For decades, “broadcast” was a one-way medium. With the adoption of social media and mobile technologies, however, that’s all changed. Making local news a participatory and relevant experience for viewers and listeners is now top of mind for local TV and radio stations across the country.

Many broadcasters are bringing in the audience into the equation – whether it’s giving them a say in the content, through polls, live Q-and-A or picking the next musical superstar, the audience is now part of the content strategy.

Going Live on Social

Newsrooms continue to experiment with Facebook Live, two years into its launch. Because Facebook puts an emphasis on inserting Facebook Live broadcasts into consumers’ news feeds while the broadcast is actually live, it’s a smart way for newsrooms to utilize the platform for breaking news content.

Meteorologists, in particular, have flocked to Facebook Live as a way to deliver breaking weather information.

“Before Facebook Live, our goal would be to post a still image or possibly a radar animation of the storm and the warning,” said Chikage Windler, the chief meteorologist at KEYE, a Sinclair-owned station in Austin. “Now, we can go live on Facebook for 30 seconds, 30 minutes or however long we need.”

A recent #ChiksChats on Facebook

In addition to breaking weather situations, Windler uses Facebook Live for nightly #ChiksChats (here’s a recent one), where she delivers the forecast and answers questions for the Facebook audience. She admits it’s a time commitment, adding an extra hour or so to her day, but she believes the connections she’s building are worth it.

Radio newsrooms are also seeing the benefits of Facebook Live with broadcasts like interactive game shows and behind-the-scenes access.

NPR hosted “Head to Head,” a series of headline-writing competitions where NPR editors went up against the Facebook audience to see whose headline reigned supreme. The last edition of the show in March 2017 produced more than 75,000 views and 200 engagements. The show took advantage of crowdsourcing – about a third of the time, the story on npr.org ended up featuring a headline from the crowd.

Also, Fresh 102.7 FM in New York, WNEW-FM, gives its Facebook audience the chance to see behind-the-scenes as its on-air personalities interview some of the biggest pop musicians in the world. The radio station, which is owned by CBS, has aired interviews of Lady Gaga, Michael Buble, Ed Sheeran and James Bay on Facebook Live. The Buble broadcast generated nearly 182,000 views, more than 4,000 reactions and 300 shares.

Non-Traditional Newscasts

Tribune Broadcasting, which owns or operates 42 stations in the United States, is using social media in a different way for morning TV news – leveraging data to figure out what people are, and will be, talking about.

Tribune has partnered with Dose, a digital media agency that specializes in analytics and sharable content, to create “Morning Dose.” The show features content that Dose has determined will connect with audiences on TV and social, based on data analytics, and will be part of that day’s social conversations. Beyond top stories and weather, “Morning Dose” features segments like “What’s Brewing,” “Bubbling Up” and “Most Ignored Story of the Day.” Personalities from Dose also make appearances on the show.

“Morning Dose” launched in June on Tribune stations in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Miami and Portland. It also airs on Facebook Live.

Digitally Driven Competitions

TEGNA, a broadcasting company that owns or operates 46 local stations across the country, is also experimenting with more original programming as part of a new content transformation strategy.

Contestants send in one-minute videos in the “Sing Like a Star” competition.

“Sing Like a Star” is the third original show the company has produced, and it premiered in 33 TEGNA markets in September. The show marries a traditional television broadcast with digital participation from the contestants and audience. The idea for the show was sparked by the amount of digital activity tied to singing performance short clips like James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke.” Hopeful contestants can download the Starmaker app, upload a one-minute audition and try to get votes through the app. The broadcast itself is 30 minutes each weekend, and the segments are tailored to also appease the crowd watching via mobile or social.

“What we did, because it’s a 30-minute show, is we made all of the singing performances right at one minute long,“ said Ted Eccles, the executive producer of “Sing Like a Star.” “They really hit that sweet spot for sharable content and digital viewing. Traditionally when you get a singing competition, somebody is singing a whole song or most of the song – even ‘Idol’ and ‘The Voice’ would do two- to three-minute versions of the song. We’ve found about a minute is the optimum amount of content that people like to watch on a smaller device.”

The show has received about 1,000 auditions in its first two weeks, with about 500,000 views of those auditions and 300,000 votes cast in the Starmaker app.

“Sing Like a Star” is airing on the weekends in those 33 TEGNA markets, and Eccles said they’re pleased so far with the ratings.

Dual-Screen Experiences

Another place for newsroom innovation is dual-screen experiences – turning television viewers into active participants in the broadcast while using their smartphones, tablets or computers.

TEGNA is currently partnering with Megaphone TV to use its platform for viewer participation during local news and sports broadcasts. For example, KUSA in Denver has used this technology to allow viewers to have a vote on which local topics are covered in newscasts. In addition, WFAA in Dallas regularly allows viewers of sporting events to participate in polls and quizzes through the station’s app or website.

WJLA, a Sinclair-owned station in Washington, DC, has also had success using Megaphone and similar platforms for real-time polling and audience engagement during newscasts.

“We try to incorporate viewer interactivity in every newscast,” said Simon Landau, the executive producer of digital media at WJLA. “Whether it’s showcasing social media commentary around a trending topic, photos sent in by our audience or asking a poll question, we try to engage our viewers in every show.”

Landau said the station typically focuses on breaking news, talkers and polarizing issues for audience engagement opportunities, but they’ve also seen success with big “national days,” like National Cat Day or National Pizza Day, when it comes to viewers wanting to be a part of the content.

Three-Screen Experiences

TEGNA is also focusing on the concept of three-screen experiences. According to Frank Mungeam, TEGNA’s vice president of digital content, they’re taking a more holistic approach to storytelling – where the story will ultimately be the combination of experiences the audience has with that content on television, digital and social.

“We’re looking to take a page out of the movie industry with the concept of the trailer and the movie,” Mungeam said. “In older days of broadcast, folks would say, ‘You can’t give it away. You have to save the good stuff for 5 p.m.’ What we think of with effective trailers – think “Game of Thrones” or “Star Wars” – is there anyone who saw the trailer and thought, ‘That’s all I need of that’? The trailer is content itself, and these experiences, over time on these platforms, build interest in the overall broadcast story. Our three-screen strategy is how to use those three platforms for what they do best. For social, focusing on sharable, interactive and engaging content. For digital, it’s the deep dive, the more, the extra. For broadcast, it’s great, narrative storytelling.”

Mungeam said the ultimate goal is for these experiences from one story to last for multiple days on multiple platforms – instead of airing one time on a television newscast. This strategy gives consumers a greater chance to see content, and keeps the community thinking and talking about important issues in the news.

Crowdsourcing Content

Speaking of using content on multiple platforms, StormPins, an app that originally launched as a way for Graham Media stations to collect storm photos and videos from users, has been expanded to include all kinds of user-generated content.

Using an app, viewers can drop an interactive pin on a map and attach up to 10 seconds of video or a picture – and then communicate and engage with other viewers in that area. Viewer submissions are often used on air.

