Small-town shops using video

Yikes.

Have the ad department sell it. If they can't, they're not trying. I make $3,500 a year as a one-man band and I couldn't sell food to a starving person.

Your reporters SHOULD NOT be doing the broadcasting. To do it right, one needs to hire a couple of freelancers in the community and pay them a stringer fee to broadcast the games.

Of course, the local paper where I am doesn't bother with announcers, but they throw a two-day-old raw video feed of practically every game we do on their website.

 

Here's a video I did for our paper a few weeks ago that ran with a big enterprise feature in print. We're not a tiny shop, our circ. is about 55K, but definitely not a giant paper that has people dedicated to video.

Did the whole video in about three days. I ended up having to do a voiceover since one of my sources (a former player) kept changing the meeting time for an interview on me and I needed at least three voices in the video. The voiceover was done with a mic I had, but with no professional sound equipment, there's a bit of an echo. The interview with the coach was shot as my ASE was doing his print interview, so you can tell the obvious convo fillers on a few parts, but with the woman, it went well. Overall, I think the video was a success.

If you know what you're doing, it doesn't take that much work, though it can be time consuming, that's for sure. Just giving an example of a smaller paper able to do some video work and not having it look poor (though it could always be better).

http://www.nwaonline.com/xx/videos/2012/jan/01/5537/

 

As much as my last shop was all VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO YOU ALL MUST DO VIDEO IT IS THE FUTURE YES EVEN BAD VIDEO IT DOESN'T MATTER FUTURE, what really seemed to drive web traffic was photo galleries. Which are about a zillion times easier to put together, and anyone shooting on a digital camera will generally have tons of stuff they don't use for the paper.

 

People loveeee photo galleries. Eff any money your company is spending on video - pour it into photo instead (better equipment, using more freelancers, etc.) and I bet the results would be better.

 

We're big on videos. But I'm taking it one further and doing "live TV" shows with a laptop webcam, plug-in mic and Livestream (with the procaster).

We have permanent embed code through Livestream, so we embed it into a story that is always on our website homepage. So far it has been rather guerrilla in production -- just me going somewhere and setting up -- but the 3 finished products are much better than I anticipated.

I take the laptop to an event, hit "Go Live" on procaster, and I'm basically a one-man TV station for our paper. People in the newsroom have approached me with ideas for live shows, which is nice. We haven't gotten a ton of viewers for any particular show yet -- 165 for the first one, a 30-minute interview with a paralyzed road-rage victim and three state lawmakers, was our best so far.

It's new and fun, and easy. Just have to improve on the technical side of things.

 

That's a great idea, Songbird. With basketball state tournaments coming up, that could be an awesome traffic builder.

As for the photo galleries, it's true, people love them. Nearly five years with Rivals.com, and that always brought the most traffic. Heck, usually we gained at least one subscriber per gallery. In athletics, I also think a lot of the times kids and parents just want to go through images trying to see pictures of themselves and copy them to Facebook.

 

I think the mistake here is trying to do video from games in a way that you hope competes with standalone TV news coverage, assuming there is some. I've found it's so much more useful as tool to supplement print coverage. Unless you've got a dedicated spot on the sideline and a decent camera, you're going to spend a lot of time filtering through your shots, being frustrated with stats and your general level of attention and end up with something that pales in comparison to the clip someone with pro equipment is going to get.

That said, I love doing video and I've had a lot of good response from it. Now I mostly cover a DI school, and I get a ton of views basically just doing quick 90-second video interview clips from media availability days. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I put together a little bumper with our college coverage logo and embed them in a blog that day. If it helps, I've spent a lot of time watching the YouTube analytics and viewers trail off after about two minutes, so you don't need much. And I try not to use the stuff that's too in-depth or clearly being used for a feature. You want something quick and to the point in a video. I realize I'm lucky that I've got access to a well-followed DI program and that a raw interview with Podunk's Little Johnny isn't going to get 1,500 views on a blog post.

