Is this the kind of stuff we will need to be doing for the Web?

Slappy is right, make it five separate videos of three minutes. Viewers that click on all five videos generate five times more ad revenue than someone who watches an entire 16 minute video.

Generally, videos don't get that many hits. Photo galleries are where it's at.

 

Cory,

I don't say this to rip your work, but you asked for feedback, so I'll be honest.

I work in TV. If this is the future of newspapers on the web, newspapers are dead meat.

You are at a newspaper. Play to your strength. Newspapers have bigger staffs than TV stations and those staffers are generally better writers. You want to compete with TV stations on the web? Write about a lot of stuff. Make the writing better than the writing on the TV station's page. Cover more stories than the TV station does. With a good staff, both of those things should be easy for you.

Don't do video like this, because the TV station will bury you. Technically it was very, very rough. The composition was bad. The audio was bad. I understand that it's the first attempt for you guys, but in the internet marketplace you are competing with people who know what they're doing. You guys don't.

Beyond the technical problems, good video work is about storytelling. There was no story arc of any type there, and at 16 minutes you'd damn well better have one. There's an art to structuring any piece, written or on video, and you guys don't know how to do it for video.

Newspapers need to look really hard at why they're branching into video. It's not a winning proposition in most cases.

If you really wanted to provide a video support to the story you would have been better off posting a series of :30 video clips about the player -- sound bites remembering the guy, quick highlights of his career in Altoona, stuff like that. But not a 16 minute attempt at a documentary.

 

One question I had is what makes a guy who played double A ball so compelling? Do people in Altoona care about Hyzdu?

 

The franchise retired his number after only two years in existence, so yeah, he's a really big deal here. There aren't many players who have had their numbers retired by a minor league team.
The team is in its 10th season, and he is still the most popular player to come through here. One of the main reasons is he was a first-round draft pick who played 10 years in the minors before resurrecting his career in Altoona and finally getting to the majors. He also was a huge hit in the community. Really just an all-around compelling local story. Altoona is a town of 50,000 people that averages 5,000 fans per game, or 10 percent of the population. Not your typical minor league town.
I have written dozens of updates about him over the years because people always want to know where he's at. The timing of the documentary was to coincide with him coming back for "Adam Hyzdu Night" during the team's 10th anniversary season.

 

This is good advise. The power of the web isn't in trying to replicate what either newspapers or TV does, but in bridging the gap between the mediums. Think about how video can supplement and enhance storytelling, not replace it. Keep the clips short and sweet. Focused on expounding on the written word, not duplicating what is written. If the story is about the breakaway speed of a running back, think a highlight clip of those most amazing plays. If the story is about the oratory skills of Barack Obama, then give your readers a snippet of his best stuff. These principles can be applied to stories big and small, on a national scale or on the local Crash Davis.

 

I have to agree with the comments from PCL and sportsed. Newspapers shouldn't be trying to be TV stations.

There are ways to use video clips to enhance coverage of your stories on the web. I would have rather watched a series of shorter clips than one 16-minute video. My computer wouldn't even play the video without me downloading it. It took about 15 minutes to download and by then I could only watch a few minutes of it.

You could have taken all of content from that video and turned it into several pieces of content for a web package. You could run a feature on the guy, a photo gallery of pics from over the years and footage from a few interviews (in shorter clips) and put together a nice package of stuff.

Then you could come back with a follow-up story and footage from the actual event.

 

Maybe if a puppy dog was placed in the video {Zell}