Viewers send in weather photos, which KSAT runs on air. (Photo courtesy KSAT)

“When there is a weather event, we definitely get a lot of storm pictures,” said Scott Shiotani, the director of new media at KSAT, the ABC affiliate in San Antonio. “Outside of a storm event, pets would be the biggest category, followed by sunsets and landscape pictures.”

KSAT also collects rodeo pictures, high school football pictures and other user-generated content. Viewers can also get real-time, crowdsourced traffic information from the app.

From user-generated content to picking the stories that will be reported, the audience has more opportunities than ever to engage with broadcast news. As more stations, both TV and radio, begin to change content strategies, this will only continue to expand the audience’s role as participants in the programming – no matter the platform.

Note: This is a sponsored post from NAB Pilot to promote its Innovation Stories section. Read more about how broadcasters are innovating here.

Dale Blasingame is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He teaches digital journalism courses, including classes covering the fundamentals of digital media, web design and publishing, digital media entrepreneurship and social media analytics. Prior to teaching, Blasingame spent nine years as a TV news producer and won two regional Emmy Awards.

The post How Broadcasters Are Making Two-Way Experiences with Interactive Content appeared first on MediaShift.

Yet even that staple — and its business model — is being challenged like never before. If the situation isn’t terminal, it’s serious.

The latest Pew survey confirms this: local TV news viewership is falling — and fast. Only a fourth of college-educated Americans regularly watch a local TV newscast. For those with a high school degree or less, it’s less than fifty percent.

The patient is not yet on life support. So it’s important that those who run local television stations — and those of us who care about local broadcast news — try radical experiments to to revive the genre now before it’s too late to reverse the continuing and accelerating degradation of the local news ecosystem.

The way we were

At a time when news is everywhere and on every platform, why is preserving the local news important? This was a system that worked well for decades: Strong local stations added pictures to the news that people read in their morning papers and heard on the radio. These stations also provided strong dollops of consumer, investigative and weather coverage. Local newspapers—which were robustly staffed—helped set the agenda for the local market, and local stations to some degree depended on newspaper resources to point them in the right direction. As the executive who oversaw local news for many years for the Post-Newsweek (now Graham Media) stations, almost every morning news meeting that I attended paid some attention to the agenda set by the local paper.

A professional, robust local TV news operation in the ’80s and ’90s could count on a committed, large audience that, to a significant degree, reflected the demographics of the market. The commercials that were sold around these newscasts provided solid budgets for expansion of newscasts and beats.

Few winners, many losers

Now, in 2018, we’re left with a newspaper industry that has a few national winners (The New York Times, The Washington Post) and many local and regional losers. But even the New York Times admits its commitment to local has lessened now, because it sees its neighborhood as the world. When I was a local news director a few years ago at Tribune Media’s New York station, the New York Times website was one of the last places I’d look when local news broke.

Now, digital disruption has fully enflamed the local television scene, where—as the Pew survey reveals—the audience that’s left is poorer, less educated, and older — not a prescription for success. Local television news still feels much like it did when I first joined my first local station in the late 1970s. Sure, the graphics are slicker, and social media is more embedded into the writing and the storytelling, but the conventions are the same: anchor lead-ins to recorded packages, live shots, and newscast teases across the commercial break that has the audience singing along because they’ve memorized all of the hoary conventions of local news.

It’s no wonder that my students at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media hardly ever watch local news on television. In fact, for a course I teach on TV news production and writing, one of the assignments is to watch a local newscast—it’s the only way I can assure that they will have seen what it is I’ll be teaching.

One of the reasons we still teach it (along with digital storytelling, documentary, and other disciplines) is that there’s still a need for producers, writers, and reporters to fill thousands of better-paying jobs covering news at local television stations. We used to be aghast at what producers would make in small markets; we’re less aghast when we compare those salaries to folks making less but working more at many digital operations.

News collaborations are one way to strengthen the local news universe. The Center for Cooperative Media here at Montclair State, for example, has done more than any organization in conceptualizing a future of digital collaborations and projects. The Center recently published a collaborative database with information about almost 100 news collaborations from over 800 organizations.

But I worry that these collaborations, though valuable and successful, don’t scale up to a mass audience. TV, though hobbled, is still the way most Americans get their local news. The inescapable truth is that throughout our nation’s history, local news has always been a commercial enterprise, fueled by capitalism and competition, and focused on many demographics.

What can we learn from cable news shows like Fox News Channel’s “Hannity”? Shown here, Tom Brokaw and Sean Hannity on set in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images)

An experiment that just might work

So what can be done? Some large local operators like TEGNA are playing with new formats and ideas—more in-depth storytelling in some cases, hiring comedians to add dash to morning newscasts in others. Sinclair – poised to be the largest operator of local stations once it completes its acquisition of Tribune Media – borrows from Fox News in imposing a right-of-center slant to its newscasts.

As someone who once ran news coverage for both a major group and a major cable news network this is what I would do:

I would prevail upon senior management at the company to let us do full research and development at an underperforming station in a decent-sized market, one without union restrictions that forbid employees from shooting and editing. There would have to be full buy-in and acknowledgement from the corporate level to the station management level that normal benchmarks for success (ratings and revenue at the top of the list) would not be held against the station managers for a period of two to three years. Without that incentive to succeed (or fail) wildly, this experiment would be doomed; we’d end up with some version of the incrementalism that got us into this mess. We would endeavor to emulate companies like Alphabet and Amazon in taking big bets and going all in.

Then, we’d start from scratch, asking ourselves (and researching) who are our target audiences? What platforms are best to reach these targets? What programming best works on each platform? What kind of skill sets do our journalists need to succeed?

Other questions: What kinds of sales categories and formats (both digital and on-air) are not being served and what kind of products can we create to serve them? What can we learn from Vice Media (up-close, in-your-face passionate reporting) and cable news (up-close, in-your-face passionate discussion) that’s transferable to our new local entity? (Hint: Passion works.) What valuable beats (and advertisers) were lost when the local newspaper slimmed down?

At the risk of jumping ahead without fully researching the above, here’s what I might anticipate:

• A fully developed local news brand — NOT the old call letters or channel number.
• A central, agnostic-to-platform news creation team: producers, reporters, writers, assignment editors.
• For television: a belief that viewers still like interesting personalities. I’d go full-bore here, with emphasis on smart, opinionated, and yes, passionate journalists.
• Digital sites (website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and whatever comes next) that push out the journalism in formats appropriate to the platform). Develop hyper local sites digitally.
• A redefining of what TV newscasts should be: Less focus on run-of-the-mill news, and more focus on the beats that the newspaper used to own. Don’t give up on more attractive demos! Also, question everything: writing style, teases, length of stories, etc. Throw out old research!
• Partnerships and collaborations with existing digital journalism sites where it makes sense.
• Aggressive marketing; on air, on line, on social.

The risks of this approach are many. What if we fail? What if our profit margins decrease? What happens to my career if I’m part of this experiment?

But I maintain the risks are outweighed by the chance to reinvigorate a force for civic engagement and involvement that has helped keep communities informed since local news became profitable back in the ’60s. Anything less is just an inexorable march toward a test pattern.

