour. We have to wait nearly 4 minutes before we get the punters which is then a bit drawn out. The result is that all the best general shots have been used in the montage and Gary has top resort to dipping to black or the odd very shakey GV.

It does serve as a good example of the mechanics (and pitfalls) of vox-pops though. Check out Bill and Nancy Gaunt at about 4:45 in. The first part of that is just misunderstanding it should have been cut out. Vox-pops should be quick and flow, one in to the other – quote, quote, quote and out. The rest of the package has done the set-up.

But credit has to go to Gary Grattan for producing a nice range of content. Gary is good on camera and puts together some nice stuff. Tighter packages would push the personality to the front. Take the Big Wheel Experience package as an example. A nice idea – Gary suffers from vertigo so stick him on a giant ferris wheel and film the result. (You need better office mates Gary!) – but a ponderous execution. Twice as long as it needed to be and the whole interview with the wheel guy was another package.

Vertigo video: You have some cruel office mates Gary.

Some of the filming on the wheel piece Martin Nelson whose work pops up a lot more in the sports section. In fact a large chunk of the Sports video and the odd special report seems to come from Martin via EagleEye Films. Again the content is okay and generally well shot and edited. The format gets formulaic with a music intro, some gv’s with a heavy music bed and then the meat of the package. Some of the packages run very long and again the TV influence kicks in with credits at the end.

Overall
There where obviously big plans for the multimedia content at the Belfast Telegraph so have they born fruit. In short, no.

Of all the sites I’ve looked at, that disconnect between the video and the paper makes the Belfast Telegraph’s offering the most like a national newspaper I have seen. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

Whilst the video is often well produced and in the case of the bulletins, I would expect nothing less, it feels very disconnected from the paper. The main thrust of dynamic content is in the bulletins but i feel like I could be watching any TV news bulletin not the Telegraph TV. The odd ‘read more in the paper’ does little to make it particular to the paper. It’s almost like they send the odd screen grab of the days pull-out and they send back a generic bulletin with the odd insert. This just reminded me of the ‘exclusive’ efforts of the tabloids.

I wanted more from the paper, more tie in and more relationship between the way stories develop through the day. The morning bulletin is a great point to flag up developing news stories and spin them through the day. There is a real chance to whet my appetite for the whole day so that I’m desperate to buy the paper in the evening. It’s a chance missed and in it’s place it’s a local newsfeed instead.

The rest of the content suffers the same disconnect. Whilst there is obviously an effort to produce good stuff the lack of tie in with the paper – good embedded video and related articles – means the video ranges off, doing its own thing. The need to split video over a few clips is a sure fire sign of a lack of editorial focus. It should be split over several articles. Each chunk complimenting the story. That’s not a criticism of the work that’s there, as I say, credit to the staff for keeping the flow of content. It’s just that without proper integration in to the online offering it seems to do it’s own thing.

Perhaps a good deal of the problems I see can be blamed on the CMS. The lack of a solid relationship between the articles and video is a sure sign of different systems fighting each other. But ultimately there is a real lack of integration on the site. It’s a opportunity missed both practically and editorially.

For me the bulletins don’t add anything to the mix anymore. I’d rather see more news and local colour, tightly integrated in to the articles – more Garys and Lindseys please and less GMTV.

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

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Tag Archives: video