I love my iPad. One of the reasons I love it is that it’s a great device for watching video. Some mainstream media integrate video very nicely into their iPad applications. However, it seems that all this slickness comes at a price: The conversation with the people formerly known as the audience is often non-existent. It seems that the potentially-messy-but-genuine conversation with
the community is being shifted to Facebook and Twitter.
The iPad (and similar products) is potentially a disruptive device, empowering people to publish not just blog posts or status updates but also their own books and magazines, as the example of Flipboard (left) demonstrates. There is a danger, however, that traditional media won’t understand this and will revert to its old ways by producing slick end products that broadcast without actually engaging in a conversation.
You can see this tendency at work online in the videos produced by newspapers. Yes, you can (often) embed their videos, share them on Twitter and Facebook and via email. But often you can’t participate in a discussion about the video. Sometimes you can’t even leave a comment. Too little effort is being made to evaluate and integrate interactive and community aspects into video.
For example, have a look at the impressive video production on WSJ.com. The videos are well done, but the integration of community interactivity is underwhelming. We’re struggling with this at my own newspaper as well, but we’re in the process of applying some of the solutions I suggest below.
10 Suggestions
In order to help media organizations do a better job of making video interactive, here are 10 suggestions for integrating video into a wider discussion with the community.
- Enable people to leave comments on a video. What I often see on YouTube, however, is that the producer or uploader of the videos do not participate in the discussion. The same rules apply here as for text articles: If you don’t respond to comments, there is a risk that people will consider the comments to be akin to graffiti on a blank wall, and not participate.
- When interviewing colleagues or experts in a video, provide a back-channel so the audience can chat along and add to the discussion. For example, Livestream.com and Ustream.tv offer a chat and social stream next to the live video. Ustream also does this rather well in its iPhone App.
- It’s also possible to integrate video into a text-chat module, such as the previously discussed CoverItLive. A word of caution: Most people are not good at being a talking head on video while simultaneously chatting — it tends to give clumsy and boring results. So let the live video host focus on her job.
- The same rules apply as for a regular chat session: It helps to have a fixed schedule for conversational sessions, and to provide an introductory article or post to provide context and discussion material, thus enabling people to ask questions in advance and to prepare for the discussion.
- You can invite community members to have a video conversation by using their webcams to appear directly on camera. I’ve done some experiments with Seesmic video and will note that some psychological and technical barriers stand in the way of doing this well. Which means we need more experimentation.
- Especially when it comes to local news coverage, it could be interesting to invite your community members to contribute their own videos. In my previous post about immersive journalism, I mentioned Stroome as an interesting platform for collaborative video editing.
- You can easily build a virtual studio in Second Life and invite guests to participate in a live discussion with an audience of avatars/community members. Second Life enables you to combine audio (for host and guests) and chat (for the audience/community members), and a video stream all in one. You can do this for guests who would be hard to convince to come in person to your newsroom for a live discussion. To see this in action, have a look at the Metanomics show. You can find other related practices in the aforementioned immersive journalism post and the comments on that post.
- Do not underestimate the importance of text. It could be interesting to have three live streams: 1) The live video stream of an interview; 2) the chat channel; and 3) a live blog. The live blog enables people who missed the live event to quickly find out what the chat was about. During the event it helps those who are hearing impaired, or who are in office settings and can’t watch the video.
- A very simple but effective technique is to announce a video interview in advance and to ask the community for input in terms of questions or topics for discussion. This seems very straightforward, but it’s mindboggling how reluctant journalists are to ask the community for input.
- Along the same lines, there are many ways to ask for help when preparing for a video interview: You could use a wiki, a collaborative mindmap, or let people vote for the best questions. But in my opinion the good old blog post does a great job because it’s conversational and not technologically intimidating. Just explain what your intentions are for the interview, what the context is (as you would do for your newsroom colleagues), and ask people to react. A follow-up in the video or in a separate blog post would be nice. Be sure to mention which community questions made it into the interview — and make sure you tell your guest when a question comes directly from the community.
Those are my ideas. Please share your own suggestions for turning video into a community experience below in the comments.
Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.
Hey there Roland,
Very nice&helpful article!
To add some interactivity in your videos, visit http://www.lb.brainient.com
Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical buy ffxiv power leveling student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.
buy ff14 power leveling Multimedia
Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten buy ff14 cd key sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s buy ffxiv gold face.
One man, his cheeks red, leaned in and hissed that if the police were not present, Mr. Rose would be in buy ffxiv gil danger.