Mark Effron, a veteran broadcast and digital news executive at companies such as MSNBC and New York Public Radio, is currently a professor of Journalism and TV and Digital Media at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media, where he oversees the School’s News Lab.

The post Here’s How We Can Reinvent Local News appeared first on MediaShift.

As a former TV news executive and now professor of journalism at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media, I’m especially sensitive to that challenge. I spent my career in the world of broadcasts, deadlines, packages, backtiming and standups. Even when digital changed everything, and we embraced social media, it was just an embrace, not a marriage.

So, how do you approach teaching video journalism? In the lexicon of Ford: must I be thinking about how to turn my students into “visual journalism solutions providers?” Maybe that’s overwrought, but clearly, it’s no longer enough for budding journalists to understand how to use, say, Snapchat and Instagram, because today’s hot thing is yesterday’s Foursquare.

How do I get students ready for a digital future where Facebook and Google (at least today) suck most of the revenue out of the digital news ecosystem, while most of the jobs are still in the mainstream of local television, network television and cable—though the “cool factor” is no longer there?

Going Live on Election Night

I confronted this recently as I organized multi-platform election night coverage of the recent New Jersey gubernatorial race to replace Chris Christie.  At Montclair State, we are blessed with a state-of-the-art open learning facility with the latest Sony 4k equipment.  We have a spanking new News Lab (a simulated multi-platform newsroom) with anchor desk, interview sets in studios, and control rooms that put my old one at MSNBC to shame.

And everything was utilized on election night. Control Room C was busy and buzzy, with students throwing to live shots, cueing talent and rolling pieces. The studio was jamming with professional journalists affiliated with the School’s Center for Cooperative Media, working alongside the student journalists.

Students work in the News Lab at Montclair State University during election night 2017. (Photo: Natalie De La Rosa)

Veteran TV news executive-turned-professor Vern Gantt turned to me at the beginning of the evening, when his charges were still trying to get into the rhythm when the joint is cooking and the news is breaking, and said: “I feel like I’m 20 years younger.” He was recalling the exhilaration of election nights he helped coordinate in the bigshot world of cable news.

I looked at the students he was helping. One looked pale.  “And they,” I said, “look 20 years older.”

They soon proved me wrong. The pale one quickly regained her color, found her voice, her stance and along with her co-executive producers, guided the multi-hour affair steadily along.  Her name is Georgia Salvaryn, a senior: “I learned a lot about myself that night; I learned that I like to be in these high-stress situations where I’m under pressure to get things done and to work with others in that situation and to stay both cool and authoritative in getting done what needs to get done.”

A Cultural, Generational Shift in Coverage

Part of what made this teaching-cum-professional experience so vivid and occasionally unnerving was that many of these students were participating in an American ritual—election night on television—without being familiar with the genre.  I had wondered how they would adjust to the insanity of live news on an election night. Think of playing baseball if you never saw the game. Most of these students are fully weaned off of television news. They get their news from links in their Facebook feed and from Twitter.  The news they consume is disaggregated and de-branded.

We didn’t have a broadcast signal, nor were we carried on cable. Facebook Live was our carrier (revenue-suck or not), and we streamed our programming on multiple university websites and Facebook pages.  We did live shots throughout the state, but without those expensive satellite trucks of yesteryear. Skype (mostly) worked just fine.

Adjunct Professor Jaime Bedrin stays up to date on the election results in New Jersey as part of the university’s election night coverage. (Photo: Natalie De La Rosa)

But I worried: Were we teaching them a skill and a genre that was yesterday’s model? How do you take a forward-looking approach to teaching journalism when nobody has the answer as to what that is?

Another of my colleagues, Tara George, a former New York Daily News reporter and now coordinator of the Television and Digital Media and Journalism programs, gave some perspective: “Staying relevant in journalism education is a constantly moving target. We have to be careful to make sure we are teaching students skills and giving them experiences which will be valuable to them and make them marketable in a hyper-competitive media environment. What students learned the other night was how exciting journalism can be, how important the work is, how to work with colleagues, and how to be unafraid to try new things and make mistakes and learn from them.”

Reflection After a Successful Election 2017

At the post-broadcast celebration, you could feel the excitement and you could see in the eyes of the students that look: Whew, that was something. Maybe not my thing, exactly, but whew.  This was not an epoch-defining race; there was no Donald Trump at the top of this ticket. Chris Christie’s shadow was a big one, and neither candidate for his replacement inspired much passion among the students.  They had to go out and do their research, ask their questions and learn to be journalists. This was not a race they talked about in the dorms at night.

Madison Glassman, a senior, covered the winner, Phil Murphy, whose headquarters were in Asbury Park.

“I had never done a live shot before,” she said. “I was surrounded by reporters from CNN and the Philadelphia stations with all of their fancy equipment. My producer was holding two cellphones, one on top of the other: One was shooting me on Skype, the other had the flashlight app on, so I could be seen. The night drove home to me: This is what I want to do in my career. It makes me happy.”

I was happy for Madison because I understood that feeling. But I also felt ambivalence. I want her and her peers to think beyond the TV box, literal and figurative. I want them to understand that the lessons of the night transcend the format and the delivery system. I want them to be exhilarated by innovation, even if it’s using that flashlight app.  What will never go away is the need for good and timely decision making, collaboration, understanding of “tools”—and of course solid journalism.

Coverage during election night meant using a variety of tools and platforms to tell the story. (Photo: Natalie De La Rosa)

As for the future, I envision a world that continues on its hybrid path: CNN, for example, will continue to hire show producers and digital journalists. Some of them will migrate from one area to another, and more will seamlessly jump back and forth between television and digital realms, like Brian Stelter. My former NBC colleague Lester Holt tells students that each has to be a Swiss army knife. I take that one step further. I think the journalists and media professionals of the future will be like a Swiss army knife with new snap-on attachments, as the formats and technologies evolve.

I think of my niece, who recently became a Snapchat Discover channel designer for Self, which earlier this year shuttered its print magazine. She’s untethered to print and doesn’t miss it.

I want my students to take the forms and structures of my generation, subvert them, morph them, stretch them, and create something new. Somewhere in that post-celebratory bacchanal, I hope one of those students was thinking: “This was interesting…but it could be way better. I have an idea…”

Mark Effron is a veteran broadcast news executive with such companies as The Washington Post, MSNBC, and New York Public Radio. He’s currently a professor of Journalism at the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where he coordinates the News Lab.

Photo Gallery Images by Natalie De La Rosa

The post How to Rethink Teaching Broadcast Journalism in a Digital Age appeared first on MediaShift.

It was a good, four-decade-long run. While it lasted.

The smartphone, a device barely larger than the viewfinder on a professional ENG camera, has begun turning the video newsgathering world upside down. It is so small, mobile and easy to use that dedicated videographers are not needed to operate it. (Reporters who shoot their own video are known as VJs—video journalists, and mojos—mobile journalists.) ENG diehards see the diminutive smartphone footprint as a huge disadvantage, image-wise, because big cameras signal to police and politicians: “I’m a working journalist.”

