'Front-running newspaper in terms of video on the Web'
Editor & Publisher calls the The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., the "the front-running newspaper in terms of video on the Web." The paper's site runs a new, three-minute newscast, produced by the newspaper and featuring an anchorwoman on the paper's staff, twice each day.
"We've been doing video on the site for almost three years now," says Michael Maness, vice president of new media at the paper. At first they'd run what Maness calls "featurey stuff" -- they'd send a photographer to record a few minutes of footage at a breaking-news event or they'd buy footage from a news service, and they'd include the video clips alongside a news story on the site. Delaware has no local broadcast stations of its own, so area residents soon learned to come to the News Journal site for breaking news, with traffic growing about tenfold from February 2003 to February 2004.The new webcast launched in October of this year. "I wanted to do something that combined the immediacy of TV with the depth of the newspaper and the interactivity of the Internet," Maness says. "That's what we tried to come up with: News from the future, what would it look like? Let's do it now."
News from the future, apparently, looks a bit like local news in Lynchburg, Va. -- Maness hired Patti Pettite, an anchor and reporter for WEST-TV there, for his newscast. Using original video shot by News Journal photographers, Pettite puts together an original three-minute newscast each morning and afternoon, available for viewing as a Flash animation on the News Journal's site.
Traffic has been growing by about 20 percent each week, Maness reports, though the rate of growth is slowing. And he's already thinking about expansion, examining the possibility of producing more than two webcasts a day, adding sports coverage, and perhaps moving to a live video stream. "But that's down the road," he says....
And News Journal-style Web newscasts give the opportunity for TV-type commercials. In each three-minute News Journal newscast, there are two 15-second ad spots and one 30-second spot. The initiative is only two months old, and already 85 percent of the inventory is sold. When a final advertiser come on board in January, ad space in the webcast well be essentially sold out, reports News Journal new-media chief Michael Maness. "It's something advertisers have really responded to," he says. "We have car dealers that say, 'I spend $2 million for ads in Philadelphia, which reach only 15 percent of the Delaware market, and instead I could put it on this and reach a highly targeted Delaware market.'"
Dec 18, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
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1 comments about ''Front-running newspaper in terms of video on the Web''Editorially and technically it's very clever, but commercially? I don't see any ads in the feed so how is this making them any more money than, say, not doing it would?
Posted by seamus at December 20, 2004 7:12 AM
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1 Weblogs reference ''Front-running newspaper in terms of video on the Web'' Weekend notesTrackback excerpt: Catching up on good practice this weekend, I see a bunch of developments that indicate still further the whole online journalism/citizen reporting phenomenon is really picking up steam; people are starting to produce some remarkable things. Wilmington,... [Read More]
Posted on roblog at December 19, 2004 2:49 PM
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