video

A YouTube channel dedicated to online journalism is building its stock of videos from industry experts and practitioners.Launched in April, the YouTube Reporters' Center already holds more than 30 videos offering tips on key aspects of digital journalism.Categories include Expert Videos, Interviews and Profiles, Investigative Reporting, and Ethics, Law & Fact-Checking.Among the industry insiders offering the benefit of their experience are veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward, CBS news anchor Katie Couric, and HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington.In addition to these general advice pieces, there are also technical instructional videos such as this one from Reuters.com about filming effective video interviews.And this video from Bloomberg TV gives some valuable tips on how to tell a story with numbers.YouTube says of the citizen reporting resource: “The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news.”

Now that YouTube is a household name and more and more users have taken to watching long-form video on sites like Hulu, the question isn't whether video on the web will thrive, but what the future of online video will look like. There are many news organizations and tech companies who are exploring the next wave of online video or using existing video technology in creative ways. Here are a few examples of whats new, now and next.Map mashups have become a staple in newsrooms around the world, but Vidmap is taking the technology to the next level by marrying video with dynamic maps. The example video below shows a car traveling in Meissen, Germany while the map on the left tracks its exact route.The technology is similar to what the New York Times incorporated into its multimedia piece on the city's marathon: a street-level video of the route that moved in tandem with an adjacent map of the city.Dipity, the site where users can create their own embeddable timelines, already made it easy for users to plot video on a timeline. One of its latest projects, TimeTube, takes advantage of the technology, allowing anyone to input a search term and watch related YouTube videos arranged chronologically on a timeline.Most collections of YouTube video that appear on any given site are likely one long string of videos embedded one after the other. To bring the periodic table of the elements to life, the University of Nottingham ditched the list format and instead made the periodic table itself interactive. When a user clicks on an element, an embedded video pops up that discusses and showcases that element in a series of compelling video clips.Of course, one cannot discuss innovative online video without highlighting GOOD Magazine and its unique video offerings, available both on its site and on YouTube. GOOD isn't the first organization to create animation or motion graphics, but it is one of the few to use these technologies in a journalism context — whether it be visualizing Barack Obama's résumé or explaining the concept of "vampire energy" (below). And then there's video itself. There are a wide range of video cameras out there, but journalists often limit themselves to the same few devices.CBS 4 producer Gio Benitez used a story about the iPhone 3GS to show off the mobile device's video-shooting capabilities, using the phone itself to record interviews for the story. There is a noticeable quality difference, but what better way to illustrate new technology than to use the technology itself? Read more about the response to the story here.Finally, another relatively new technology that few journalists have taken advantage of is high definition, slow motion photography. Broadcast news nowadays is anything but slow, but the web offers a unique opportunity for illustrating the world around us at a slower pace, allowing the user to soak in details that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Examples include this HD video clip from the BBC program "South Pacific" of a surfer riding a giant wave, shot in slow motion to illustrate the beauty of the experience. The Discovery Channel also used slow motion video to capture a great white shark attacking a seal, shot at 150th of its actual speed. And in a showreel designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the SprintCam V3 HD system, the video below of a rugby match and other events shows how sometimes slower is better.Also on 10,000 Words:• 15 Tips for shooting online video• 6 Creative approaches to photography• A quick guide to interactive YouTube videos• 12 Creative uses of time-lapse photography (and 4 ways to create it)• How to shoot great video quickly and efficiently

This is a great resource: the Television Scripts portion of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, online for free, accessible by anyone. Check these sections:

• Write to Pictures
• Story Structure
• 10 Key Words Approach (this is great!)
• What Is the Story? (also excellent)
• Shooting Soundbites