Scooped by Joe Citizen

It’s a device so ubiquitous that it places cell-phone-packing, ordinary citizens near the scenes of most breaking news events. Meaning the first images of many big stories are not coming from professional camera teams, but from amateur eyewitness bystanders. (Being scooped by Joe Citizen is probably more embarrassing for reporters than showing up at press conferences without highly visible ENG cameras.)

Even though scoffers are slowing the megatrend, the shift is irreversible. ENG gear is way too bulky and way too expensive to survive in a world that is moving toward digital news delivery and mobile, small-screen news consumption. It’s just that the change to where more reporters use smartphones at the front end of the video news chain is progressing more slowly than their use by news consumers at the tail end.

It’s not just the tiny, built-in, inexpensive camera that sets a smartphone apart from ENG cameras. The smartphone also has integral video editing software plus a wireless connection to cellular networks that permits the device to also replace traditional, standalone editing systems, live trucks and legacy microwave and satellite connections between the news scene and the newsroom. Who knew so much video news production power could be built into something not even invented for newsgathering?

The jack-of-all-trades, all-in-one capability allows the smartphone newsgathering megashift to ride other trending waves: the rapid decline in newspaper readership and the more gradual decline in television news watchers. (It’s why both publishers and television supplement their legacy delivery methods with digital delivery.)

Will news consumption change?

We know smartphone newsgathering will have a big impact on video news providers. How will the megashift affect news consumers?

A journalist films with his smartphone as Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau speaks to the press on the Rambla boulevard (JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/Getty Images)

It will accelerate the decline of television, the medium that has been the most popular way of accessing video news. Smartphone newsgathering advocate Glen Mulcahy—who founded MoJoCon, annual conferences mobile journalists worldwide, who already most often shoot with cell phones— predicts that “TV news will be dead in 5 years.” He blames television management for it even taking that long, because “they are too f****** entrenched in the expensive buildings, (ENG) platforms and transmission systems.”

It will also mean instant access to far more live reports from scenes of breaking stories because so many mobile reporters will be able to go live with their smartphones. No ENG crew needed.

Which will also lead to a sharp reduction of so-called “black-hole” liveshots that most local television news shows broadcast to create the appearance of timely reporting. (The expression black hole liveshot comes from the tens of thousands of TV news live shots that show reporters, often at night, standing at scenes of events that occurred hours earlier. It’s a widespread practice used to justify expensive ENG gear and live trucks.)

Digital news consumers will have no tolerance for black hole live shots. Not just because many don’t want their intelligence insulted, but also because they want to see major news events live, as they happen, not hours later. As smartphone newsgathering and digital delivery pick up steam, there will be far more “genuine” live shots because of so many hundreds of VJs being out and about with their cell phones.

South Asia leading the way

How long can ENG cling to life? So far, no U.S. television news outlet has made a complete transition to smartphone newsgathering. But the tipping point may have begun this year at NDTV in New Delhi, India.

This past summer, NDTV switched to a mobile journalism model where its reporters shoot and edit news video. The television station has already laid off camera operators and video editors. NDTV, which broadcasts news in two languages, announced it was shifting from conventional broadcasting to digital storytelling using mobile phones to match “international trends.”

“Like other news broadcasters around the world, NDTV is reorganizing its newsroom and resources to focus on mobile journalism. We are the first major network in India whose reporters are all trained in using mobile phones to shoot stories. This is not just about cost-cutting, though that is certainly, for us…an important factor in operations. Mobile journalism means reports are lightning-quick and much more efficiently produced—a priority for any news company. It would be irresponsible to viewers and to shareholders, as well as (being) archaic, to maintain decades-old templates of how to shoot and edit.”

Perhaps not to be outdone, the Bangladesh daily, Prothom Alo, published in English and Bengali, announced this fall that it’s been building a large mobile journalism network in the country with “184 journalists around the country trained to shoot, edit and publish content straight from their smartphones.” According to journalism.co.uk:

“In July 2016, the publisher began to experiment with the new techniques, and found that mobile journalism (mojo) helped them increase the amount of video coverage they produced, while improving the speed at which they report on stories for their online daily audience of seven million readers.”

Whether South Asians have now become the world leaders in refining and adopting the smartphone newsgathering/mobile journalism combo concept remains to be seen. It looks like it. The movement, although catching on worldwide, has not yet reached the tipping point, as ENG clings on for dear life. It’s a grip that could fade fast, much like film did in most of the world in the 1970s.

Lynn Packer is a former television news reporter and former university broadcast journalism instructor (in the US and Germany). He also consulted for several German television stations and networks. Packer is now preparing smartphone newsgathering workshops for Germany.

The post Why an Indian TV Station Went All-In on Smartphone Newsgathering appeared first on MediaShift.

4K: The Party Guest Who Arrived While We Were Turning The Lights On

You know that person,the first guest through the door. Sometimes with a dish or a bag of chips, but nonetheless a bit early and inconvenient. You do your best to make them feel comfortable and welcome, but you’re inevitably still scrambling to put everything together to make your party pop. You’ve no doubt figured out my analogy by now. We’ve been here before, after all. Anyone remember 3D TV?

Spoiler alert: 4K got to the party WAY too early. Let me be clear, I love 4K content and how rich and immersive it is by nature. I own a couple of 4K UHD (ultra HD, as it is often called) televisions. But like the premature party guest, all the parts and pieces aren’t yet assembled for even passable 4K viewing experiences.

One thing beyond dispute is the stunning visual quality of 4K and UHD. After all, 4K itself has enough pixels to fully fill four HD screens. Would you be able to tell the difference between HD and 4K content side by side? Even if you can’t, seeing that eye-popping 4K video at your local Costco or electronics store is quite compelling. Prices for 4K televisions have plummeted in the past 24 months, and more consumers are replacing aging televisions with new 4K rigs or adding to their overall mix because of all the hype. Pure televisions aside, the addressable 4K audience on tablets and smartphones isn’t overwhelming. Research out this year shows that 80% of U.S. homes have smartphones, but only 16% own a 4K television. Regardless of these numbers, the amount of content available to these screens is minute right now.

A Complex but Manageable Sausage Factory

We live in an arid desert of content where 4K is the promised oasis. Once you get beyond those gorgeous 4K videos in store of the eagle flying over some river in Alaska, it is hard to find UHD content for your screen. Sure, Apple upped the ante, throwing its chips in the game with its new Apple TV 4K and library of content upgraded to the new spec. Similarly, Netflix and Amazon produce most (if not all) of their new shows in 4K glory. But relative to the universe of television, movies and other video available to us as viewers, we’re still laying under that palm tree, waiting for some delicious water at the oasis. Even yours truly, the bleeding edge tech adopter that I am, remain disappointed in the extremely finite amount of 4K content available on my DIRECTV system. And I pay extra for it! The problem is multifaceted.

Relief will come. Adoption and availability take time. As we saw with HD content before it, content will eventually trickle into the UHD universe and be more readily available on the screen of our choice. Though 4K content is more computationally complex to prepare, the tools and technologies exist to make production possible at scale.

