Summary
Training all the newsroom staff with multimedia paid off big time when the vtech shooting happened. People were at least somewhat familiar (if not proficient) with all of the equipment. But not being proficient was okay - the key was to help readers be part of the experience asap.
Sadly, there was actually no mention of 'citizen journalism' during the lecture. Maybe the talk was mistitled? The crooked road multimedia piece was pretty cool.
Notes
Hosts: Seth Gitner and Lindsey Nair from The Roanoke Times
- 97K circ
- 5 mill page views a month
- 400K - 500K visits a month
Find a person who's interested in online storytelling, train anyone who wants to learnt. Give staff the skills to think in a multimedia mindset. Reporters regularky recording audio with photographs.
Got reporter involved. Weekly piece called 'everyday heroes'
anyone in newsroom is already trained to tell stories. Apply that to audio + photographs. How to sequence it all together to tell a story.
(Note: I think I'm the only one blogging here. ironic)
Lots of experimentation required. Recognize the failure, keep trying. Audio podcasts didn't really work out for them. Moved it to video podcasts.
Interactive demo: The Crooked Road. Crooked Road - pretty cool - can listen to each instrument, break down the music into tracks. tourism podcast - drive the road yourself and listen to it when you get there.
Lots of people involved on one project. 3-4 month project. 5 day series with double-truck. but didn't get the feel of bluegrass.
Lindsey talking about the TimesCast
- home grown daily videocast. dec. 2005.
- volunteered for it
- sneak peek of stories.
- entertainment
- weather
watch the tone. important.
meant to be interactive. include a lot of links. polls, surveys. 'weather guest' everyday. salem highschool cheerleading squad, bands, animals from the zoo, all sorts of people.
reporter buyin - iffy at first. naysayers, iffy. compromising integrity. lighthearted. opinion changed over time.
- features reported, web producer, editorial assistant, online entertainment editor.
(showed an example cast)
get a teleprompter. it's worth the 2K investment.
greenscreen - can do some fun with it. (showed a demo of a halloween videocast)
only one person's main job. everyone else does it on the side. About an hour out of each person's day.
script in by noon. 11-12 guest. cameos in advance sometimes? 3:30pm is when it goes up.
200-500 viewership.
some spinoffs - MusicCast (band every monday), SportsCast (about 1 week lifetime).
first band - death metal. tiles in studio began to fall.
greenscreen: artists just draw a background and that's it. TalkSoup-ish feel. sports department comes in and watches. mainly because the two people already *have* an audience. get their audience from the columns onto the online side.
need to figure out ways not just to build this stuff, but to market it.
Bring in bloggers to do the weather. E.g. Aerobics blogger comes in and does the weather + an aerobics routine. She posts that on her blog. Maybe her fans will come to the roanoke site.
Viral - other means of getting an audience to them.
how does it fit into hard, breaking news?
- special series for election night.
- updates every half hour.
interview forum. conversation as the election progressed. 13 updates till 2am.
carbon monixide leak - no entertainment news that day.
vtech shootings in april - decision was to streamline things. drop all links. just have someone out there giving the latest updates.
- such a huge event for the paper - not sure how to integerate that into the timescast with all the other resources being diverted elsewhere.
how were the shootings covered froma multimedia side:
- escape of michael morva (inmate). went to hospital killed guard, and was on the loose in vtech. in august (?). killed some people. rolling news update at that time. reverse chrnological. served as 'practice' for tech shooting.
April 16 - 22
4mill pageviews, 1mill unique visitors. 1.5 visits.
normal: 6mill pageviews and 400K unique visitors in a MONTH.
They put all video on a sister paper's site.
(it sounds like they didn't know about amazon S3 - oh well :) )
roanoke times housee. students went out with video cameras.
huge media event. roanoke times tried best to cover it how they could. timescast, developing processes around that. getting news in earlier. the studio... all that infrastructure helped get the converage for the vtech shooting. because people were already proficient at that.
broadcast outlet called their editor. for footage. what's satellite? what's ftp? they weren't talking the same language. press conference. video featres. slide shows. 360 panoramic. trying all this stuff out on the fly.
cnn was doing all the latest updates. so they needed a different angle. 'hugs' clip.
also had a single point person who could pull in all the updates and coordinate. Not just writing straight news updates. but sprinkle in scene setting things - that are important to local readers but maybe not the national community. Voices from regular people.
Regular updates. It's okay to say "we don't know this." eg. cnn had an incorrect death toll; they updated it.
put up pdf's of the front pages. the rolling updates combined with the front pages made the updates a lot better. had all of the information there earlier. get new leads.
partnered with washington post. univ. video. able to use some of their content on another side. It's about getting the story out; doesn't matter where it came from.
Q&A:
-how did the rolling update work out?
summary at the top + rolling update with timestamps. worked pretty well..
what was the election coverage viewership like?
- not sure.
Q: test/measure/learn mantra is repeated. how do you maintain commitment of editors and landmark - how do you sell the business on the idea of keeping with this?
(they didn't really answer the question). plenty of opportunity to move with this and see what next. keep innovating. fortunately management understands that.
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