That was cool enough. What I didn’t expect was how Deb Roy has since applied his research in language acquisition to the intersection of public media and online conversations.

Think ABC’s #QandA on steroids, but instead of just monitoring or displaying the hashtag, it’s mapping every public conversation and connection that’s taking place around a program or individual broadcast.

In January I experimented with a little mobile journalism, or MoJo, on a small story. Using Qik on a Dopod mobile phone, I live streamed video from the scene of a unit fire on Brisbane’s south side.

This was by no means an experiment in mobile journalism that even basically covered how MoJo could be done, it was simply a spur of the moment decision to give it a go. These are my thoughts on the process.

One of the videos watching fire fighters go about their work after they had already put the fire out.

Interview with the fire officer in charge

This video was taken with a TV cameraman alongside me. The use of his light was crucial. I had earlier interviewed the officer in charge using my point and shoot camera, but the footage was very poor without a light on the subject.

Each time I started a new video stream an update was sent to Twitter. While I was live streaming to the internet several people used Qik’s inbuilt comment facility to send me comments asking where I was, who I was with, and what was going on.

Pro: There is the potential for community or viewer input during a live interview. The journalist could invite questions from the audience, choosing one or several to ask directly if appropriate.
Con: None really. The comments don’t create a notification sound or show in the video. The only issue is if a journalist thinks they might be distracted, but this is easily overcome by turning off comments.

The vision is streaming live to the internet.
Pro: No editing required before original content can be viewed. Gives audience the very real sense of “being there”, and participating in the event or interview.
Con: For mainstream media, there could be the paralysing fear of loss of control. What might someone say or do? Not just say in terms of “offensive” language, but saying something that could present a serious legal problem, like accusing someone of being responsible for a crime. The fear is not irrational, but TV do live crosses all the time.
Another loss of control is the ability to embed the video anywhere. That means competitors could simply put the embed code on their own site. This isn’t a problem if there is a way of appropriately branding the video because viewers will still know who created the content, no matter where they see it.

Apart from live streaming to the internet, I also took images and video on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W110. In some cases this was concurrent, simply holding the camera under the phone while one streamed and the other recorded.

The most compelling footage of the fire was shot on a mobile phone by a neighbour, not a member of the media. Connecting our phones via Bluetooth, he was able to give me the footage of flames shooting from the window. That phone footage was used on TV news the following day and can be seen embedded in the Courier Mail story here.

The videos above are in a live emergency services situation, but standard interviews are of course also possible. I’ve been experimenting with Qik, but UStream and other services are available as well.

Interview with Qik co-founder
Innovations in Journalism – live streaming video from mobiles developed by Qik
In the comments at that page: “Tip to Qiksters – buy a cellphone tripod.” I couldn’t agree more.

A post of mine from 2007, some of my earliest interest in mobile journalism came out of the Reuters MoJo lab.
the earley edition – Mobile Journalism Toolkit

Stephen Quinn is a journalism academic at Deakin University who specialises in Mobile Journalism. One place you can follow his thoughts is on the GlobalMojo blog.
He’s a good man to follow if you’re interested in mobile journalism, particularly in the Asia Pacific region.

Either check out the video directly directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page. If you think it’s worth sharing please send the links around, or digg it.

James Smith first tried singing 18 months ago. That was karaoke – now he’s had 10 singing lessons, and on Saturday night he sang Nessun Dorma and several others at the Bastille Day Grand Dinner Ball.

I shot and edited the video. I rarely get to play with the video cameras these days… This is the first interview James has ever done. A story to rival Paul Potts – the singing mobile phone salesman from Britain’s Got Talent (YouTube link).We had to go with the video before both commercial TV news stations got him, despite my rough shooting and editing skills (back lighting on his porch, and why the hell is there not a tripod in that kit?). Both commercial stations did a story on their Saturday 6pm bulletins, 18 hours after my video went online, but this was James Smith’s first ever interview.

Again, either check out the video directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page.

I had embedded the video here, but something to do with the code broke my webpage, so visit the links to see it.

I like the thought of that future, but hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around the concept of how the journalist could record audio, video, get some stills and take a few handwritten notes all at the same time.

The picture I had was similar to that of the one-man band – bass drum strapped to back, harmonica brace, foot pedals, cymbals between the knees and a violin for some fast fiddling.

But for Jane Munro, one of the Radio Online producers for the ABC, it’s just part of the job.

‘When I am shooting a video story I use the camera to acquire everything I need to publish on a range of platforms.
‘I extract the audio from the video package, and sometimes broadcast that audio unchanged as a complete radio package. I then extract still images from the video to accompany a text article. That and a compressed version of the video is published on our local website.’

More available from Issue 48 of Inside the ABC

Some journalists can’t wrap their heads around more than asking questions and taking notes. It’s easy enough to set up and leave a small camera on a tripod while you interview someone, or record audio (which many do for personal record anyway), but the problem comes in the production process.

The editing and posting online of content is where more technical skills are needed. Journalists shouldn’t be expected to learn and do these things themselves, but those who can or want to should be given the opportunity, and this is where organisation-wide collaborative systems need to be in place to make it possible.

