Oct

30

How long is too long?

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 30, 2008 under: multimedia, newspapers, television, video | 1 Comment

The New York Times’ Bits blog has an interesting post today about online video. It addresses a question about how long Web site users will spend watching video on their computers. The answer seems to be that they are committing more and more time to this Internet activity.When I first started doing video for the Web, as early as 2001, the conventional wisdom was to keep these news reports short — in part to keep the file sizes at a manageable weight so people could access them. Now, just about everyone has high speed Internet access and Web phenomena such as YouTube have made using computers to watch videos as common place as checking e-mails. I guess it would make sense that Web users would have more patience to stick with longer news videos as well.

Oct

28

It was bound to happen soon

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 28, 2008 under: business, economy, newspapers, online news | 1 Comment

The Christian Science Monitor announced today that it would drop its daily print edition next April and place more focus on delivering the news on its Web site.The move makes the Monitor the first national newspaper to stop publishing a daily edition on paper and focus on its online presence. It will also publish a weekly print version and daily news updates via e-mails. The move, top newspaper executives say, will allow the Monitor to continue operating its overseas bureaus and Washington newsroom.

“We plan to take advantage of the Internet in order to deliver the Monitor’s journalism more quickly, to improve the Monitor’s timeliness and relevance, and to increase revenue and reduce costs. We can do this by changing the way the Monitor reaches its readers,” Judy Wolff, chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society, was quoted as saying in the Monitor’s story about the changes.  

You can check out a presentation of changes planned for the more robust Web site here.Although the Monitor’s financial situation is a little different from most newspapers because of the support it gets from the Christian Science Church, it may be a foreboding of what is to come in the next few years for other newspapers with national reach.

Oct

2

‘Charticles’ and online storytelling

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 2, 2008 under: multimedia, newspapers, online news, video | 1 Comment

The current issue of American Journalism Review has an article titled “Charticle Fever,” which examines a type of storytelling gaining prominence in newspapers. A charticle mixes text, photos and graphics to tell a story. It is visual and allows a reader to drop in and take only the information that he or she may be interested in. According to the article, some editors and reporters aren’t crazy about this type of storytelling because they see it as undermining traditional, narrative-style reporting.
 Without commenting on the pros or cons of charticles, it strikes me that the fact that these types of stories are becoming more prominent in print could be a reflection of how stories are told online. Web versions of stories also meld text with photos and other media such as video, audio, flash files and interactive features. Maybe what’s happening online is influencing what’s happening in print.  
I’ll include here a couple of examples of Web journalism that are taking this melding of different media to new places.  The first is Flyp Media, an online-only magazine, and the washingtonpost.com’s Video Haiku, which brings together text, photos and video in a linear format.