“There are a lot of people who’ve given up trying to get on commercial television and have gone to securing their own YouTube channels, and I think, at the end of the day, that’s going to be the future of broadcasting,” Gordon said. “People are just going to put stuff out there. They’re gonna have their own YouTube channels, and eventually you’ll be able to buy things from those channels. But I think one of the things that people have to understand is it takes perseverance.”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Ed Gordon, Host of Conversations with Ed Gordon?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Baratunde Thurston and the rest of the crew at Cultivated Wit are teaming up with AOL Studios to produce a show called FUNDED. It’ll feature crowdfunded projects from around the country and talk to the entrepreneurs about why they chose such a path. In a blog post announcing the project, Thurston implored anyone who knows of cool, under-the-radar projects to share.

What are your favorite crowdfunded journalism projects?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Phillyburbs.com, a Calkins Media Group website based in suburban Philadelphia, has been transitioning its print papers online for the past decade and it’s starting to get serious about video content. The Bucks County Courier Times, one of the group’s papers (and for the record, where my mother works), recently launched The Courier Times Update, a ten minute news broadcast that goes live on their website at 2pm every day. Rachel Canelli, the host of the update, has transitioned from a strictly print reporter to the Courier’s go-to video reporter over the past few years. She doesn’t have any broadcast experience, but like most mid-market journalists these days, she’s learned how produce her own video segments.

 Ever since we had a website, we’ve done video. But it was more random. Three years ago we started a weekly segment called Buzz In Bucks and that evolved from man on the street interviews and hard news to more feature content. Two years ago, we started doing daily news video. That’s when they started handing out iPhones and cameras – it was a big investment, and then everyone was expected to do video. And the photographers got in because the had the capability to shoot video. Within the last year or so, we hired the video consultant and bringing in new players – we hired a new CEO and general manager and we started to put an emphasis on moving to video, by investing in equipment and software to add advertisements into the videos.

How many of you are sitting in a newsroom struggling to stay relevant? It’s not easy. For the team at the Courier, it was about hiring Canelli to head the update, and repurposing other reporters and photographers in the newsroom to add more video content. It’s a bit of a scramble.  continued…

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Months later, the journalism-focused blogosphere is finally getting excited about it. But going so far as to say it’s “shaking up the news world” is a bit of a stretch.

Frankly, I’m not buying it for two major reasons:

1) The six second, GIF-like looping of video makes Vines some of the most boring video content out there. What could be done with a good photo is instead exploited and worn out with the app. In fact, “Finite Vine” would be a welcome addition.

2) Audio helps with context and Vine’s capability for voiceovers is great. But after seeing some Vines, I’m glad the default volume status is mute. It makes me want to push for other video channels, like HuffPost Live, to run the same way. I’m on a constant mission to hit the mute button on most videos on news websites before playback starts. It feels like a constant attack.

If Twitter is an incessant feed of things you’ll probably never get around to reading, or really need to know, then Vines just add to that noise. There’s a reason why traditional broadcasting organizations haven’t taken to it. You need more than six seconds and a GIF to tell a story. Even if it’s just 24 seconds more and two GIFs — anything is better than a Vine.

Let’s stop the madness.

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But news companies aren’t clamoring to take part in Youtube. In fact, the video company endured a messy breakup last month with Reuters and Wall Street Journal, pulling millions of dollars in funding and laying off more than a dozen contractors in the process. To put it simply: premium Youtube ventures and news do not mix. continued…

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One of these companies is Thrash Lab, a California-based documentary team that releases all of its work for free on Youtube. Backed by Twitter god and Two and a Half Men star Ashton Kutcher, Thrash Lab has produced bi-coastal features focusing on people in all kinds of creative fields — but excels in producing clever, slice-of-life views into popular subcultures.

Check out this feature on specialty coffeemakers:

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s been a week since Vine, Twitter’s new app for creating, curating, and sharing short videos, hit the iOS App Store and I can’t help viewing every one that comes my way.

The chance to create, post and share a short video means big things for journalists in the field. But as of yet, I’ve only seen one of breaking news and it was a very sad, and very fuzzy, video of the dolphin stuck in a New York City canal last week.

Instead, journalists seem most excited about sharing their view of the newsroom and documenting, very, very quickly, the process of putting together the next edition.

And yet, it’s hard to be skeptical about a new way to post video on the go. Remember when we were all skeptical about Twitter in the first place? Or was that just me? It’s since become our daily, morning briefing with our coffee and the rest of the news-breaking world.

There will be more bad Vine videos to come, and if you’re in the field, six seconds is not a lot of time for context. But let’s not give up just yet or just plug the view from our desks.

