Multimedia and storytelling
Alan Regan's presentation - view the accompanying powerpoint slides by clicking the second link below:
Denis McEvoy's presentation
Ciara Ní Ghabhann's (slide 1-5) and Alan Regan's (slide 6-15) presentation
Slide 6:
A report by the NUJ in 2007 summed up the industry's attitude to online journalism and its potential. It said that it was "all at once exhilarating, terrifying, baffling, inspiring and damaging."
James Montgomery, editor of FT.com, explained what multimedia involves. He says: "in multimedia, you've got to mix up video, graphics, stills and audio. We're just learning about that... we can see there are some quite compelling things you could do."
Multimedia is not just all about video. I'll be addressing the perception that it's just video again later.
Slide 8:
According to Stuart Allen, the Oklahoma City bombin in 1995 was a "landmark moment in online history." Newsday Direct provided immediate coverage, with a locator map, the latest AP story and a graphic of bombs which terrorists use. ABC News posted a video clip on AOL, but it took 11 minutes to download a 15-second postage stamp-sized piece of video.
Ireland's joined the multimedia age relatively early. RTÉ.ie launched on May 26th, 1996, and offered recordings of radio features which were updated daily. They also had news from Aertel. During the Late Late Show's 1995/96 season, they streamed one of their programme's live online, and it was watched in Australia and Japan.Live news video was launched on the RTÉ website in 1998. But as you can see here, the quality was typically poor for that time. The face you can see here is Bertie Ahern's. The blob of green towards the bottom right reads '9.00', but it's very difficult to make that out.
Slide 9:
There is huge advertising potential with online media, but this potential hasn't been fully exploited yet. A Telegraph article in 2007 said that in 2006, £2 billion was spent on online ads, and £4 billion on television. But a BBC report last September showed that online had overtaken TV for the first time. In the first six months of last year, £1.75 billion was spent on online advertising, compared with £1.63 billion on television.
Looking at video specifically, Thurman and Lupton outlined the debate over whether to show ads beforehand (pre-roll) or during the video (mid-roll). Mirror.co.uk editor Steve Purcell says that mid-rolls are effective. Most other editors that were interviewed said that viewers would simply leave the page. FT.com editor James Montgomery said that ads should be short, since the clips will only be one or two minutes themselves. The Sun, for instance, experimented with 30-second pre-rolls with little success.
Adobe Flash technology offers the potential for interactive ads, engaging the viewer much more than having them simply sit and watch a video. The Guardian's head of editorial development, Neil McIntosh, said that "interactive ads are much more appealing than 30 seconds of bludgeoning."
Slide 10:
Co-location is now regarded as essential in newsrooms. This means bringing the online team right into the heart of the newsroom, alongside their broadcast or print colleagues. The BBC have reorganised their layout so that writers and designers work together on stories, and get to work on them straight away. Sky News's 2005 relaunch brought their web team, their television team and the studio itself all into the one room. Before 2008, the Guardian's online team, the print team, and the Observer team were all on different floors. They moved to King's Cross in London in 2008, where they all work together. The Guardian's Neil McIntosh asked if their old setup made "sense in a 24/7 news operation? No," was his answer.
Slide 11:
The most popular video on the Carlow Nationalist website is of a disallowed goal during a county championship semi-final. The picture isn't entirely clear, and the images are shaky. But that doesn't necessarily matter. The Telegraph's digital editor, Ed Roussell, said that "the cost of production in television is sky high in a world where suddenly anybody can produce video and put it on the internet. Will what we do be as good? Probably not. Does it need to be? No."Thurman and Lufton say that online newspapers' have an "ability to accommodate online viewing preferences, unencumbered as it is by a broadcast tradition of high production values." They say that Youtube's short, popular, low-quality clips are encouraging for newspapers.
Some editors question their popularity, however. In 2007, Stewart Kirkpatrick, the former editor of Scotsman.com, doubted whether "there's a large public appetite for low-quality video from professional news outlets." But in Carlow at least, there is that appetite.
Slide 12:
There is huge disagreement over what works well. BBC Interactive's Pete Clifton says that video should be integrated with text, but not repeat what it says. There is general agreement however that videos should be embedded.
Slide 13:
Note: At this point, I took a show of hands, and asked who uses RTÉ.ie on a regular basis. Most people (around two-thirds) said that they did. I asked who read the articles, and most of these hands remained up. I asked who clicks on the links to the videos on the bottom of each article on a regular or semi-regular basis, and only about 20-25% of those hands remained up.
The BBC says that when they used RTÉ's current method of linking to videos in a stand-alone player, there was a 2% take-up. However, when they embedded the player on the story page as you can see here, there was a 25-40% take-up. Embedded players force journalists to think about how video works with your text, according to a BBC editors' blog.
Slide 14:
The Telegraph's Ed Roussell says that experienced 'specialists' like Sky News's Jeff Randall are popular, already have TV experience, and are confident in what they do.
BBC Interactive editor, Steve Herrmann, says however that "text is the cornerstone and it's what most of the audience wants."
The Press Gazette says that video is central.
The Times's Anne Spackman disagrees, and says that content is king - their expertise is specialisms and those stories aren't picture-led.
But Mark Little told us here at DCU that content isn't king. He said that "content has no value unless it's shared among people. You need a community to talk about it."
Slide 15:
So why is it so difficult? It involves trial and error. And there has been a lot of error. The Guardian launched its online video service in 2007, which was much later than others. According to Neil McIntosh, they want to bide time as their competitors' videos were "dreadful", he says.
The audience is time-poor and demanding. Sky News's Steve Bennedik says that the online audience wants 40-second clips, not two-minute packages. He's hopeful, but not optimistic, of making in-depth reports work online.
The skillsets required now are changing, but Neil McIntosh says that being an exemplary journalist in both print and multimedia simply isn't feasible.
Time and cost is also a factor. Flash, for instance, is very expensive and requires expertise to configure. It also throws up editorial challenges, as it's difficult to find people with the right combination of Flash and editorial skills, according to McIntosh.
It's difficult too because we still don't know what works. Take the feasibility of podcasts, for instance. The Telegraph says that video will win hands down, but the Times said podcasts are at the forefront of their plans. Their soccer podcast was getting 20,000 downloads per week. However, podcasts are often automatically downloaded from RSS feeds, so there's no evidence that they're actually being listened to.
What's useful now may be useless in five year's time. Second Life was a big deal in 2007 and had nine million users. At the time, the Guardian ran an "extremely profitable" Second Fest virtual music festival. Research in 2007 predicted that 80% of internet users would have avatars on it by 2011. The BBC, the Guardian, the FT and the Telegraph all predicted that Second Life would only be a fad. Since then, Second Life's growth has been very slow. Today, it only has 18 million users. It ranks 3,749th in the world internet rankings - which is 200 behind RTÉ.ie, according to Alexa.Conclusion
Multimedia needs to mix up video, graphics, stills and audio. We're still learning how to do that, though. Finding the right balance is a challenge, especially considering that what's the right balance in 2010, may not be in 2012.
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