Yesterday Nielsen reported that video streaming online is up 17 percent for November, but of the top online brands for video, not one was a news site. While this statistic is not necessarily surprising, it’s just another reminder that news has room for improvement for online video — and student news orgs are no exception.

Video kit on less than $200

The basics for high-quality video production don’t have to leave you broke. Fairly high quality video can be produced with inexpensive products. A basic video kit can be put together for less than $200.

1. $99 – Kodak Zi6HD $150 – Kodak Zi8: We recommend this camera over the FlipCam because it has an external mic input and it shoots in HD. For those on a larger budget, a Sony Handycam is a good, inexpensive camcorder.
2. $26 – Lapel microphone: Audio is one of the most important elements of the overall video production and built-in mics hardly ever do the trick. Lapel mics can be used almost universally in a pinch — you can even tape them to podiums. At all costs you want to avoid the echos and ambient noise that any camera’s built-in mic will produce. You might also want to consider buying an XLR adapter, which allows you to plug in to the audio system at most public events.
3. $15 – Tripod: Nothing says amateur like shaky video. For crisp, clean shots, a basic tripod is a must.

Both Windows and Mac operating systems come with free video software — Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, respectively. Both are more than capable of producing single-camera news stories and adding features like lower thirds. Without spending any money on software, they are probably your best bet. A free option for PC users is Pinnacle’s Video Spin software.Something that might be an option in the future is a product called Stroome, which is still currently in beta. It is a Web-based video editing tool that seeks to make video production a collaborative process. The interface needs work right now, but the platform will surely become more stable as more versions are released. USC’s Annenburg School of Journalism has already signed a license with the program to start using the software in its classrooms.

Building effective archives

Being able to shoot and edit video is only half the battle. Presenting it in a manner easy for your users to find and navigate through is one area where college news orgs can improve. Lessons can be learned from YouTube, where on average, users spend upwards of an hour a month streaming video. Perhaps one of the most effective techniques utilized by YouTube is the “related videos” box in the sidebar that keeps readers perpetually engaged. A few takebacks from YouTube’s interace that news sites can use:

• Ability to search for videos by keyword
• One-click access to play videos (without having to navigate back and forth between a landing page and posts)
• Permalinks for individual videos
• Ability to share individual videos via social media

Building archive functionality into WordPress takes a little extra handy work. One of the easier solutions is a video sharing service called blip.tv. Blip.tv offers several advantages to other video sharing Web sites:

• Full integration: You can customize blip.tv’s player to match your own branding — no third-party logos on your video.
• Tools for dissemination: Using blip.tv you can post video on YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, notify your Facebook and Twitter followers, and you can even have it add a new post in WordPress.
• Revenue Sharing: You can choose whether or not your videos have advertisements, and what kind of advertisements to show (preroll, overlay and postroll). If you choose to allow ads, you will receive 50 percent of revenue from them — a good deal if you consider that major news sites are relying on video more than ever for revenue.

You can create a custom video player with the sidebar turned on in order to provide one-stop access to all your videos, or you can use the RSS feed to create a list of clickable thumbnails.

If you want to keep everything in-house an option is the JW Player. JW Player is more customizable than blip.tv’s player — for example, it allows the playlist to appear at the bottom — but you can’t add advertisements unless you’re willing to pay for the product. One option is to use the RSS feed from blip.tv in the JW Player, which would allow for ease of use and maximum customization. If you decide to use the JW Player exclusively, the Flash Video Player plugin makes embedding videos much easier.

Examples of effective video landing pages

The New York Times’ video landing page is very YouTube-like in nature, displaying popular video clips in the right sidebar and a description below the player. The NYTimes dedicates an entire subsection of its main site to multimedia and video. Sharing videos is easy with quick links below the player.

The Daily Pennsylvanian uses a slick overlay system that plays videos with the one-click ease. The Pennsylvanian uses the aforementioned JW Player to play the videos. There are also permalinks to each video, which is where users can comment.

The Daily Kansan, a publication running the Django-based Ellington CMS, has a nice page layout, but clicking on one of the thumbnails takes you to an article page, which does not include any links to related video.

Max Cutler, Web developer at the Yale Daily News and Courant News, recently started a forum topic about presenting multimedia on a student news site that we’ve been meaning to start a conversation around. The YDN recently launched a new landing page for their multimedia that offers a much more graphic view. What’s your reaction to how the page presents different type of media? Is it better to have content organized by topic or content type? What’s your ideal multimedia browsing experience? Weigh in on the thread!

In the “Multimedia Storytelling” session, presented by photojournalist David Stephenson, the Canon 5D Mark II was showcased as a tool to solve the problems faced by today’s visual journalists. To that end, Stephenson began the session by highlighting his 5D Mark II tip sheet, later showcasing pieces produced by his team at kentucky.com. Included herein are some notable quotes and notes from the 50-minute presentation.

On tripods: if you purchase equipment that you are comfortable with and that you like, you will be much more likely to use it.<

On a multi-capable tool:

The fact that I don’t have to go to an assignment with a video camera on one side and a still camera on the other means a lot to mean and it means a lot to my back.”

On “serving two masters:”

“You can serve your Web publication and your print publication with one camera.”

On drawbacks to the 5D Mark II: audio and autofocus are not on-par with a dedicated video camera.

On making the most of your equipment’s shortfalls:

“Most journalists have a litle MacGuyver in them… They find a way to make things work.”

