Kamis, 11 Oktober 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Frontline invests in interactive video for The Choice 2012

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 08:13 AM PDT

In terms of online video, Frontline got to the scene early, making full episodes of the show available on the web back in the mid-1990s. Now the documentary series is experimenting with their online repository of video to try to orient itself for a future beyond television.

Frontline’s latest program, The Choice 2012, is a biographical look at Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on the eve of the presidential election. In the process of producing the documentary, Frontline did more than 100 interviews, many more than could fit within the broadcast confines of the show. Instead of just dumping the raw footage or selected clips online, the Frontline staff produced 16 videos for the web, over 8 hours of footage, each with an interactive transcript of the conversation. The project was possible through funding from Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. (Philip Bennett, the former Washington Post managing editor, is both Frontline’s managing editor and a Sanford professor; Sanford is home to the Jay Rutherfurd Living History Program, for which this will serve as a special collection.)

They’re calling the videos oral histories rather than interviews. Disaggregated from the narrative of the documentary itself, the videos, each running 30 minutes plus in length, feel like a one-on-one conversation rather than a piece of a candidate profile. It’s a sitdown with Ann Romney or Rahm Emanuel, in their own words.

Frontline’s online materials have always been a support to the main broadcast, but now they want to find more dynamic ways of using the video footage and transcripts. “This site creates a nontraditional form of storytelling,” said Andrew Golis, Frontline’s director of digital media. The transcript and video are meant to work either in concert or separately, with video cues tied to various parts of the written transcript. A viewer has the option of reading the transcript and jumping to points in the video, or watching the whole thing from start to finish. Golis said tying the two together has a powerful contextual effect, being able to hear someone talk but also see their exact words.

Sarah Moughty, Frontline’s assistant managing editor for digital, said The Choice, the series’ long-running election special, is designed to provide a more personal narrative on presidential candidates. That made it the right fit for the new interactive video treatment, she said. “There’s something compelling to just sitting back and listening to the guy that went on mission to France with Romney, or Obama’s roommate in New York,” Moughty said.

Though Frontline’s has a history of making video available online, it typically consists of the entire program, selected clips, or a few extended interviews. Moughty said this project went further because the video was edited and produced specifically for an online audience — “We’ve never done it on this scale before,” she said.

So how will viewers find it? Prompts during TV broadcasts of The Choice 2012 direct viewers to the site, and Golis said they plan to use Facebook and Twitter to drive people to the videos as well. (A related project to assemble candidate-related artifacts online got some social media traction and used Branch as a discussion platform.) But Golis told me he sees the videos reaching the widest audience through online search: “We want people who search for Tom Topolinski, when they read about him in David Remnick’s book five years from now, to find this interview.”

In the last year, Frontline has been spending more time thinking about its future and the future of documentary film. In July the program promoted Raney Aronson to deputy executive producer, making her a possible successor to David Fanning, Frontline’s executive producer.

In April, Frontline pulled together a quiet little confab with more than 30 people from places like The Washington Post, Mozilla, The New York Times, MIT, the National Film Board of Canada, and various corners of public media. The idea behind the meeting was to imagine what Frontline’s storytelling will look like in the near and distant future. One of the questions to come out of the gathering was how documentary producers can take advantage of the web or tablets to expand their storytelling beyond an hour-long film.

Like countless broadcast producers, Frontline wants to win with online video in a way that doesn’t lessen its television work or fragment the audience. They’re also enticed by the promise of tablets, a new output that can recapture some of the intimacy of TV while offering a new layer of engagement.

Golis said the oral histories project is a step towards the future where storytelling can be linear or nonlinear. He said the goal is to give the audience the ability to seamlessly move between something on broadcast and something more immersive on the web. “I think on some level this is a piece of infrastructure that will reinforce a lot of different things,” Golis said.

The Orange County Register is hiring dozens of reporters, focusing on print-first expansion

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 07:03 AM PDT

Why did the Orange County Register send reporters and photogs to cover 40 — yes, four-zero, 40 — high-school sporting events in one weekend?

No, it’s not another news mob. Nor is it a one-time thing. At a time when many newspaper companies are starting to think digital first, the Register is investing in print.

The paper has a renewed focus on high school sports — regularly covering dozens of games with a reporter and photographer at “every single one,” editor Ken Brusic told me. It’s part of a beefed up high school sports section, which is just one of the changes that came in the wake of the newspaper’s sale to the Boston-based investment group 2100 Trust over the summer.

"We've been sitting in this dark prison cell for so many years and someone has come and thrown open the door,"

The Orange County Register has also listed a slew of investigative reporting jobs, and introduced a new free-standing business section. All in all, the paper’s hiring about 50 editorial staffers to add to the 180 they already have.