When I was doing preps not too long ago, I tried some live action shots, mostly basketball and semi-pro indoor football since it was close enough capture with a Flip-style camera, but it was hit or miss and often low quality. I experimented a bit, and with some really basic skills in a cheap program like Sony Vegas (I think it's about $50 now), I managed to put together some nice little feature and preview packages that did pretty well, views-wise. After I did a dozen or so, I had it down pat and putting together a three-minute video took maybe 20 minutes. This worked really great for preseason football because I could do a player profile for print, where I could get in-depth, and then cover all the general nuts and bolts stuff in a quick video.

Here are a few examples of what I came up with through my experimenting:

Preview videos from preseason football practice:

Action video from high school basketball:

Action video from indoor football:

Finally, here's the sort of unedited interview I've been posting lately. Without the kind of unfettered access to practices I had covering preps, it's hard to do much else, but I've noticed people seem to appreciate the brevity and simpleness of the straight postgame or postpractice interview.

For that little bumper at the beginning, I found an audio sample disc somewhere with some soundclips of a crowd and some "hut-hut," and I used Adobe After Effects with some tips I picked up from the free tutorials at videocopilot.net.

Some of the high school hoops and indoor football videos were shot with an older Flip cam, but the widescreen ones (football previews, raw college interview segments) I shot with a Kodak ZX5, which is pretty tough, waterproof and costs about $99 or so now. The battery lasts about two solid hours, recharges pretty quickly, and a 16 GB memory card gives me four hours of HD shooting.

 

One of the weeklies in the middle of the state does; the two guys do a pretty good job with it. It's why, when we had an opening, I tried to talk each one into leaving their paper (we were offering more $ than they were making) to come and work with me. (The SE said no because the cash wasn't enough to switch from his spot; the other guy said yes, provided his bosses didn't give him a huge pay bump. He said he didn't expect them to. They did.)

 

Since Lobster brought it up, what kind of camcorders/cameras do some of you use?

 

I'm in Springfield, Mo. right now covering the signing ceremony of Dorial Green-Beckham. We're doing live streams of four signings on our Websites using a program called Qik, which pretty much lets your cell phone be a webcam. I'm using it on the iPad. Hopefully works out well.

 

Hey, video folks. Let's share signing day video ideas to help add to everyone's coverage in the future. What did your shop do? Find any new and fun programs or techniques? I'd love to see other users videos, but I definitely understand the anonymity factor. Still, I'd love to at least hear what you did without blowing cover.

I Covered all of the DGB media frenzy today and I think the Qik thing worked pretty well, considering it was a 3G connection. For the actual signing itself, we had more than 1,600 readers watching live. I had to hold the iPad without a tripod since I also had a digital rolling, but I think it worked well. Two videos below of it below:

http://qik.com/video/47808089
http://qik.com/video/47807955

My Web Editor called me at 8:10 a.m. and wanted me to broadcast a live update using the iPad's front camera at 8:15. Didn't know it at the time, but had 1,000 people watching it (which is weird to think of when you're a newspaper guy, rather than TV, and aren't used to the live setting), but it went alright http://qik.com/video/47807466

Also did post-event video about three minutes long. Just the highlights of the presser, why he chose Mizzou, yadda, yadda ...

http://www.arkansasonline.com/videos/recruiting/

OK. Let's all try to help each other get better by brainstorming ideas. I'd love feedback on my main video package, too.

 

One other thing to keep in mind ... know your state association rules for audio/video coverage, ESPECIALLY once you get into tournaments.

If you're doing a full or condensed game, it's not like newspaper coverage where you can show up and write a story, because you are actually giving away the product (video or audio of a game), not just reporting on it.

In our state, the regular season is totally up to each host school (but always get permission first), but any audio/video coverage of a state tournament event requires an application and a rights fee. Those who don't pay/get approved are limited to 3.5 minutes of video that can be placed on the website.

Local paper in our community has had the publisher pushing them to throw videos up on their site (ostensibly to compete with my small-fry play-by-play company, although I'm not sure they'd ever actually admit that), so they're paying a stringer to go out and shoot raw video of full games. State tournament rolls around, and because they've never had to deal with the audio/video side of things, they go out and send their stringer to do a full event, and then put the entire event on their website. They must've gotten a friendly call from the association, because I noticed nearly all of the video had been taken down off their site by mid-week.