Samsung presents the company’ s recent smartphones Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ and 4K televisions during IFA consumer electronics unlimited at Messe Berlin. (Photo by Madeleine Lenz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Specifically, on-demand video clips take more power, resources and time to prepare in 4K. Live events are also able to be streamed in 4K, but it’s difficult. I like to call it “walking an elevated tightrope with no safety net.” In addition to getting this content to the cloud for processing, there is a similar challenge in delivering this content to the viewer. Your friendly neighborhood content delivery network (CDN) is also facing the need to innovate and beef up the infrastructure in support of content that is at least four times more complex to deliver. I’m being facetious on purpose to illustrate the complexity required with every quantum shift in video. As resolution increases, the methods and means through which we deliver it require massive shifts.

Even with all the innovation evident in UHD preparation and delivery, if you’re staring at a 4K-enabled screen, are we confident that the wired and wireless networks are ready for us to view 4K? Some networks will throttle users after a certain amount of usage, which will effectively handicap 4K viewing, given the additional bandwidth required to view.

The Technicolor, Retina Display, Dolby Vision, Yellow Brick Road is Ahead

Whether you’re dialed in to your new 4K smartphone, tablet or television, this is not a cautionary tale. I see a future in which we all revel in the pretty pixels that will dance on screens before us. But like Captain Early Party, I am here now to tell you that we are at best in the first mile of an ultra high-definition marathon. The days (and miles) ahead will yield some rewarding and fruitful experiences, especially for OTT. Keep that screen and bag of chips ready.

Matt Smith is Vice President and Principal Media Evangelist for Brightcove’s media business unit. He has served in a variety of roles in the industry, from architecture to operations, and has extensive experience in finding solutions for the challenging problems faced by media and entertainment companies as they reach viewers on any screen. Matt’s experience spans many aspects of today’s complex video workflows and he is a frequent speaker at many industry events and conferences.

The post 4K Still Too Early for Widespread Adoption – But It Will Come appeared first on MediaShift.

Streaming and devices

From the start, cord cutting was about saving money. That’s the goal, here: ditch overpriced cable or satellite TV, and keep the cash. But we’re not all ascetics, of course, so cord cutting only really took off when it became easy to stay entertained without cable.

Cord cutting owes its existence in a large part to the rise of streaming services like Netflix. Cable subscriptions peaked around the year 2000, which is the same year that Netflix was founded. The roughest years for pay TV have come in the years since Netflix’s 2007 launch of its streaming service (as you might recall, they were about DVDs in the mail before that). Hulu debuted that same year, and the roster of on-demand streaming services has exploded since then to include big players like Amazon Prime and HBO as well as niche services, free services, and user-curated services. As it stands, here are the big on-demand services you ought to know:

• Netflix is the original and still the dominant service in the marketplace. It has stepped up its original content game due to competition for streaming rights and the tactics of its major competitors, including…
• Available without a cable subscription through the OTT service HBO Now, HBO is very much part of the streaming video-on-demand wars.
• Amazon Prime gives subscribers access to streaming TV shows and movies, including Amazon originals and even some live broadcasts.
• Hulu has some limited ads (though you can pay more to ditch them), but it also has a lot of network shows available on demand relatively soon after they air.
• Crackle and Tubi TV. These are ad-supported video-on-demand services (“AVOD” in industry lingo), meaning you’ll deal with a lot of ads but can watch the content for free.

One trick with cord cutting, though, is that most of these services are unrelated. You can’t watch Hulu content on Netflix or Netflix content on Hulu, and while there is some overlap (you can add HBO to Amazon Prime, for instance, or through the skinny bundles that we’ll discuss shortly), it can be easy for cord cutting solutions to get messy.

Hence the burgeoning market for streaming devices, which includes everything from Google’s Chromecast (a $35 dongle that allows 1080p streams from other devices to be played on your TV) to Apple’s Apple TV 4K (a 4K-capable streaming box with its apps, interfaces, and content discovery features — as well as a $179 price tag).

Roku was the first on this scene back in 2008 (just a year after Netflix created the need for such a device) and still makes some of the best options, but it’s a crowded field these days. There are lots of streaming devices out there, which is good, because cord cutting’s many streaming apps form a better cable substitute when they’re organized and accessible through one device. A streaming device is a must-have accessory for a cord cutter, and it makes it easy to watch streaming video on demand – or live, as we’ll see shortly. Here are the big-time streaming devices you need to know about:

• Longtime streaming box manufacturers Roku offer a lineup that runs from the Roku Ultra ($99.99) to the tiny and cheap Roku Express ($29.99). The sweet spot in the lineup is either the Ultra or the Roku Streaming Stick+ ($69.99), which are both 4K-capable. Roku’s platform is, in this blogger’s view, the best in the business.
• Fire TV. Amazon’s streaming box is $69.99, a great price for a 4K-capable device. Its platform tends to surface Amazon properties, making it most popular with Amazon power users.
• Apple TV 4K.The latest version of Apple’s streaming box is powerful but at $179 (32GB model) and $199 (64GB model) quite pricey. The user interface, naturally, is gorgeous.
• The Chromecast ($35) and 4K-capable Chromecast Ultra ($69) don’t have on-screen user interfaces. Instead, they allow you to choose content on another device (like a mobile device or laptop) and then sling the media up onto your TV from there. That makes them super simple but arguably less ideal for families who want the content discovery process up on a screen everyone can see.
• Nvidia Shield TV. This pricey ($179.99, or $199.99 with the gaming controller) streaming device is aimed at gamers. It can stream games from PCs and from the web, offers a gaming controller, and can run Android games. It’s also, of course, an Android TV and a great 4K streaming box.
• Smart TVs. You don’t need a streaming box if you have a smart TV, though some of the manufacturers of these devices could learn a thing or two about user-friendliness from the streaming box folks. There are too many brands to list here, but it’s worth noting that fans of Roku’s platform will find it on smart TVs made in collaboration with TCL, Insignia, RCA, and other manufacturers.

Cord cutting and live TV

Cord cutting’s history is tied up in Netflix and other SVOD (that’s “streaming video on demand”) services, but if we’ve truly reached the cord-cutting tipping point, it’s live TV that has made the difference. The past few years have seen allegedly “DVR-proof” live events like sports experiences an advertising bubble even as cable and satellite companies reeled from cord cutting and DVR-related advertising losses. But cord cutters are watching live TV too, now, and that’s encouraging more and more of us to walk away from cable and satellite.

Modern cord cutters use a combination of some very familiar and very new tech to watch live TV. Let’s start with the old-school solution: over-the-air TV. Thanks to a vast network of local affiliate stations, the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) broadcast over the air in just about every region. Your local action news team has its own transmitter, which means that you can use an antenna to watch local news for free (and in high definition, as a matter of fact). while antennas are an “old” technology, there’s nothing old about the latest models and modern over-the-air transmission protocols. There’s nothing to stop you from tuning in at other hours, too, for major-network shows as well as those NFL games, World Series broadcasts, and other live events that were supposed to save cable.

