Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Zayk and Mavis, the Alaska Zoo’s resident black bears, helped the Alaska Department of Fish and Game try out one of the new garbage cans now in use in the city. Urban bears are a problem all summer and the biologists hosting this demonstration were called away to dart a black bear prowling downtown.

ADN photog Marc Lester shot a fun little video of Andrew Kerosky, a guy who’s been dancing more or less every Friday on an Anchorage street corner since 2006.

It’s not earthshaking but I really enjoy this sort of online piece: it’s simple, quick to produce, and tells a story about one small part of the city.

During the Linehan trial earlier this month I was chatting with a 48-Hours producer (they sent a team to cover the sentencing!) about video cameras and he pulled a Sanyo Xacti CG-65 out of his bag. Neil was talking it up as a travel camera — it’s very small, light and produces compressed (MPEG-4) files (he’d done a recent piece for the New York Times out of Thailand with it).

This is one of the older cameras in the line and he suggested avoiding the more recent, HD-capable versions.

I’m not going to give up my G9 but it certainly looked like an option for web-only work.

The University of Alaska Anchorage is hosting the Division II NCAA West Regional tournament this weekend and for the first game I decided to continue my G9 experiment, this time adding video. The game itself was a bit of disappointment (UAA won 80-60, very few students on hand due to spring break) and I didn’t get much of a story but I am pleased with the results from the camera.

I collected stand-alone audio with an M-Audio 24/96 (which is the dominant sound in the piece) but left the camera’s audio track in place under the video.

I may look like an over-eager parent but this small, light set-up seems promising.

At the beginning of the year I talked to the editor about creating a YouTube channel for the paper. My interest in it came directly out of the Knight Digital Media Workshop and the idea that we might be able to reach a few more people and just maybe get them to visit adn.com.

And. Not much happened. The videos of our soldiers returning picked up a few hundred views and a handful of comments but nothing to get excited about. All the photographers are pretty good about uploading material (we convert our audio slideshows to .movs and post those as well) and we were up to 23 movies after Bill Roth posted his video of the the Iditarod restart on March 2.

Well, on the 11th someone at YouTube decided to promote Bill’s video on the site’s home page.

There were over 11,000 hits on the video by 11 am that morning. Now, about 60 hours later, there have been over 72,000 views.

I’ve no idea what it all means. The AncDailyNews channel got 1,400 views and now has over a dozen subscribers but our metrics show almost no referrals from YouTube. It’d be nice to have collected those eyeballs but they’re almost certainly people who wouldn’t have seen the video anyway. I suppose a slightly raised profile is better than nothing at all.