On music: it’s a hotly debated topic, but when deemed appropriate, royalty-free is the way to go. Specifically, Stephenson often uses Incompetech.

Finally, Stephenson on his shooting style with this camera:

“They were still images, but they just happened to move.”

Ideas: lots of infographics, blogs, and user interactivity.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was pretty good this week, with Joey soliciting questions for its FAQ page.

Some interesting questions that are likely to make the list:

• Will you have control of my site’s design or do I get admin access to the back end?
• How long will the transition take from College Publisher to WordPress?
• Is CoPress building a content management system (CMS)?
• How is CoPress different than a CMS, and why is this necessary?
• How did CoPress get started?

Also on the forum, Greg asked what schools are using for e-mail newsletter and alerts. It seems, at least, from responses in the forum that Feedburner is still a common option.

Mo Jangda said, “From a content delivery standpoint, we haven’t really used subscription or newsletter services. I’ve always relied on the idea that FeedBurner has got us covered since it has email email subscription built-in — though I imagine we’d be better served actually publicizing that by having a subscription box in the sidebar of our home page.”

Lauren Rabiano asked a question that addresses a common problem in newspapers everywhere, “How do you deal with people who think backwards (espeically when they’re the people who control your money)? You can’t just ignore them or hope that they’ll “get it” sometime soon. How can you show them and change their minds? And can you do it alone?”

Holly Setter from The Pleiad offered some sound suggests, “The approach I took for getting Pleiad staffers was simply to work at getting them more involved personally on the Web. Our program has centered entirely on the print publication–we didn’t have anyone producing Web exclusive content nor did we have any training in multimedia packaging–so a lot of them were under the impression that it wasn’t important to know. Most weren’t exploring blogging options or social networking sites beyond Facebook (or if they were, it was not with the idea of using them for journalism). My basic idea was that if I could get them to use the available media for themselves, it’d be less scary to incorporate it into the newsroom.”

Let’s keep the forum flowing with questions, comments and concerns! Don’t be afraid! Feel free to add your two cents!

On the wiki, Emily updated the Ideal CMS Feature List with the CoPress team’s ideas on how to better implement your workflow and improve your overall system. Feel free add your own ideas. The more people who contribute, the more comprehensive the list can become.

In the News

Last but not least, here are some links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Video and Small College Newspapers – Andrew Spittle of the Whitman Pioneer asks how a one-man tech team can better implement video onto their Web site.
• Top 10 business mistakes that newspapers must avoid as they go online-only – The Online Journalism Review encourages getting customer feedback, searching for alternative advertising solutions, among countless other innovative ideas.
• AP Fighting Last Century’s Battles – Interesting look on how the AP could lead the charge in internet news syndication, rather than holding onto a model that no longer exists.
• Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards – A unique list on citizen journalism editorial standards posted by The Huffington Post.
• About the Pleiad – Holly Setter announces that her college newspaper The Pleiad will now be moving exclusively online

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway.

3. Video editing

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. After capturing about 3.5 hours of raw footage in Final Cut Pro, it took approximately three all-night sessions between three people to cut the interviews into short clips for the web. The average length of each clip was 1-2 minutes, with no clip longer than 5 minutes. We intentionally kept the clips short and to the point, catering to the attention span of most web users.

Once exported, the clips were uploaded to Vimeo along with some basic metadata (professor and subject in the title, pull quote in the description). We chose Vimeo for their high video playback quality and because they have one of the cleanest embedded players around.

Around the same time we were cranking out video clips, I got started with designing the page layout.

4. Layout and design

I always begin my web design process with some sketches on paper. My first thought was to build something like a mindmap, grouping clips by topic and sub-topic in a nonlinear format.

But the information might be too hard to find that way. So we came up with a dashboard of sorts at the top of the page that would let users jump to the sections they’re interested in, using simple anchor links.

At this point, I usually open up Photoshop and start playing around with graphics, because once I have a banner in place, the rest of the page’s design and color scheme tends to fall into place.

The layout itself was hand-coded in CSS and HTML, using a single-column WordPress page template as the base. All editing was done from the WordPress admin panel, with copious amounts of page previews and refreshing to test the design before it went live.

5. Putting it all together

The final stage of the project was to plug all the videos into the page layout. This turned out to be easier said than done, as we ended up with more video clips than we knew what to do with.

Ultimately, we came up with a decidedly low-tech solution to organizing the 70+ clips into the proper categories and questions: cutting up little strips of paper, writing a clip’s title on each one, and moving them around on a table until every clip had a home in the final presentation.

From there, it was simply a matter of going from section to section, copying the embed codes from Vimeo into the source code and adding thumbnails and pull quotes.

We used the Shadowbox JS plugin, which supports multiple types of media, to achieve the lightbox effect for launching videos.

A note on usability

In the project’s initial release, the thumbnails were actually embedded videos that could be played on the page without needing to launch a full-size version. Vimeo’s elegantly designed video embed options made this possible, and we all agreed that this was a very cool thing to include.

Unfortunately, within hours after launch, we received reports that our feature was causing browsers to freeze up on slower computers. Loading dozens of embedded videos on one page was too resource-intensive for a large percentage of our audience, so we had to scale back to simple image thumbnails.

Lesson learned: usability and accessibility always trumps coolness factor. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for any multimedia journalism project on the web.