Small-town shops using video

veering just a tad here. i'm working on an online community news site (basically an online only newspaper) and a little out of my comfort zone. we'd like to add some video to the site but not our own. the school district we cover does a fantastic job with videos such as a weekly football preview (about 5 minutes total length) as well as some great features. they post all their videos on youtube. the city council also posts videos and streams their meetings live. could we use these videos or would we be relegated to just just providing a link? also, our congressman seems to post every interview he's in on his youtube page but most are clips from cnn, etc. since his videos aren't produced by him, i'm guessing the rules would be very different.

 

You can link to it without asking permission, but if you want to offer it on your site, you normally need the permission of the video's owner. Generally, I've found that most of the entities you've cited are fine with sharing that sort of content - you normally just have to ask once for blanket permission, then you're golden.

 

You can embed Youtube clips without permission.

 

i figured i could treat the videos on youtube by the school district and city council as basically video press releases but i still plan to speak to someone just as a courtesy and to make sure i get a heads up on future videos, especially if it's a feature that i could package with a story we'd do.

the ones from the congressman i'm not sure about because cnn/fox, etc., didn't post them on youtube, the congressman's staff does.

 

Per YouTube's user agreement, if they enable you to embed the video, it implies they are OK with anyone embedding it. There are two options - allow embedding or prohibit it - and it's an all-or-none clause in the agreement. I stumbled upon a debate about this a few months back and was surprised at how contentious it was.

For anyone wondering, using a pay service such as Vimeo allows you the cool option of being able to embed videos and have them play only on specified domains, so you could in theory dole out approval one by one if people asked to use the video on their blogs or sites. Alternately, you could stop someone else from stealing your video while still embedding it yourself on your own sites and blogs.

 

Personally, I love the idea of video. It's a way of drawing a younger demographic in who could become your future subscribers.

At our shop for our all-star package, we had one of our reporters compete against our MVP in his or her event. He swam with the swimmer, played a game of horse with the hoops MVP, stuff like that. I loved it.

Video doesn't have to be all that long either, since no one has an attention span anymore. And honestly I don't think that have to be posted immediately after the game either if you're on a tight deadline. First thing the next morning should be okay if it's going to take you more than an hour.

Honestly when I check my Yahoo! homepage in the morning if they have a video story I skip it. I still want to read my news. But small-town local news? I think it's great. The major metros aren't coming out to Podunk. This way we're really pushing the local angle which is SO POPULAR these days.

 

If you're looking to draw in traffic from the social media route, nothing is better, especially local preps-wise, than posting Facebook and Twitter links to video.

And here's something I noticed almost across the board when I covered preps (forgive me if I mentioned this in this or another thread): The worse the school is at that sport, the more views it gets. The only real exception is a national recruit or a state-title-level video. I can only assume the kids are not used to getting much positive coverage, so they see the video as something other than just a losing score in print. This applied 99 percent of the time when I used to do a lot of prep football preview videos from practices.