It requires just a little effort. If a stills photographer has been taking their own camcorder out on jobs years before newspapers – let alone video – went online, it would be unwise of the organisation to not recognise that persons worth, or encourage their efforts.

When I asked ‘where to news video?’ in the last post, I had forgotten about another Pew Internet survey I blogged about last year.

In that survey, it was found that news video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.

My response, as young adults who are completely comfortable with online video get older and become more interested in news and current events, online news video naturally becomes a viable product with a genuinely loyal viewer base.

But you have to be able to share that product. Let a loyal viewer base help increase distribution, if they like your content they’ll want to.

As online visits and online video viewership grows across every demographic, where does online news video fit in? The online department of a newspaper can’t cover every story in video, and shouldn’t be expected to. In Australia, international or national video stories for newspaper sites come from wire services, such as Reuters or Sky News video.

There’s no reason, however, for them not to come from independent video makers, or user-generated content, because they are competing with video-sharing sites.

What online newspapers should be doing better is local news video. They’re better placed and have better local knowledge to make the story more personal for their viewers. If they won’t do it themselves, providing the platform for user-generated content to appear could also be a ‘ratings’ winner.

User-generated ‘news’ content can be uploaded to a slew of video sharing sites, but it’s effectively invisible if people don’t know where it is or how to find it. Create the platform, and viewers will come to you for the people’s news, supplemented by your own. It doesn’t have to be extremely difficult either.

The Pew Internet: Video Sharing report showed that 15 per cent of respondents had visited a video-sharing site within a day, compared to 8 per cent in the survey a year earlier.

Overall, 48 per cent of those surveyed reported ‘ever’ visiting a video-sharing site, up from 33 per cent in 2006.

The largest percentage growth of users visiting video-sharing sites daily came from high school graduates, whose usage grew from five to 13 per cent, and was followed by women, who jumped from five to 11 per cent.

The largest demographic of daily video-sharing site users in 2007 was the 18-29 age bracket, of whom 30 per cent reported daily video views. The next largest demographic was men, of whom 20 percent reported using a video site ‘yesterday’ in the survey.

The only demographic in the survey not to record a growth in daily usage of online video sites was people aged 65 and over, who remained unchanged at four per cent use.

From a Pew Internet report from July 2007, half of those who view videos share the link, while three quarters of online video viewers reported receiving video links from others.
Pew Internet: Online Video.

Make your news video shareable, or even easier to view, and again the viewers will appreciate it.

Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.

None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck – it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.

For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.

Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch – Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.

With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face – rejection.

But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player – share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.

In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.

The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.

For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content – because they try to make it easily accessible.

Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.

If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.

The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.

Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.

Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure.  Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content – which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.

Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp.  This aspect of the current beta player is promising.

The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.

I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.

A review of Hulu at LostRemote.

Also, if your “talent” isn’t talented enough to be on air, why are they talented enough to be online?  Be very clear here, he’s not saying they shouldn’t be online, but that television and web are different.  Tell people not to think of themselves as speaking for television, and the imperfection and quirkiness of being themselves can be the selling point.

As Safran says, there is a difference between “real and quirky” and “bad delivery”.

via LR – The web is not the TV minor leagues

About CitizeNews

Our mission is to aggregate the work of talented video journalists of great diversity and distinction whose work is characterized by a powerful individual vision. We are constructing a digital platform where video journalists chronicle the world as they work to interpret its peoples, issues, events and personalities.

The Travel Channel, with Michael Rosenblum, launched a new series called What’s Your Trip earlier this year.

They’ll pay up to $1000 for travel-related videos used on air so if you could use the dosh, and you took your video camera with you anyway – why don’t you see if you’re good enough?

The actual website for What’s Your Trip is a little busy… read Rosenblum’s pitch here.

Instead, what do we do? Stand ups? People eating bugs. Guess Who’s Coming to Decorate. What a tragic waste.

A great deal of the banality of television was inherent in the technology. When cameras were big and heavy and bulky there was a natural disincliation to use them creatively. We were content to perch them on a tripod and roll tape. The result: static.

[...]

Small, hand held digital video cameras have the potential to do for television journalism what Leicas did for photo journalism – create a very different looking product – one that is more intimate, more immediate and much more powerful.

if we have the courage to change……

We could, of course, continue to use these small cameras to replicate what we do already.

We could also mount a leica on a tripod and take a very stiff formal photograph.

But that would be a waste of vast potential….

via Michael Rosenblum

Pew Research Center: Online Videos Go Mainstream

To make the online video point, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com has put together a video entry about the research findings.

From the Pew survey link:

• Online video now reaches a mainstream audience; 57% of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video
• Three in four young adult internet users watch or download video online
• News video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.
• More than half of online video viewers share links to the video they find with others.
• Most online video viewers have watched online with other people.
• Professional videos are preferred to amateur productions online, but amateur content appeals to coveted segments of the young male audience.
• Few pay to access online video.

Local news stations, please take note.  As all media move to the web, the local paper is your direct video competitor – and doing a much better job.

via Rosenblumtv