Can you think of a way you could use Vine to enhance a story? Have you already? Share them with us in the comments or @10,000Words.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The joke’s on us, guys. I couldn’t help laughing out loud and passing around a recent article from The Onion this week. The headline “Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity” caught my eye. The satirical piece contained gems like this quote:

Every time I type a web address into my browser, I don’t need to be taken to a fully immersive, cross-platform, interactive viewing experience,” said San Diego office manager Keith Boscone. “I don’t want to take a moment to provide my feedback, open a free account, become part of a growing online community, or see what related links are available at various content partners.

Har-har. Go ahead. Read the whole thing, I’ll wait.

Now back to business. As much as our jobs depend on curating those cross-platforms and creating sharable content, things are only funny when they’re true right? I think there are lessons to be learned from being the butt of the joke. Here’s how to keep those snarky Onion writers happy:

1. Use Video Only When It’s Compelling

Many of my colleagues working at hometown papers have been handed small digital cameras in the past years and an order from higher ups to have accompanying video for their stories and columns. We all have to be reporters, video producers, audio editors, among other things, these days. But video only works when it’s compelling. For it to be compelling, you need more training than the two afternoons in the conference room with the tech guy. Many of us are good writers and good video editors. Just as many people are not. (Full disclosure: I am not.) There is a huge difference between knowing how to put together a nice video from filming to finishing touches, and really feeling, embracing, the medium. I want to propose that while adapting is good, and learning to use Final Cut or even iMovie is a must, if you know it’s just not your thing: rebel.  continued…

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He discusses the app and his take on the future of journalism and the importance of local, unique stories in the survival of journalism. It’s a short but insightful clip. Here’s a taste:

“I think journalism is going to go through a very innovative process. How we think about journalism today is really about location and format… and also by geo-location… For journalism to be really a influential force in new media ti has to understand mobile, it has to understand tablets, it has to understand new viewing habits and how they all work together.”

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The only caveat is, for better for worse, shooting video on a small, light smartphone has a steep learning curve. To get a compelling, color-balanced shot that isn’t shaky or blurry is a mammoth task — an unknowledgeable shooter can easily end up with muddy, diffuse content that isn’t share-worthy.

Luckily, there are some easy and effective tips to get a great shot. continued…

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A few weeks ago we highlighted TubeChop as an easy-to-use tool for highlighting parts of a YouTube video relevant to your story. EmbedPlus is another such tool, but with a handful of other additional, useful features.

EmbedPlus, available as a Chrome extension, WordPress plugin and simple wizard, allows you as a journalist to (among other things):

• Annotate YouTube videos, placing your own text and links (perhaps “explainers” or more context) at designated times
• Crop videos to the interesting or relevant portions, per the same idea we outlined for TubeChop
• Mark several jump-to points (“chapters”) relevant to your coverage, so a reader doesn’t have to go searching
• Provide quick access to conversations (“reactions”) to the YouTube video on social platforms like Reddit and Twitter

continued…

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In part I of our Media Beat interview with MDC Partners chief strategist and Crispin Porter + Bogusky chairman Chuck Porter, the ad exec (though he doesn’t really take to that term) discusses his holding company’s acquisition strategy and what it’s like working alongside MDC CEO Miles Nadal.

According to the ad vet, creativity is key when determining the right acquisition as he says simply, “My criterion is the work.”

This and all MediabistroTV productions can also be viewed on our YouTube Channel. Be sure to check out Part II and III of our chat with Porter tomorrow and Wednesday, respectively.

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Geo optional: One of my earlier qualms with Meograph is that it required the use of a map, making the tool completely unusable for a story that has no significant geo-location elements, but does have the other elements of timeline and multimedia. Now, Meograph is “geo optional,” meaning an increase of potential use cases.

Browser support: Playback of a published meograph, which always worked in all browsers, continues to work. But now you can create a Meograph using the author back-end using any browser as well.

Launch of the journalism page: Meograph’s new journalists page guides news organizations through how to use the tool. The page lists benefits for news orgs.  Soon, they’ll be adding journalism-specific content and hopefully usage examples to this page, so keep an eye on it.

Overall redesign: Since the last time we wrote about Meograph (when it was still in beta), the app has gotten a huge facelift. See before and after screenshots below. Although the redesign is mostly an aesthetic improvement, as a third-party embeddable tool, it’s important that the design you’re embedding onto your news site is clean and elegant. On our wish list (which we’ve mentioned to the Meograph team): the ability for newsrooms to easily customize the colors and theme of the player.

Improvements to the back end: In addition to being more browser compatible, the back end’s interface has seen some improvements. There’s a beautiful drag’n drop interface that lets you slide content around and easily add new elements. It’s extremely easy and intuitive to use.

Engagement stats: We also finally have some numbers about meograph’s effectiveness. According to the company’s CEO, Misha Leybovich, about one-third of viewers watch embedded meographs and spend 2-3 minutes longer engaging with a page that has an embedded meograph.

The tool is still free at this point. You can see more demos of news usages on their demos page.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.