MediaStorm: Spring New Media Lecture Series

Summary

I was nothing short of wowed by the demos that Brian did. And I love their mission: "to be the Life magazine of our generation." They're definitely creating some powerful stuff. And I could hear ooohs and aaahs from around the room. So there's definitely a market for his kind of journalism. I love that they are self funded and not VC funded. Definitely check out some of their work (I went back and added links to the pieces below, or you can just get to them from their homepage

Live Notes

Brian Storm from mediastorm

past: msnbc, corbis

storytelling, and what it means to be entrepreneurial.

20:00 what should mediastorm be?
- the life magazine of our generation.

collaboration. why can't one person do it all?
(demoing an interactive presentation)

everything done in final cut. want the television to be the viewing device.

(iraq)

20:10: audio + photo. real opportunity there. photo gives context.

this is the kind of piece that you need to see, maybe not want to see.

another piece "1976" - just music. about cuba...

20:13 - cuba piece has gotten a lot of traffic. brings people in and makes them look at the other stoies.

How do you get people to care about aids in africa? give them a voice. let the subjects speak for themselves.

Example: Bloodline (AIDS in Africa)

(the audio/photo mix is overwhelming)

20:26: bloodline was five years of coverage.

It started as prints on a wall, but it wasn't a narrative. there was no voice. let them tell it.

Q: Did she do all of it? (Kristin?)
A: yup - she shot video along the way. wasn't her focus. photography was. people need to do it with intent.

Revolution isn't in the photography medium. It's just the distribution cost and the cost of the equipment.

The sandwich generation. commisioned piece for msnbc.com. "20 million americans are sandwiched between kids and parents."
photo;/audio/video.

20:42: (that was amazing. very touching.)
a lot of writing goes into this. how did the narrative match the visual? in terms of technique. where he's shaving; audio + photo (but not the video). herbie was naked all the time :)

how do you use motion + moment best together (video + still). the apex of the narrative: he's losing his house. the sound of stuff crashing and then the still.


the mediasotorm platform:

MGM lion road = mediastorm logo. that turns into the page. tactile page.

transcript for hearing impaired. but also helps with the editing.

transactional process: buy the book off amazon. license images, buy film, etc. buy song: click on it, it goes straight to itunes.

viral email collab is key. also dig/deliious/technorati/etc. Special promotional images for bloggers.

Distribution:

- visual newsletters. try to live up to the brand.
- rss
- myspace: weird. but go where the audience is
- flickr feed of the promotional images

(one guy in russia created a viral effect for them)

podcast in itunes.

video is a great starting point.

iTunes: game changing.
apple tv: gets you to the 8' experience.

iPhone is twice the dpi 162 vs 76dpi (didn't know that)

Business Model

Multimedia Agency: allows them to syndicate content. License content. E.g. slate. promotion on msn.com AARP.

online auction to syndicate the premier. bid on the right to premier. just like ebay.

20:56 : flipbook about kurds in iraq.


21:01 : had the detail on each scene in the flipbook as well.

Production: working with a bunch of huge players: nat geo, msnbc, slate, aarp, la times, ...

Brightcodebrightcove - helps the video come in superfast. (showing a piece on Darfur)


another technique: vh1 popups-style.

21:04: nat geo project. wildlife refuge in chad.

21:14 able to take what was layed out in a magazine and give life to it. another interactive thing: google earth + zakouma = interactive.


Q&A

Citizen Journalism: Knight New Media Lecture Series

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.

New Media Lecture Series

The New Media Knight center at Berkeley has a Spring New Media Lecture Series. I'm going to try to catch some of the events over the next day or two. I inadvertantly missed the first lecture; a little upset at myself about that. Hopefully we'll have some live-blogging coverage from a few Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students.

I'm not sure that the topics are directly relevant to reporterist's mission, but they are certainly interesting.

Update: I live-blogged the first day of lectures. Videos are also being streamed live by Berkeley.

Here's notes from the first day:
- Citizen Journalism
- MediaStorm