(KPG_Payless/Shutterstock)

For network TV from the many channels that do not broadcast over the air, you’ll need to turn to a pay TV service — but it doesn’t have to be cable or satellite. “Skinny bundles” are the new normal on the live TV front, and they bring live TV to the streaming world while cutting down the size (and cost) of the channel packages they offer. The field is crowded with skinny bundle options these days, including some from major legacy pay TV companies, who have seen the writing on the wall. Here are the ones to know:

• DirecTV Now. AT&T’s skinny bundle offers tiered channel bundles, from the small and cheap to the big and expensive.
• Hulu with Live TV. Hulu, known for its on-demand service, also has this single-package skinny bundle on offer.
• PlayStation Vue. Sony’s service offers tiered options and, despite the name, is available on many devices other than the PlayStation 4.
• Sling TV. Dish’s skinny bundle offers a more customizable brand of bundle by allowing subscribers to choose from a wide range of small add-on packages once they’ve subscribed to one of the base packages.
• YouTube TV. Google’s skinny bundle is still in the process of being rolled out, so it’s limited to certain regions and has less robust platform support than the competition.

Can cord cutting actually save you money?

At this point, it’s clear enough that you can get rid of cable and still get as much live TV as ever. But we’re in danger of losing sight of the original goal, which was to save money. A not-so-skinny skinny bundle package like DirecTV Now’s “Gotta Have It” (120+ channels) or PlayStation Vue’s “Ultra” (90+ channels) will cost you around $70 a month, which will make your bills almost as cable-like as your viewing experience. And cable companies, who have certainly noticed the trend that’s killing their business, tend to also be internet service providers, which means they can rig up unfair pricing systems that make internet-only services disproportionately expensive. In the end, is it really worth it to cut the cord?

Sure, maybe. The thing is, though, that the math is a little different for everyone. You’ll need to know how many channels you really want and need, which on-demand services you’ll use (and which of them you’ll keep regardless of whether or not you cut the cord), and what kind of over-the-air reception you get in your area. You’ll need to know how much your cable bill is right now and how much your internet-only bill would be, as well as what sort of data caps you’ll be dealing with. And then you’ll need to do some math (mercifully, there are plenty of online cord-cutting budgeting tools to help you—including one over in my little corner of the internet, Cordcutting.com).

Yeah, it’s a bit of work, but being frugal tends to mean paying a bit more attention in order to pay a bit less on your bills. In the end, it’s clear that cutting the cord can save you money. How much of that budget breathing room you want to put back into cord cutting services and devices is up to you. So if you’re ready, give it a shot: jot down the price of a Roku or a Fire TV, add in a skinny bundle, weigh the one-time cost of a decent antenna, and put it all together with your ISP’s price for internet without cable. There’s a good chance that, like so many others, you’ll see that you can save quite a bit while giving up very little. Hey, no wonder it’s a trend.

Stephen Lovely is a lifelong writer and a longtime cord cutter. He writes news articles, how-to posts, streaming guides, and more for Cordcutting.com. He lives in New York State.

The post Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Pay TV (2017 Edition) appeared first on MediaShift.

Q&A

Storyhunter: When looking at story ideas, how do you determine which stories will emotionally resonate with your audience? Is it just about getting to know the audience, or is there more to it than that?

Khalil Jetha: There’s always more to it than just knowing the audience. It’s understanding their specific relationship to the topic that is important. If, for example, we’re running a video about Star Wars characters challenging social stereotypes, we don’t just target fantasy fans or sci-fi geeks. We will target female fans of Doctor Who between the ages of 25 and 40 with the knowledge that we’re pulling the emotional strings associated with the latest Doctor, who happens to be female. We’ll target Star Wars fans of John Boyega, knowing those fans are pulling for the most significant franchise character of color since Billy Dee Williams. We don’t just know facts about our audience, we know what they care about and what makes it significant from an emotional standpoint. We know what gives them hope, what stirs their determination, and which emotion associated with our videos will leave the most lasting impression.

SH: Can you describe a video produced by Great Big Story that gathered views very quickly?

KJ: A recent video of ours that took off was Sounds of the Nightmare Machine, which in its first week saw more than 500,000 views on YouTube and more than one million on Facebook inside 24 hours.

The post CNN’s Viral Video Strategy for ‘Great Big Story’ appeared first on MediaShift.

This summer, I used a NATPE Faculty Development Grant to spend two weeks at a television news operation, my longest stint in a newsroom since joining academe.

The station I visited, KXAS-TV, the NBC owned and operated station in Dallas-Fort Worth known as NBC 5, was the first station in Texas when it launched in 1948. It is also a station in transition. Mark Ginther, the vice president of news, came to the station less than two years ago with a vision to move away from daily crime news toward more enterprise coverage.

Before starting my time at NBC 5, a former colleague quipped that, although there have been some technology changes, most things remained the same (for starters, I was amazed the iNEWS, the popular newsroom computer system, had hardly changed). Some other newsroom traditions remained: eccentric characters, gallows humor, and an appetite for free food.

I did find some changes and some constants and, when classes resume in the fall, I will have several things to share that will enhance my teaching.

1. The Newscast Still Leads

One of the first things that struck me is how much the newsroom is still so focused on the traditional broadcasts. While digital is included in meetings and seen as important, it is often secondary to the newscasts.

But the more time I spent observing, the more I realized the conundrum. One way to think about this is that newspapers making efforts to be digital first means, for the most part, focusing on digital and using that content to produce one paper for the next day. However, at NBC 5, like most TV newsrooms, there are hours of broadcasts to fill from 4:30 in the morning until 10:35 at night, a total of 6 hours a day at NBC 5. That means you have many hard broadcast deadlines and you need lots of local content to fill 4:30 to 7 a.m., 11 a.m. to noon, 4 to 5 p.m., 5 to 5:30 p.m., 6 to 6:30 p.m. and 10 to 10:35 p.m.

Kris Gutierrez and Bianca Castro anchor a 5 p.m. newscast. Photo by Aaron Chimbel.

While digital demands have increased, TV newsrooms are producing more hours of broadcasts each day, an average of 5.3 hours a day in 2014 compared to 3.6 hours per day a decade earlier, according to Pew Research Center.

At the same time, the digital staff has been expanded to eight staffers and includes a recent addition of a digital video producer who works to create shareable videos for social media and the station’s digital outlets. She produces her videos not as vertical or horizontal videos, but as squares, which she says works well using the most real estate on most devices.

About two-thirds of the traffic to the station’s digital properties comes from mobile, so thinking about how stories will play devices is important. Still, the focus is on the traditional broadcasts, which make up the vast majority of TV station advertising revenue.

Takeaway:

Everyone is expected to do their TV job and contribute to digital. Reporters are required to write text versions of their stories and post them to the content management system before their story airs, in addition to posting to social media about their stories.

2. Mornings are More Important Than Ever

For most people entering local TV news, the most prestigious assignments have been the late night newscasts with mornings seen as a purgatory where the newest folks are sent to pay their dues.

