Cornering the video market
Last Tuesday, just as the Ted Stevens indictment story was breaking, a woman called the newsroom saying she had video of a bear attacking a moose calf in her front yard. I didn’t make it out to Jennifer’s house until Wednesday morning, but by then she had shot more footage, this time of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game responding to the area.
Technically the footage could be better — the camera work is shaky, lots of panning and zooming, poor audio — but what an amazing moment to get on camera! It’s a rare event to see, let alone capture, and it was obvious immediately that she had a great story to tell.
After copying the files, I asked Jennifer to describe what happened in an audio piece (one take, two minutes. She totally nailed it) and then shot some b-roll of the area. The finished product took about four hours to produce, in large part because of file conversion problems (VOB to AVI to MOV), but in three days it’s received nearly 30,000 views on adn.com, making it one of our most popular videos of the year.
I frequently hear newsroom staffers (to be honest, usually photographers) ask why we have to shoot video when the views don’t justify the effort. I think this experience provides an answer: By producing video we redefine people’s understanding of the newspaper to include video. When we own online video in our local market users look to us (and not just TV) to distribute their content and, more importantly, they’ll visit our site first to see news video.
An aside: like many long-time Alaskans I’d gotten a little blase about bears. Not stupid, but I certainly didn’t understand what a bear attack looked like. The bear in the video throws that moose around like it’s nothing at all — which is all that’s left at the end.
UPDATE: CNN called the office today looking to run the video. I got this information second hand, so I don’t know if it’s just the website or for broadcast (quality seems suspect for broadcast).
UPDATE 2: The video is now posted to CNN’s homepage. I’m a little disappointed they gave the Daily News a “courtesy” credit instead of a “produced by” credit.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
As one of those pesky photographers that questions whether the view stats justify the effort, I feel it necessary to point out just a couple things:
1. Some stories are clearly more appropriate for video and some are not. A bear dragging off a moose calf is compelling video.
2. Your production of the video was good and worth every bit of effort you put into it. It made it a much better, professional product. But let’s be real, it got 30k hits because a bear was dragging off a moose calf. It had “holy shit” factor.
3. ADN got that video because a reader saw us as an outlet for video. That’s great and your point is well taken. It would follow that the price we’ve paid to get to that level is many days spent by many people making shoulder-shrug quality videos that get, what, less than a few hundred views. Intelligent people could disagree about whether the ends justify the means. It certainly hasn’t been the cure of industry money woes.
4. The initial question is less about stats and more about how we can do the story best, not whether we should do multimedia at all. When I look at a story that calls for multimedia, I ask myself which one services the story best. Audio slideshows do well. For me they’ve stirred more reader feedback than anything else I’ve done. So my objection is not doing video at all, it’s doing video JUST because it’s video. That perpetuates what seems like the biggest false assumption of all, that readers do not appreciate or are not affected by good still photographs. If anything, the stats tells us that’s not true everyday.
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August 4th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
There’s a fine line between quality video and video-for-the-sake-of-doing-video and we’re frequently on the wrong side of it. Last week was a perfect example: the bear video went up Wednesday and on Friday morning I was shooting an editor-demanded video of a woman’s 100th birthday party (NOT compelling).
But we need to know how to use the tools. I learn something about the medium every time I shoot a video, whether the end product is interesting or not. If we (the newspaper) are proficient with the cameras and software, we’ll be able to use video when the opportunity presents itself (like a bear attack).
I’m also becoming less comfortable with predicting which of our videos will be successful. Sure, a bear attacking a moose calf is a sure bet but a video tour of the Target store? It’s received over
50006300 views so far, numbers I never would have guessed.Multimedia, including video, is not the miracle tonic that will save newspapers — though it will be an ingredient — but that’s another topic.