Category Archives: blogs

3D cricket coverage?

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Here’s a conundrum thrown up by new media: if you broadcast a 3D replication of a cricket game, are you infringing the broadcaster who bought the television rights?

That’s what’s happening with Cricinfo. New Media Age reports that its 3D cricket coverage “could undermine Sky’s rights” (subscription required):

“Cricinfo … has developed an application that ties 3D animation to the site’s ball-by-ball updates. The technology tracks over 20 differentials in each ball that’s delivered and broadcasts a 3D version directly after every bowl.

“Experts have claimed that the move could infringe copyrights and the technological developments could lead to a new set of rights covering 3D animation being introduced.”

And what if you’re watching in Second Life..?

Student experiments with audio

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The other week I gave students a brief overview of principles of recording audio for the web. One of these was ’emotive audio’, so in order that students had something to edit in the second part of the class, I gave students 20 minutes to ask a stranger a question designed to elicit an emotive response, such as “What was your most embarrassing moment?” (recorded by Anna Jones) or “Can you describe the last dream you had?” (Sarah Gee,  and also Shemaine Rose). Some wimped out of the emotive questions, including Hannah Watson, who instead asked “What is your favourite animal/vegetable?” – dull replies, but she gets credit for asking one respondent to make a lion noise – and the other to make a sweetcorn noise…

Newspaper video: Judge not lest ye be judged

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Andy Dickinson has a synthesis of an argument over newspaper video, specifically how newspaper video should be judged. You’ll need ten minutes to go through all the posts linked to, but it’s a good question: who should judge web video? TV producers? Newspaper editors? The people behind web-only video operations like Rocketboom? The rules are still being invented…

Pay if you want a voice

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That seems to be the subtext of Pearson chief executive Dame Marjorie Scardino’s statement,  as the Guardian reports that FT.com is likely to continue to rely on subscription revenues:

“As debate online has become more diffuse – hundreds of thousands or millions of voices on each topic – it has become less helpful in a way,” she said. “The trend now online seems to be some sort of mediation and we think we might have a role there.”

[…] “she said that the 90,000 subscribers to FT.com represent a “rarified audience” including senior figures in business and politics across the world and “We have found that to some extent with the quality of audience we have got we can provoke the discussion”.”

And to think some people used to dream that the internet would give a voice to those without power…

Online video: how it should be done

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I’m still cranky from too much Lemsip Max, but grateful to Robert Freeman for pointing me to an example of how online video should be done.

On the award-winning Eastern Daily Press website the video for ‘Your chance to name leopard cubs‘ ticks every box for me:

  • Short (53 seconds)
  • Illustrates something that couldn’t be described as well in words alone (by most people)
  • No anchor – in fact, no commentary at all
  • It runs alongside, and complements, a text-based article, rather than replacing it.
  • Compelling content (i.e. cute animals – well, until they start snarling)

Interestingly, the lack of commentary initially confuses, but you quickly get used to this. In fact, it reminds me of the moving images on newspapers in Harry Potter films – perhaps we need to think of video in those terms, though not always.

Online video: can it get any worse than this?

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It is with a deep sense of shame that I nominate the newspaper I grew up with – The Bolton (formerly Evening) News – for the worst attempt at online video I’ve seen so far.

Today’s Bolton News Video page features the often repeated mistake of the ‘news anchor’ reading out news stories – nothing new there, although as I’ve blogged previously, the role of the news anchor is already being performed by the website: if we want to know the latest headlines we can read them in our own time on the homepage.

But then it gets much worse – as the first story is introduced, the camera cuts to… an image of the article in that day’s paper. Now that’s creative and engaging storytelling.

Further stories cut to stock images of: a hospital; a firefighter; and a footballer. In fact, the only point at which we leave the office is… for the weather – probably the one piece of journalism that doesn’t require a journalist to leave their desk (thankfully we were spared images of clouds, rain, etc.).

I’m getting close to the point of making my own online news video service. It will consist of me sitting in front of a camera reading out the day’s headlines, then holding the paper up to the lens. Really, I could steal their viewers in an instant. And I would do the weather as a separate video because, frankly, if someone is looking for the local weather forecast online they’re not going to sit through five minutes of headlines to get it.

If you’re going to do online video, integrate it with the rest of your journalism. Television presenters are for TV; newspaper layouts are for print; stock images are for brochures. Send your journalist out with a video camera or don’t bother at all.

Move over ‘MyGoogle’ – I’ve found a better tool

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I’ve long been a fan of the personalised page that Google allows you to create through selecting RSS feeds and adding them to your selection. But, thanks to Poynter, I’ve discovered an even better, more intuitive tool, called Wikio. It’s a personalised news service, but based on keywords as well as RSS feeds. Yes, I know you can create an RSS feed based on a keyword, but Wikio just does it much more intuitively, and makes it easier.

That’s not all – there’s a built-in social recommendation-type feature which recommends additional keywords based on the ones you’ve selected. And there’s a ‘Publish’ feature which allows you to create material yourself.

The only downside at the moment is that the generic and unpersonalised ‘news’ tabbed page is always the default – so you have to click on your personalised tabbed page to begin surfing.

Trinity Mirror head speaks of "garlic bread moment"

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At yesterday’s Citizen Journalism conference Trinity Mirror Head of Multimedia Michael Hill spoke of this being the “garlic bread moment” for the local press – the realisation that new media and citizen journalism “is the future”.

At the same time “Local papers have been doing citizen journalism for over a hundred years – it’s always been about local people.” The battle now is to convince hearts and minds that local people want to consume – and take part in – their news in a different way. This is the “man on the Clapham Omnibus 2.0” who checks the news on their mobile phone, picks up a free newspaper but walks past the newsagent, searches for items of interest online, and relies on bloggers as much as journalists.

“We have to accept that breaking news online has to come first,” he said, a process he intimated some journalists were finding hard to swallow. One had protested: “Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?” His response? “The goose has got bird flu”.

The process of persuasion has already begun, with ‘Back to Basics’ presentations to Trinity Mirror staff around the country. In the process the company has discovered latent talent in some staff – web savvy journalists; writers who can also edit video – but there is a conscious attempt not to “create islands” of ‘new media teams’ or ‘digital teams’. Hill described the process as being “like turning round an oil tank,” and that some staff would never get it, “but they’ll do what they’re told to do.”

The group have a number of plans for the future. Hill argues that “Local is Web 2.1,” and work is already under way on the first five of a planned 35 ‘micro-sites’ around the country, created by key local people. Blogs are already integral to the newspaper sites, with 34,000 pages being read across the group in the last week alone, and will become more so, as the group looks to tap into the niche publishing of ‘Long Tail’ economics, illustrated most vividly (and to some attendees’ consternation) by the ‘Geordie Dreamer’.

The group are also working on technology to rank stories by the number of people viewing them. “Newsworthiness used to be a judgement of what would sell copies,” he explained, but for the website it is a judgement of what will generate page views.

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Paul Bradshaw lectures on the Journalism degree at UCE Birmingham media department. He writes a number of blogs including the Online Journalism Blog, Interactive PR and Web and New Media