Talking about the future
Chet said it’s important for journalists and online producers to ask “what is the best way to tell this story?”And he said we have to continue training journalists to think about all the media available to tell a story, instead of just relying on the sidebar as almost an after thought for images and video. Ah ha! Finally, some real validation for my rants.
Here are some more highlights from our roundtable session:
- We spent about five minutes discussing journalism grads and the skill sets they could bring to the newsroom. However, the overall consensus is that most schools still aren’t teaching multimedia journalism. A few people mentioned UNC and California as schools where students are getting this kind of education. Of course, I had to pipe up and mention Kansas and the Multimedia Newsroom. But I added that frankly, most journalism schools just don’t have the faculty who can teach multimedia.
- Apparently, older folks 40+ wanted a text explanation of the video “Where’s the blurb? We want the blurb.” But the younger folks said it wasn’t necessary. Interesting. However, Jay Small was quick to point out that the text serves an important role for SEO.
- Closed captioning. It’s expensive to implement. And if you’re just posting b-roll with nat sound, what would the closed captioning say?
- Chet used to teach broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. He believes a 1:30 video is the perfect length. Although, he admits there is no hard set rule about length when it comes to video online. Sometimes it might be a good idea to have both a short version as well as as longer clip to allow users to watch video in different ways.
- We can’t forget about the money and 30-second pre-roll ads are NOT it. There are other, better ways to connect consumers and advertisers. And IMHO we shouldn’t even entertain the idea of selling pre-rolls anymore. We need to be more innovative in our approach to online advertising. I realize this may take re-educating both our sales staff and our advertisers. But taking a little time out to educate may create more and better relationships with our local advertisers.
There is so much to discuss… suffice to say that most of the summit has been validation for what we’re doing and where Scripps is trying to go with video.
We know this much is true – we have to do video. NOW!
On a side note, I met a couple of fellow KU grads.
Nick Hollensbe, a 2003 grad is Senior Video Producer for the Naples Daily New. Nick is a video editing genius. I know this because he brought his Dell portable editing machine to the summit. This guy means business! He has done some really awesome work with video at Naples.
I also met Nick Charalambous, the new Internet Director at the Anderson Independent Mail he got his masters from KU in 1997.
All in all, this summit has been a great opportunity to meet people and talk about one of my favorite subjects – the future of online media!