Regional publishers in the UK are rightly assessing the return on investment in staff training and video equipment at a time of limited resource. The crises impacting the local newspaper industry in the UK are mirrored on the other side of the Atlantic, yet for some papers video has gone from embryonic to integral in the newsroom.
Lessons can be learned from New Jersey, where regional newspaper the Star-Ledger and website NJ.com have been nominated for seven Emmy awards for video work.
One of the pieces up for the award, Chain of Life, is 17 minutes-long, not a regular assignment for the paper's video department and reporters. It is hard to keep staff motivated on longer-form projects while training up new staff, Seth Siditsky, assistant managing editor for visuals, told Journalism.co.uk. The paper's videos are on average two minutes in length, but do take a documentary style. In February the site broke it's viewing record for video, with 400,000 views in the month, and in 2009 recorded 2.9 million views for its video in total.
Soon the newsroom will have published 1,200,000 minutes of video on the site since it began producing footage in 2005-6.
"It started in the photographic department originally and came with the mandate from our owners that video was going to save the industry. We had a small band of us that were interested in it and we taught ourselves Final Cut [video editing software] and came up with our own style of what we wanted to with video," explains Siditsky.
Photographers at the paper were the first to be trained in video, but a major buyout programme at the paper in 2008, in which 151 from the newsroom's staff of 338 were accepted, saw Siditsky take charge of an integrated photography and video department brought in as part of "the fabric of the newsroom". The paper has some full-time videographers, its photographers can shoot video and some reporters are now trained.
"The Same person that shoots the video edits it - it's a one-man-band approach to video. I've me and one other member of staff that the videographers can turn to for an opinion. The model is if you go and shoot it, you have to be able to edit it or at least understand what you are doing and as such working in long-form isn't a good place to start," says Siditisky.
"The Star-Ledger has decided that this is a medium that is important and isn't going anywhere. It is important as a part of whatever newspapers evolve into."
An early practitioner of video for newspaper websites, the Star-Ledger has tried, tested and moved on from some of the formats still offered by newspaper sites. It's own show, Ledger Live, has changed from a daily show hosting all the video features produced by the paper that day, to a video column, which is only produced when there's a newsworthy topic that lends itself to debate and opinion.
"We used to do Ledger Live live but people just weren't there. You need a news angle and a reason why you are live. Just being live doesn't generate much interest," says Siditsky.
Newspapers need to get away from the mindset that this is TV news. Globe Today, the Boston Globe's new video update doesn't do this, he adds: “It's not providing any information that I couldn't read in 30 seconds on their news sites.”
Journalists need to be literate in the medium to make it work - "there's a time to use it and a time not to use it too" - as do advertising staff at papers looking to monetise the medium, he adds.
"The numbers are pointing in the right direction. The issue isn't that people aren't watching, the advertisers are still learning about what they are selling. It's almost easier to train and get the newsroom literate in this new medium than it is to get the advertising side literate in this," says Siditsky.
"We are working on trying to help the advertising people and keep them up to speed on projects we're working on so that we can make sure that they know ahead of time and can get involved from that point."
The most lucrative area for video has been the paper's coverage of high school sports, in particular wrestling, which it has been able to sell back to local TV networks. This reverse syndication of sorts is possible because of a lack of coverage of high school sports by media elsewhere in the state and is the result of the Star-Ledger capitalising on its location.
"One of the reasons we have been able to push forward with our efforts is that New Jersey doesn't really have its own TV network. The northern half of the state is touted as a suburb to New York; the southern half is a suburb of Philadelphia," he explains.
There's more advertising around and on videos on the NJ.com site now than ever before, but still not a lot, he says, adding that Star-Ledger video has "probably not paid for itself yet".
"But video here is more entrenched in this newspaper than it's ever been. It hasn't necessarily turned an advertising corner and I think we've realised that this isn't going to be the magic bullet. But does that mean it doesn't have value? I think it has value as a medium unto itself and is a way for us to tell stories that can be as good or possibly even better than ways that organisations were traditionally doing before," argues Siditsky.
"It has power as a medium and technology has made it so it doesn't cost a lot to get involved and do this. If you're not involved in this just because it hasn't yet turned that advertising corner, it doesn't mean that with the evolution of technology this won't change. Whether it's mobile or the iPad, every organisation needs to be looking at how technology is moving, because if we're not involved with it in some way we're going to get left behind.
"There's nothing as of now that points to newspaper revenue coming back to the levels that it was, and nothing pointing to the web as the saviour of all of these newspaper employees that may be out of work. You have to be involved in the newspaper, because that's were a large part of the finances comes from; but you have to be involved in the web to grow new audience and traffic. And you have to walk down these roads together and to continue to branch out into other ones or, my fear would be, media companies are just going to find themselves irrelevant, in that something else is going to come up in their place, whether it's a local or regional blog or a video site that's going to cover high school sports better than anybody else. "In many ways it feels like we can be spread very thin at times, but at the same time as journalism and organisations try to figure out where they want to be, where is it that people are going? They're going to the web and while the web isn't providing the same revenues that any of the traditional markets previously have done, you still have to be there."
Siditsky would like to see his title do more with mobile, but isn't pinning his hopes on any one technology or platform. Instead a range of media for different devices and means of distribution will give newspapers "the stronghold necessary" to come through such testing industry changes and find revenues from the new as well as traditional, he says.
"When we look at that graph of video views how can anyone say it's not worth doing? More people are watching our content than ever before. The question is how do we turn that into financial gain?" he says.
"Right now one of the ways we've been able to do that is by selling our content to other television outlets. That's certainly different and not the traditional idea of a newspaper, where advertising is placed in and around your content, but that's not nessarily the way that everyone should be thinking about making money now."
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