However, at NBC 5 early mornings are seen a growth area. News managers have been infusing resources to create what they say may be the largest staff for a local morning newscast. In addition to the requisite morning anchor duo, meteorologist and traffic anchor, the station often has as many as five reporters each day, including a consumer reporter and three live field reporters.

The station also shifted staffing after visiting the “Today” show in New York. Now, an assignment editor works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to plan for mornings and a producer, who previously produced the 5:30 a.m. newscast, works from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. to further prepare for mornings. The station’s morning newscasts are getting strong ratings, and station management sees success in the morning as key to being the market’s top station throughout the day.

Takeaway:

Embrace mornings and look for creative solutions to utilize resources for maximum impact.

3. Meetings that Matter

The newsroom schedule runs on two things: when the newscasts air and when the news meetings happen.

NBC 5 has the typical morning and afternoon news meetings, but one at 7 p.m. surprised me and stood out as a really good idea.

Recently, the night news team added a 7 p.m. meeting to go over the progress of the marquee 10 p.m. newscast (the equivalent of the 11 p.m. news on the East and West coasts).

This meeting helped to refine the focus of the newscast and allowed the senior producer, producer, director, anchors and others to assess how the stories and rundown were coming along with time to address any concerns. There’s also a quick 9:30 meeting to catch any last minute issues.

The equivalent of the 7 p.m. meeting is something I plan to incorporate in my broadcast classes where we discuss stories leading up to the newscast but do not regroup as a class to evaluate when we know more and more stories are finalized, or close to it.

Takeaway:

The collaborative approach is key and the various points of view lead to positive changes.

4. Live Technology is Ubiquitous

The advent of bonded cellular systems like Dejero, LiveU and Streambox have largely replace traditional live vans – and at a much lower cost. NBC 5 now has eight Dejero-equipped SUVs and six portable Dejero units that each send a live signal the equivalent of using nine cell phone signals.

The station still has seven traditional live microwave trucks and two satellite trucks, but they aren’t used much anymore. Often they’re only used in situations where there may be significant competing cellular traffic, like a major sporting event, and the Dejero would not be as reliable.

Producer Patty Zamarripa during a newscast. Photo by Aaron Chimbel.

Live shots are now faster, easier, more mobile and more available. Reporters can be live in more places (in moving vehicles, walking with protesters, in a skyscraper) and producers don’t need to juggle the use of live trucks. Several photojournalists have been assigned Dejeros and can be instantly deployed to breaking news, saving valuable time.

While I was familiar with the technology, I was surprised at how widespread its adoption was and how rarely the traditional live vans are used anymore.A few years ago, it was common for starter markets to just have one or two live trucks, due to the expense. Now, nearly all reporters can be live multiple times a day.

Takeaway:

For students who want to be reporters, live presentation skills are more important than ever.

News Adds Value

Since he arrived at NBC 5 in September 2015, Mark has worked to move the station from crime-focused news to more of the enterprising and NPPA-styled news he was successful with at KING-TV in Seattle.

This is a newsroom in transition, with an influx of new employees, employees in new positions, and many other longtime veterans, all adapting to a vision that challenges what many have grown accustomed to.

For example, after leading one newscast with breaking news of an officer-involved shooting, Mark led a discussion of if that was more newsworthy than the story that followed about runoff elections in Dallas. It was an insightful discussion and one that was not about saying one choice was right or wrong, but to push the journalists to think about what story has the greater importance, not just which one happened closet to news time. Perhaps the shooting story would have worked better with background about officer-involved shootings in that suburb, suggested some in the morning news meeting the next day. The point: Leading with the shooting isn’t necessarily wrong, but the default shouldn’t be for spot news, either. Crime coverage isn’t banned from newscasts, but should be in proper context and more than just the proverbial body count.

The NBC 5 newsroom. Photo by Aaron Chimbel.

Still, success was evident while I was there. The station learned it won four national Edward R. Murrow Awards, including for overall excellence, during my visit. The four national Murrows were the most for any local TV station in the country.

Perhaps then, it is not surprising that many NBC 5 journalists emphasized to me that, despite many changes in journalism, the basics still matter a great deal. Writing, reporting, people-focused stories, story generation and compelling visual storytelling are all as important as ever.

Takeaway:

For a news organization to have value to its community, it must go beyond the easy stories. Value comes in providing high-quality content that people cannot get anywhere else. Also, transitioning a newsroom is methodical, not instant.

Aaron Chimbel is an associate professor of professional practice in journalism at TCU’s Bob Schieffer College of Communication. Before returning to TCU in 2009, Chimbel worked at WFAA-TV in Dallas, where he won five Emmy Awards and a national Edward R. Murrow Award. Follow him on Twitter at @aaronchimbel.

The post TV Newsroom to Classroom: What One Prof Learned at His Summer Internship appeared first on MediaShift.

What I’m seeing is part music video-part VR experience, set to British electronic artist Clark’s new track “Hoova.” The dystopian experience claims to investigate the topics of isolation, dependency and identity in virtual reality. And it’s one of many experiences that attendees of the recent Northside Festival in New York City could try out mixed-media reality and tech products. Northside, which the New York Times dubbed “Brooklyn’s answer to South by Southwest,” played host to thousands this year during the annual technology and music festival. Here are some of the highlights:

Augmented and Virtual Reality

A festival-goer has his body scanned in 3D at the Immersive Playground at the Northside Festival. Photo by Bianca Fortis.

There were panels galore about the future of augmented and virtual reality – including one actually titled “How Do We Get People to Like VR?”

The key to the widespread use of AR and VR is to make it playful, according to several of the experts.

“Everyone talks about content creation, and that’s great,” Martina Mrongovius, the co-founder of the Center for the Holographic Art, said. “But if no one engages, what does it matter?”

Case in point: SwapBots CEO John Keefe showed off a prototype of the toys that, when placed in front of the SwapBots app, transform and “come to life.” Both he and Jeremy Kenisky, vice president of Merge VR, which designed the Merge Cube, a toy that lets the user “hold” a hologram while using a VR headset, said their companies regularly invite children to their offices to test their products.

“We don’t see ourselves as a VR or AR company,” Kenisky said. “We see ourselves as building toys for the future.”

Lex Dreitser, a VR app developer, said making the technology playful has universal application across all cultures – because we’ve all been kids.

Perhaps proving that point, in another VR panel, Ari Kuschnir, the founder of production company mssngpeces, discussed the groundbreaking VR documentary about the NBA that was released last year. A lot of VR headsets were sold when it was released, he said.

While VR and AR evangelists have expressed worry about future revenue streams, but Dessy Levinson, the Vice President & Head of Story at 645 Ventures, said the key will be engaging content.

“People will pay for content – if it’s good,” she said. “They paid to rent movies and for music on iTunes.”

Artificial Intelligence: Bots as Agents

There’s a persisting belief that it’s on humans to become computer literate. But, in fact, we’re going about it the wrong way, says Michael Nicholas, the co-founder of Born AI: computers need to become human literate.

