Home > Blog > Other >
Camcorders, Tech and Random Rants Blog
Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Camcorders, Tech and Random Rants Blog
Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Jul 29, 2008 9:00 AM
Posted by Joseph Devlin
The Profit Potential of Hyperlocal Videography
Posted by Joseph Devlin
|
There is no question that the Internet is changing journalism radically and quickly. Just look at all the newspaper death watch sites that have sprung up recently. What's more, every Joe and Jane with a camcorder or a cell phone sees themselves as a citizen journalist eagerly looking to capture YouTube-worthy, once-in-a-lifetime shots. How can a professional video journalist hope to compete with a horde of people willing to work for free? One trick is to keep an eye out for new trends that can bring you work. In this post I will be talking about emerging opportunity for shooting hyperlocal video spots. Hyperlocal Videography Defined  It is hard to imagine an industry that has been hit harder by the arrival of the Internet than the daily newspaper. Papers tried to fight back by producing online sites that reused the material originally created for the print edition. These got lots of readers, but online papers don't make as much money as their paper counterparts. So papers were forced to cut staff. While this was happening papers started to lose serious chunks of its audience to local blogs and websites that provided information about community-level (hyperlocal) events. Providing this sort of coverage could help newspapers keep customers but was prohibitively expensive. The solution to this problem was to open up the newspaper's website so that it could accept user-submitted material. Doing so proved to be a win, win proposition for everyone. Schools, clubs, and other interest groups were provided with an easy way to get the word out to the newspaper's large audience. The paper was provided with an affordable way of providing the local coverage many people wanted. Check out the Neighborsgo.com site produced by the Dallas Morning News for a great example of this trend in action. Dallas Morning News' Neighborsgo.com The Morning News is the big daily paper serving the greater Dallas/Fort Worth region. Like other big papers it was loosing readers to blogs and local websites. So in April 2007, the Morning News fought back by rolling out a website called Neighborsgo. Neighborsgo provides readers with state-of-the-art tools for sharing stories, photos, and videos with other readers. People love Neighborsgo, which quickly became the goto source for local news in the greater Dallas area. To date, 15,000 stories, 12,500 photos, and more than 400 videos have been posted at the site. Selling ad space on Neighborsgo started bringing the paper badly needed revenue. Better yet, the site provided the paper with a low-cost, local news gathering operation that made publishing limited-circulation local editions of the paper possible. Neighborsgo is turning the publishing model on its head. Oscar Martinez, the Managing Editor of Neighborsgo was recently interviewed in the MediaBlather podcast. According to Martinez, 18 full-time editors sift through all the citizen submissions sent into Neighborsgo each week. It's not their job to improve the online material. (The paper runs each online submission pretty much the way it arrives.) Instead the editors are looking for interesting material that can be used to build up one of the 35 regional inserts that the paper now prints every Saturday. In the interview Martinez talks about how badly people want their words and photos to make it into the print edition. The best way to get in print is to post online, and to submit material that is good enough to catch an editor's eye. As a result the material sent into Neighborsgo tends to be very different from the typical submission sent in to more traditional social networking site like YouTube or MySpace. Martinez stresses that material he publishes in Neighborsgo supplements but does not replace the work his journalists produce. It is understood that material published in Neighborsgo represents the ideas of individual readers. Because it is portrayed as opinion, it needs much less vetting. For example, the paper is under no obligation to check sources or the accuracy of this sort of user-generated content. Nor is there any problem with reproducing words, images and videos that were produced with the help of professionals - all cardinal sins for professionally produced journalism. If the material is informative and interesting it stands a good chance of being used in Neighborsgo. This fact opens up some interesting opportunities for professional writers, photographers and videographers. How videos hosted on Neighborsgo differ from videos posted on other social media sites. Because Neighborsgo is a hyperlocal information site, local news and information makes up vast majority of the submissions it gets. Managing Editor Martinez notes that the site gets none of the adult focused or more outrageous submissions that find their way into YouTube all the time. Instead what you see are videos like "The Story of Tess - The Wonder Dog". This is an animal adoption video created by the Rockwall Pet and Veterinarian Hospital. Rockwell knows that the Dallas News website and paper have become quite popular. It wants to use this new media outlet to promote its image as a caring origination that you can trust. The trick to getting good traffic on the site is to create videos like Tess that are interesting, informative, and not too blatantly commercial. Remember this is a social network site, and users are free to post nasty comments if they don't like your spot. It better be interesting or entertaining. Yes amateurs can produce interesting and informative spots to run on sites like Neighborsgo, but a but a pro can probably do it faster, better, and on budget. My guess is that every major city is going to have its own version of Neighborsgo within a year or so. Keep an eye open for its arrival in a city near you. If play it smart and time it right, that arrival just may bring you some interesting new business. Technorati Tags:
Trackback url for this post:
/trackbacks/trackback.php?id=35406 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||