“Think about a Starbucks model,” Brusic said. “If each day you went into Starbucks and plunked down $4 for a latte, and the cups got smaller and the content got weaker, chances are you’d stop going to Starbucks. That’s basically what newspapers have been doing as a way to deal with decreases in advertising revenue. The new guys are attempting to reverse that trend, and are attempting in a variety of different ways.”

The strategy includes hiking subscription prices — Brusic said he wasn’t sure on the exact numbers — and putting up a paywall, “probably before the end of the year.”

“In the meantime, we are moving as fast as we can to increase the quality of the print edition, because that really is where so much of the revenue comes from,” Brusic said. “The new owners have decided that the way they want to proceed with a business model is to really move from solely an advertising-based newspaper model to a subscriber-based one, and in order to accomplish that — basically, what we need if we’re going to charge more — is more quality in the newspaper.”

It’s striking that many of the changes at the Register are print-oriented. Brusic talked about new sections in terms of print pages: A one-page news explainer; an eight-page business section; a 12-page Saturday high-school sports section. New ownership eliminated the paper’s afternoon-edition iPad app The Peel. (“We simply are focusing on priorities right now, and The Peel wasn’t a priority,” Brusic said.) As for the website: Brusic says the plan is a split-site strategy to make OCRegister.com the site for “quality content” and OrangeCounty.com “more of a utility site for breaking news headlines that sends readers to the place where they’ll need to pay.” (Pieces of that strategy — a split into free and paid sites and a circulation price increase — are evocative of The Boston Globe’s plans. Aaron Kushner, who leads 2100 Trust, tried to buy the Globe from The New York Times Co. last year.)

Brusic emphasizes that improving print first doesn’t mean abandoning digital. It does, however, mean cutting back on “things that seem to be distracting the staff from the basic mission, which is to increase quality first in print.”

“The staff still files breaking news to the web, still understands the importance of mobile and digital, but we really have pulled back from chasing empty pageviews and are focusing really on — whether you’re dealing with print or digital — the core mission should be to build quality in content and build a core audience.”

For most American newspapers, the print product still produces around 80 percent of revenue. And while online advertising has generally been a disappointment for them, print circulation declines have slowed or plateaued at many papers. Few would bet on newsprint’s future 10 or 20 years out, but in the meantime, print remains the medium where newspapers hold their strongest competitive advantages. The balance that everyone’s trying to hit is how to make as much money from print as possible — for as long as possible — to pay for the digital transition, where the dollars are currently too small to support the business.

Some, as one might expect, are delighted by the foreign-seeming idea of a newspaper hiring reporters by the dozen in 2012. Here’s ex-Register editor Mark Katches, now editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and California Watch:

But not everyone’s as thrilled about the de-emphasis of digital. Columnist Marla Jo Fisher posted this to her blog about bargain hunting:

As you may be aware, the Orange County Register was recently sold to new owners who are spending a great deal of time and money improving the quality of our print newspaper.

Already, they've added a daily business section, hired a new business editor, hired an award-winning fulltime restaurant reviewer and numerous other changes that are going to make our paper even better than it was before.

As a result, they have decided that most of us should devote our time to the print newspaper, and either reduce or eliminate the effort we are making to work on blogs like this one…Some of you may know that I'm already writing a Sunday deals column each Sunday for the local section of the Register. I will continue to write that. However, I will not be continuing to update this blog. (frowny face here)

The comments on that post give a good sampling of reader opinion:

— “Wow, what a forward-thinking company…Print is dead.”

— “Love getting quick and short updates online, but nothing beats sitting with a paper and a cup o’ joe in the am!”

— “I love the idea of paper, and I get the Sunday paper but that’s only for the coupons.”

— “We just recently cancelled the Register because of the price increase, so I enjoyed being able to view the deals on your blog.”

— “The new owners are idiots…Do they think anyone under 35 reads newspapers these days?”

— “Another nail in the coffin.”

— “I guess I have to start buying the newspaper. :)”

Brusic said the hiring spree and priority changes have been a little disorienting for the newsroom at times. “We’ve been sitting in this dark prison cell for so many years and someone has come and thrown open the door,” he said. “It’s a little confusing out there, and a little intimidating, but I think all of us are working very hard to make sure we make as few mistakes as possible in the hiring and the work we put together. When we consider the alternative — the continued expense controls and diminishment of staff and that effect on the community — this is a wonderful opportunity for us to be able to serve the community better, which is clearly the primary interest, but also to be able to provide a path for other papers.”

Photo of orange by Pat David used under a Creative Commons license.

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