10 Comments Add your own

• 1. tdc  |  April 9th, 2008 at 8:07 am

  “a few hundred views a day”

  i imagine those were pretty dedicated viewsers.

  instead of trying to boost overall numbers with the gimmick dejour, why not produce this sort of stuff on a shoestring and give it time to gain an audience?

  i can point out one heavily promo’d highschool sports effort that covers NUMEROUS markets that ain’t doing much better.

  do you can it, too?

• 2. Rob  |  April 9th, 2008 at 8:25 am

  The Spokesman-Review here in Spokane is launching a similar initiative … but with radio. So I guess that won’t appeal to viewsers but will appeal to … listensers?

  They’re starting live radio newscasts starting today and have been blogging about their efforts to build a radio studio in their newsroom. Link in my name.

  Funny / sad thing is they’re owned by the same company that owns the local NBC affiliate … and the newspaper is also working on their own video initiatives and having nothing to do with the TV station.

  Seems a bit cost-ineffective considering recent layoffs at the newspaper due to declining revenues but hey, they’re the competition so I’m happy they’re not going that direction.

• 3. Chris Krewson  |  April 9th, 2008 at 10:11 am

  We’re doing a daily business newscast, Monday through Friday, in Philly. It’s anchored by our business columnist… more to the point, it’s sponsored. Traffic is good, building steadily.

• 4. tdc  |  April 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am

  philly,

  well done!

• 5. Rick Ellis  |  April 9th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

  I live in the Twin Cities and have some experience trying to build video traffic, so here’s my take on it.

  They need to be aggressively lively. Something that the print version of the paper just doesn’t have right now.

  Local entertainment is a good start, and there are some lifestyle things that could be fun. The bottom line is that the Strib needs some breakout videos, and having a political reporter droning on into a single camera shot won’t do it.

  And did I mention that the video should be embeddable and shareable?

  That having been said, trying to make it work is an interesting challenge.

• 6. Liz  |  April 9th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

  I’m VERY opinionated on this one!

  A web-only newscast won’t work online UNLESS it’s for iPods or it’s an in-flight video, or really funny, or has unique content, or something along those lines. As Rick wrote, you need something that’s either designed for a captive audience or is SPECIAL.

  Most of the newspaper green screen newscasts haven’t seemed special to me. Instead they felt like an amalgam of news stories that if I cared about, I would have read about already.

  I was a fan of the “insider” format where newsroom people tell you what’s coming up, but with the speed of news what it is, there’s no coming up anymore. Now is now.

  I will say that TimesCast was an excellent effort, with fun, bubbly hosts, but the content was already being posted on their site, so it would have been easier to click through the story pages.

  There’s a REASON people aren’t watching TV news anymore. (And don’t give me the Daily Show argument! The DS is a daily comedy routine about news. The comedy keeps people coming back folks, not the news!)

  A few hundred views a day ISN’T great (sellable) unless it is highly targeted content, and local webcasts generally aren’t targeted efforts. Also, a couple of hundred views isn’t nearly as much traffic as you’d get from an individual news video.

  I think the great webcast experiment has been fun, but it’s also proven that the Internet has trained people to make their own decisions. Let’s face it, people choose which stories to watch, and aren’t satisfied (unless it meets the conditions above!) with a force-fed newscast.

• 7. tdc  |  April 9th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

  liz,

  while that sounds reasonable, it reminds me of the all-time best selling t shirt on the university of chicago campus which reads: it works good in practice, but how about in theory?

  where do you theorize anchors fit in on the web? or do they? ain’t everyone expected to row the new media boat to the best of thier ability?

  and, if a few hundred views a day is the benchmark for worthiness, wouldn’t half or more verticles be deleted, too?

• 8. Liz Foreman  |  April 9th, 2008 at 6:14 pm

  tdc,

  i like the joke, though i think i heard that phrase once to describe wikipedia!

  a few hundred is relative depending on market size. the big question is what should the audience threshold be? probably an roi formula, like streams x cpm/production costs?

  i’m not anti long tail or niche content, but in order for a newscast to succeed, audience-wise, either on tv or on the web these days, it has to be something special. the days when people could get away with show stacking are over.

  along these lines, i’d think a smaller number of viewers would be acceptable for a niche webcast.

  as for the anchor question, i’m not against anchors at all. many types of productions require that format. wouldn’t you agree?

  i think that’s all my thoughts on the subject! someone else’s turn now!

• 9. tdc  |  April 10th, 2008 at 6:06 am

  thanks!

• 10. Hart  |  April 10th, 2008 at 10:32 am

  Hire Paul Douglas! That’s what the Strib should do with its coming-to-a-web-site-near-you TV production facility. It’s a no-brainer after WCCO fired the hugely popular weather guy in a cost-cutting move: Make news, bring aboard a bona-fide local audience draw, and benefit from the man’s years of experience in TV production. Maybe he’d even do it on a lark, having recently sold a weather data service to Garmin for a truckload of cash.

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