Create a YouTube channel for fire footage

It’s simple enough to put together a channel on YouTube of user-generated videos. We did it in about five minutes.

You’ll need a YouTube account. Go to Youtube.com/my_account and you’ll see a section on the lower right for custom players. Put together a playlist first, and then you will be able to skin your playlist with a custom player. It’s even easier than it sounds, and it sounds easy.

4 comments October 23rd, 2007

Suggestion: Create custom RSS feeds for wildfires

Local media sites in Southern California would be doing a tremendous service if they went one step further with their RSS feeds and created a few custom feeds just for stories about the wildfires in their areas. I know there are feeds for different county news stories, but a fire-specific feed would be an invaluable “wire service” for people trying to keep tabs just on this story as it changes constantly. Let us know if you see anyone doing this.

1 comment October 23rd, 2007

Users sending in photos, video in fire story

It goes without saying that a massive story like the California fires generates plenty of user content. CNN I-Report and MSNBC First Person are seeing the most submissions (at least with my unofficial count), and ABCNews.com’s i-Caught and FoxNews.com uReport are asking for user photos and video, too. And not just TV — NYTimes.com is asking for user video, powered by Brightcove. Of course, local media sites in LA are taking in a ton of photos (mostly) from the public. Check out LATimes.com’s user photos here. Maybe it’s just me, but watching a raw video clip of approaching flames shot by a homeowner from the perspective of their own balcony is even more compelling than an edited TV news report, especially online.

Many user photos are just as amazing as the professional shots.

1 comment October 23rd, 2007

Network, local TV crews pull out all the stops in SoCal

Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo are among the network news heavyweights in Southern California for the fire, reports Broadcasting & Cable. More details on the network news front on TVNewser here. And local TV stations are blowing out regular programming to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in preempted revenue. “We’re burning through money here,” said KNBC News Director Bob Long. During Sunday Night Football, KNBC used its “News Raw” online video channel to stay on the story. KABC moved its soaps to a secondary digital channel, reports Variety. “Everybody that is on our list — staff, freelance, anybody who has ever worked for us — is getting a phone call, ‘Hey, can you come in?’ ” said Paul Button, KCBS’ assistant news director. “We’ve got all our live trucks, both choppers out there. Everything feels very, very taxed.”

On the entertainment front, shoots for CSI and 24 were canceled due to the fires.

Add comment October 23rd, 2007

The importance of a breaking news design

I’ve been watching how the newspaper and TV sites cover the fires in Southern California, and it’s become very clear that some TV sites are having difficulty showcasing their content. For example, look at 10News.com and KNBC.com, to name a couple. Their standard templates, in my humble opinion, are restricting their coverage on the home page and don’t do much to distinguish this massive story from any other breaking news story. Everything feels like it’s jammed into small, inflexible boxes. In the 10News.com example, a big ad animated across the top of the page, pushing content down and back up again. Story angles get lost in the rotating tabs. Then look at LATimes.com. Clean, straighforward with an expanded coverage area that pops. Yes, I’m comparing apples to oranges in some respects because the LATimes is able to produce much more online content with a much larger staff — but critical information is easier to locate and it feels like a major story:

In another example, MSNBC.com has just switched to its breaking news layout, allowing more content to surface:

Even the SeattlePI.com moved to a big story layout:

If you build a breaking news layout ahead of time, it’s not that much work to execute it when the story breaks. Just flick the switch. TV sites should own breaking news, and a flexible, content-driven design plays a big part.

11 comments October 23rd, 2007

SignonSanDiego.com crashes, recovers

San Diego Union-Tribune’s site is down right now, although it’s fire blog (hosted elsewhere) is working just fine for the time being (it crashed yesterday.)

Update: 15 minutes later, it’s back online

Add comment October 23rd, 2007

Twittering the California fire

We mentioned yesterday that LAFD was Twittering the fires, and now there’s the LATimes, San Diego’s PBS station KPBS and a blogger named Nate Ritter, among others. Since many of these are tagged, Twitter users can enter “track sandiegofire” in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.

2 comments October 23rd, 2007

California fires: reporter watches house burn down

I’m not sure I’ve seen a more heart-wrenching video as this reporter from KFMB CBS 8 in San Diego reported as his house was burning down in front of him.

14 comments October 23rd, 2007