Making good content pay
Interesting inteview with Brian Storm on OJR: Building a perfect storm of journalism and multimedia
MediaStorm publishes and brokers multimedia projects at a high level. They auctioned off Ed Kashi’s work from Iraqi Kurdistan as a flipbook project, with MSNBC.com debuting the novel piece.
They also produced Gail Fisher’s piece on the Navajo’s uranium contamination for the Los Angeles Times. The four-part Blighted Homeland on LATimes.com is beautifully photographed. (You have to dig a little to get to the multimedia pieces.)
MediaStorm is a popular site, featuring serious, quality photojournalism. Brian Storm from the OJR story: “There are a lot of interesting things about the way the audience is different. About 70 different countries hit our website. How do they find us? It’s all word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing. It is all viral conversation and its exact opposite of broadcast. When we launched on November 16, 2005, maybe 500 people watched our project that day. Today there are thousands of people watching those same projects who have never seen it before right so the whole time-shifting capability is really critical to this medium.”
Making content pay
Another Reuters (via Boston.com) story about video sharing notes how martial arts expert Joe Eigo made $25,000 from the five million views of a video he posted on Metacafe.com.
Video sharing sites are starting to share the wealth, with YouTube anouncing revenue-sharing recently.
http://www.dovetail.tv is one. They’re aiming for high quality.
Gates predicts
A Reuters news story out of the Davos, Switzerland World Economic Forum covers Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ speech:
“The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.”
Searching video
A Washington Post article by Sara Kehaulani Goo talks about the efforts to index online video and the problems of doing so.
From her story:
“The key point to understand is that Internet video is going to go to the television,” said Phil Leigh, founder and principal analyst of Inside Digital Media, a digital media market research firm. “All of us are going to use the [Internet] search tool to find what we want to watch” on TV.
Are papers in their death throes?
There’s a raging discussion on my NewspaperVideo email list. The news of accelerated media job cuts (Pace of Downsizing Accelerates) has put everyone in panic.
I don’t know if we’re all fawked. I suspect the New York Times and the Washington Post will continue in some form. The LA Times, they’re f*d, though. The super-local super-small papers have a chance of surviving.
But us mid-size metros are in a world of trouble, I think. We depend on a mass audience but our audience is imploding, scattering like a supernova to the far corners of the media universe. Savvy marketers — from the white house to your local auto dealer — are bypassing mass media to sell directly to the consumer. At some point the balance will tilt and advertisers will leave our print product like field mice fleeing a grass fire.
As much as I’d like journalism to be free, it ain’t. We spend gazillions covering the news. We spent megabucks covering hurricanes for the last few years. We spent megabucks covering Haiti, and Cuba, and the rest of Florida — our back yard. Real journalism costs real money. Lawyers for FOI requests and record requests aren’t cheap. Helicopters cost $750 an hour when the school bus gets hijacked. Heck, it costs $25 just to park to cover an assignment. The sat phone is $2 a minute when the storm hits. Journalism is definitely not free.
What are we going to do? Maybe we’ll continue as an advertising company at a hyper-local level. And just maybe, a few of us can make a living as content producers. The Associated Press is a content company. Even the local dinner theater is a content company. They make a living. Maybe we can, too.
We multimedia producers have a highly saleable product. The gazillion outlets for TV are hungry for content. We can sell ’em what we produce after we’ve posted it on our web site. We can produce high-quality stuff that gets hundreds of thousands of hits, instead of hundreds. We can be the authors of all the content that the aggregators will eventually have to pay for when the AP wire service model wastes away. (We’re already talking about dropping AP.) But the transition isn’t going to be pleasant.
We had the belt-tightening meeting yesterday. No layoffs, though, they promise. Me, I’m still pushing to get a broadcast camera in the hopes of having marketable footage. Ain’t gonna happen, but we can dream, can’t we?
At least us new media folks will be the last ones out.
THAT OF WHICH WE DON’T SPEAK
According to the NPD Group , six million households downloaded online video in the third quarter of 2006.
I would have thought about five million of those would be mentos-and-diet-coke videos. But no, sixty percent was porn. Another 20% was from TV shows. Five percent were movies. Which leaves 15% for lonelygirl15, amanda, eepy, and us newspaper people.
Just so you know where we stand.
How’s your CMS handle video?
Adrian Holovaty writes about newspaper content management systems in A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change . He explains that rigid content management systems that identify every entry as a “story” get in the way of useful database publishing.
But his arguments also apply to video on newspaper websites. We really need to get video, photo, story, graphic, raw data and archives all together. Arguments for lo-fi video to go with stories are specious until we can post the video with the story, instead of some player on another page.
Showtime for Smithsonian
IFC News says Showtime locked up rights to the Smithsonian Museum’s archives. But we’re here to look at the newscast, not the news. For you Timescast-style news show fans, check out IFC News’ intro and their chromakey background. They manage to combine professional production values with an anti-tv feel.
See:
NY Times invests in Brightcove
The internet video distributor Brightcove just got an additional $59.5 million in funding from a group which includes the New York Times. They’ve got some heavy hitters behind them, including AOL, Hearst, and I think the Washington Post. See the story at Red Herring.
I hope the practice of putting a TV set (a separate video player) on a web page dies off quickly. I’m still waiting to see an automated content management system that will put video embeds on pages the way newspaper pictures sit on the printed page. The idea of captive pre-roll advertising is really strong, though, so expect to see lots of Brightcove players soon.
On the other hand, anything that increases revenue, I suppose, is a good thing….
One really cool thing about Brightcove is the reporting that tells how many people watched your video all the way through. Check out some of Brightcove’s site and you’ll see that almost nobody finishes one.
Internet TV from a newspaper company
If you haven’t checked out http://www.hamptonroads.tv/ lately, they’ve gotten over their growing pains and their servers feed video smoothly now. It finally works the way it should and it’s an interesting place to visit.
HamptonRoads.tv is a huge internet-only TV station created by Landmark Communications / Pilot Media Companies, whose Virginian-Pilot newspaper is the largest metro in Virginia. (They also own the Weather Channel and multimedia powerhouse Roanoke.com) Visual Journalists at the Virginian-Pilot contribute pieces to hamptonroads.tv, but the majority of local content comes from dedicated hamptonroads.tv shooters.
They have channels on their player and you can get world, national, and local content, as well as viewer-contributed.
Their “.com is so yesterday” intro is worth the price of admission.