Nicholas referenced SmarterChild, an early AI bot that was on the buddy list of millions of AOL chat users in the early 2000s. There’s a significant difference between the bots of yore and the AI bots that are being used today: while SmarterChild spoke in pre-written scripts, today we have natural language intelligence which can help AI better understand humans. Bots that can understand – and help – us are called agents, Nicholas said.

“It’s less virtual assistant, more virtual specialist,” he said. “It’s about having a relationship with something you can trust.”

Nicholas envisions a future transformed by AI.

“Everything that can be automated will be,” he said. “And everything that can’t, will rise in value.”

Platforms and Publishers

From left to right: Shani Hilton of BuzzFeed, Lydia Polgreen of HuffPost, Sam Dolnick of the New York Times and Melissa Bell of Vox. Photo by Bianca Fortis.

While Instagram may have started as a photo sharing platform, the company’s objective now is to strengthen relationships around the world, according to Kevin Weil, Instagram’s Head of Product.

The app now has more than 400 million daily users, and more than 200 million people use Instagram’s new Stories feature, Weil said. The fastest emerging markets are in Asia and India. During an interview with BuzzFeed’s San Francisco Bureau Chief Mat Honan, Honan needled Weil about Instagram’s apparent copying of Snapchat features, including Stories and augmented reality filters. In response, Weil pointed to Mosaic, an early internet web browser, and asked whether internet users should still be expected to use it.

“Being first is important,” he said. “And we’re good about giving credit where credit is due. “But being first isn’t everything.”

For many users, Instagram isn’t just a place to post any old photo – feeds have become galleries where users show “highlights” of their lives, and the Stories feature allows users to share in-between moments without having to add something to their feed they may not want in six months. Ephemerality is freeing, he said.

“Most of your life happens between your highlights,” Weil said. “It’s about strengthening relationships with those small, silly daily moments. The Stories feature was a pressure release valve.”

And while the distribution of content via social platforms invite a host of problems for news organizations, New York Times Assistant Editor Sam Dolnick (and member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that owns the paper) said during another panel that it’s because of those platforms that those organizations have so many readers. The Times’ audience before the platforms wasn’t half as big as it is now, he said. There are millions of people reading and reading immediately. Platforms also allow news organizations to expand their audiences – including to teenagers.

“I have 14-year-olds who know Vox because of Snapchat,” Vox Publisher Melissa Bell said. “It’s great to see platforms pushing us in those directions. We’re re-thinking how we create editorial content.”

HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen said she spends all her time thinking about how to make news for people who don’t really care about the news or who aren’t tuned in.

“Platforms are an important way for us to worm our way into the lives of people who don’t feel served by the news ecosystem,” she said.

Bell said the crisis facing the journalism industry won’t be solved with a few product solutions and quick fixes. We need a total transformation, and we’re in the midst of it, she said. But ultimately, the panelists also said that audiences still engage with big investigations and other deeply reported stories.

“Basic reporting, verifying facts, getting sources to tell you things they’re not supposed to – those things from a generation ago are not out of fashion,” Dolnick said. “Traditional get-the-facts journalism still matters.”

Podcasts: The Second Golden Age of Audio?

We’ve entered a second golden age of audio if you ask Alex Blumberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Media. During a conversation with Snap Judgement Host and Executive Producer Glynn Washington to discuss the future of radio and podcasting.

Blumberg said podcasting allows creators to make stories that are serialized or stories that only appeal to certain groups. The cost to entry is very low and allows cheaper experimentation that other mediums.

“A movie can take three years,” he said. “It takes at least a year-and-a-half for a TV pilot. We can do a story in two days – or even three hours. The water is warm in the pool, and I think people should jump in.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post Brooklyn’s Northside Festival Takes on VR, AR, Bots and Podcasts appeared first on MediaShift.

Is there anything in journalism that screams innovation more than drones? Since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) instituted new rules in 2016, unmanned aircraft equipped with cameras have become popular in newsrooms like Chicago’s CBS2, Norfolk’s The Virginian Pilot, and The New York Times. But should every news videographer be running out to get one?

Prof. Matt Waite discusses how the worlds of journalism and drones collide. (File photo from Matt Waite)

“The question is ‘what purpose is the drone serving in the story?’” says Matt Waite, a professor at the University of Nebraska who in 2011 founded the Drone Journalism Lab to study the technology and train journalists on the use of drones. Waite believes that incorporating drones into your newsroom is not that simple of a choice. Instead, like any shoot, the planning should be meticulous.

“I think it starts a long time before you even put your hands on the device,” he says. “It is not a casual thing that you can just go out and do. It requires forethought and planning, and for the pilot-in-command to do a lot of stuff even before leaving the building.”

As regulations stand right now, news organizations and journalism schools experimenting with drones fall under the rules for “commercial flights.” That means drone operators must be certified by passing the FAA’s 60-question, multiple-choice test. The good news? No flying capability demonstration is necessary.

According to Waite, any local TV station can have a drone unit up and running within two to six months. And most of that time will go into the planning.

“A pilot can pass that test with about 40 hours of study,” he explains. “It’s not hard, it’s just work. The bigger hanger right now in most newsrooms is internal. They are trying to figure out what type of legal parameters they should operate under.”

Do you have the budget?

Budgeting is also a concern, says Waite, especially for smaller newsrooms. A commercial drone kit will run between five and ten thousand dollars. “It is inexpensive compared to a manned helicopter,” Waite says, referring to the eyes-in-the-sky on which many local TV news stations rely. “Insurance issues are also slowing people down. General liability policies don’t cover aircrafts, so you have to get special insurance for this. And that is in the thousands of dollars a year.”

To address issues like that, Waite’s Drone Journalism Lab recently released an Operations Manual – with support from the Knight Foundation and available to anyone under a Creative Commons license – to help professionalize drone operations across newsrooms. Waite is also involved in a series of workshops with the Poynter Institute to train journalists and videographers to fly drones and get accredited by the FAA.

Be clear about the story first

Creative Commons photo.

Over the last few years, news organizations like the BBC, CNN, and Australia’s ABC have all been setting the standards for drone journalism. Waite is unsure how local TV stations and smaller newsrooms will manage with drones. He’s certain, though, that stations must decide why they’re going to use the technology before they put in the purchase order.

“They have to start with the question of ‘what is the drone giving us in this story?’” Waite says. “If the answer is ‘it is offering a perspective on this event that you can’t get from the ground that will greatly increase people’s understanding,’ I say rock on. That is exactly what it is for.”

And that’s exactly what Chicago CBS2 news director Jeff Kiernan recently told the Radio Television Digital News Association he expects from of a drone story. “In our twice-daily news conference, anyone can pitch a story, explaining how a drone could enhance it,” Kiernan told RTDNA.

This piece was initially published on Storybench, a cookbook for digital storytelling. Storybench is a collaboration between Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program, a new graduate degree in digital journalism, and Esquire magazine.

Felippe Rodrigues is a former law student turned sports writer and a big fan of the Olympics. He is currently a graduate student in Northeastern’s Media Innovation program.

The post What Local TV Should Know Before Taking Off With Drone Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.