Before any threats could be carried out, the police intervened, dragged Mr. Rose away from the crowd and insisted that he return to the cheap ff14 gil separate area, one block away, where supporters of the mosque had been asked to stand.
cheap ffxiv gold Minutes later, as Mr. Rose was still shaking off the encounter, he turned to find the red-cheeked man back at his side. The man had followed the student up the street, buy ff14 gil and the two now stared at each other for a tense moment. Then the man stuck out a hand and, in a terse voice, said, cheap ff14 gold “I’m sorry.”
“You have a right,” he told Mr. Rose. (He would not give his name.) “I am sorry for what I said to you. I disagree with you completely, but you have a ff14 power level right.”
ff14 power levelThe dual protests on Sunday, against and for the Islamic center, part of a complex on Park Place called Park51, had taunts, tensions and the occasional minor scuffle. Around 500 opponents of the project stood in a cordoned-off area, singing patriotic buy ff14 time card songs and speaking of a hijacked Constitution, while about 200 supporters held a counterprotest nearby.
As the rallies went on in Lower ff14 gil Manhattan, one of the main organizers of the Islamic center, Daisy Khan, said in a televised interview that the opposition to the plan was akin to go to buy ff14 gil discrimination against Jews. “This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism,” Ms. Khan said on the ABC morning program “This Week.”
“That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even buy ffxiv gold Islamophobia; it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims, and we are deeply concerned,” she said.
But Sunday’s ff14 gil exchange of words, although harsh at times, never led to blows or other violence. No arrests or injuries were reported by the authorities. “The rain was the biggest problem,” a spokesman for the buy ffxiv gil police said.
That calm prevailed, in a charged atmosphere two blocks north of ground buy ffxiv gil zero, was due in large part to a sizable and wary police deployment. Dozens of officers kept watch and ffxiv cd key aggressively stopped members of either side from approaching the other.
Those efforts did not keep activists like Mr. Rose from trying. He said he had waded into the opposing crowd “to get a better sense ff14 cd key of what the protesters were saying or thinking.”
Was he surprised by their message? Mr. Rose shook his head. “There was nothing that Newt Gingrich isn’t ffxiv cd key saying,” he said.
But in interviews, some protesters said they had arrived not to advance a political agenda, but to express their belief that the center’s organizers had ignored the ffxiv cd key interests of the public.
“I’m upset at how this whole thing was handled,” said Dominick DeRubbio, nephew of David P. DeRubbio, a firefighter killed in final fantasy xiv key the World Trade Center. “The level of defiance is running high. They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not.’ ”
Other protesters insisted that while they supported religious freedoms, cheap ffxiv cd key the location of the planned Islamic center was an incursion on the rights of those who deemed ground ffxiv time card zero a hallowed space. “It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site,” said Kali Costas, who said she was a member of the Tea Party.
NEW YORK (CBS 2) – The archbishop final fantasy xiv cd key of New York paid a special visit to Staten Island Sunday morning. He celebrated mass in Port Richmond in the wake of a series of bias attacks in ff14 cd key the neighborhood.
Music and prayer filled Saint Mary of the Assumption Parish during Sunday morning mass.
The church, in the Port Richmond section of Staten Island, was packed buy ffxiv cd key with parishioners for mass celebrated in Spanish by Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
The Archbishop was ffxiv item there as a show of support for the mostly Hispanic congregation who are seeing a wave of bias crimes, largely against Hispanic men.
“Staten Island people know, this has no place here,” buy ffxiv time card Dolan said. “We want to renew what we’re all about, and I think that’s happening.”
ffxiv item Pat Harder came back to the church, where she was married 55 years ago, for Dolan’s service.
“I didn’t understand hardly one word during mass, but there was so much love, ffxiv key so many smiles, so cheap ffxiv cd key much happiness,” Harder said.
The latest of a dozen attacks in Port ff14 cd key Richmond was reported last week.
Police have established a heavy presence in the neighborhood to combat the crimes, including a 24-hour command post, watch towers and extra officers. buy ffxiv cd key Some at the service say it is helping.
buy ffxiv cd key “I see a lot of cops, like every day, 24/7, day and night,” Port Richmond resident Jiovanny Garcia said.
Most of the officers temporarily assigned buy ffxiv item to Port Richmond speak Spanish. They’re getting out the word that crime victims will not be prosecuted if they’re in the county illegally, they say that’s ff14 item encouraging some in the community to come forward to report attacks.
Police are also handing out flyers in the area, printed in Spanish and English, making it clear that illegal immigrants won’t be targeted for coming cheap ffxiv item forward.
buy ff14 gold
buy ff14 gold
buy ff14 gold
buy ff14 gold
buy ff14 gold