I’m saying this from the perspective of a journalism educator who struggles to find good professional materials for my students to learn from. Too many textbooks are written as if for idiots, and the prices are ridiculous. I’m embarrassed to ask students to spend $50 for a book that contains only 10 or 20 valuable pages — and far too many journalism textbooks fit that description.
(One of the more notable exceptions is Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production [2008] — less than $20, and every chapter is truly useful.)
I’m stunned to see this Reuters handbook. From the BBC (public, not-for-profit), I wouldn’t be so surprised. But from Reuters, a fully commercial enterprise? I think someone should give Reuters a medal, a prize, a commendation. The entire Handbook of Journalism is cool, but this video news portion is so much more clear and concise than all the TV news textbooks I have ever examined — awesome. The whole handbook is a wiki (NOT editable by the public, of course) to make for easy corrections and updating. It’s brilliant.
Thank you, Reuters. Every journalism program in every college and university should thank you for this.
(Tip of my hat to the broadcast journalism blog Advancing the Story, where I learned about the Reuters handbook.)

The Daily Express is seeking feedback on its redesigned website, now available in beta.Visitors to express.co.uk are currently directed to this new beta version, but can still access the original site by selecting it from the home page.After comparing and contrasting the two, users can go to the short survey and give their views on the changes.Created by Netro42, the pilot website introduces category widgets on the homepage – such as Weather, TV Guide, Lifestyle – which can be collapsed by users to suit their interests.The beta version also introduces a web search widget and a video player offering sporting highlights from the Ashes series, the Premier League, and international football.Reviews of the beta site can be found on the Online Journalism Blog and on e-consultancy.com.

About a year ago I had the opportunity to look at Viralheat, a media monitoring service that at the time was focused on real-time analysis of trends in online video services such as Hulu. Viralheat was good stuff and ahead of its time in many ways, though positioned as a high-end service aimed at a fairly narrow audience. It was interesting, then, to see recently the evolution of Viralheat into a more broadly based real-time trend monitoring service that covers a wide array of social media outlets and regularly updated Web sites and that can be yours to use for as little as $10 a month. Viralheat allows you to choose key words and phrases and to track key statistics on how frequently they are popping up as fresh mentions in today's real-time publishing environments. You can get summary stats for cross-site mentions or drill down into trends found in specific online services. Viralheat's graphs are highly reminiscent of those found in Google Analytics - a possible exit strategy in the making? - and the interface as a whole has matured into a very well-designed tool that groups information into very easy-to-digest summary of key metions of terms. I like especially the three-tab summaries that form the body of Viralheat's content, which aggregate mentions in separate tabs for messages, websites and videos. This really helps you to get a sense of these three very distinct types of influence and to be able to use Viralheat as a high-power aggregation service that can trump many other online aggregation tools for ease of monitoring.While many of the summary statistics are basically just tallies and percentages, one key tool in Viralheat is a color-coded summary of positive, neutral and negative sentiment discovered for a chosen term. In a screen grab provided by Viralheat this statistic revealed that although the new Bing search engine from Microsoft had strong mentions in social media, videos and Web sites over a recent week, more than 86 percent of these mentions were rated with neutral sentiment - in other words, most people weren't waxing strongly about the new service but were instead just spreading the word about it. This type of take can help to separate perceived buzz from mere volume quite rapidly.Taken in sum with the other statistics Viralheat is offering a strong basic workbench of media analytics that almost anyone can afford to use to understand how their products, services and brands are resonating moment-by-moment through the countless number of online media outlets that are the front lines to true market influence. It was only a year or so ago that such types of services were used mostly by major ad agencies, corporations and PR firms to track the performance of trends in online media services. Now, thanks to highly scalable cloud computing services, good and essential monitoring can be used by any size organization to understand trends over an even wider range of services than those used by traditional monitoring services. Most importantly, by covering the waterfront of the most popular message-oriented online social media services, Viralheat can tap into trends in the highly distributed world of social media publishing in which many trends take form and influence opinions well before they are packaged in traditional media outlets. If you've been thinking that you need to be able to monitor social media more effectively for your organization but you don't know where to begin, you list of excuses has become much shorter.