These days, carrying around a full video rig is the last thing a journalist wants to do when in the middle of important breaking news. Thankfully, the smartphone is rapidly becoming the go-to option for capturing news as it happens, and the rise of HD quality video in such a small package means that more important and newsworthy moments are being captured and shared throughout the world.

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. Read more

PBS Arts Off Book put out this interesting, short video this week with some thoughts from a few leading minds in the digital journalism sphere (including Mark Luckie, the 10,000 Words founder and current manager of journalism and news at Twitter). The subject is all about how Twitter has impacted journalism and journalists’ role in using the service to source news and be a source of news. I wanted to pass it on because some of the points the speakers (Luckie, Jeff Jarvis, Craig Kanalley and Chris Anderson) brought up were important to think over, including the role of journalists as the filter for Tweets/breaking news and also the importance of realizing a lot of sources and people aren’t on Twitter or Facebook. Anyway, it’s only about 5 minutes long. Watch it.

Here’s a tool to help annotate and direct people to points of interest in any last minute campaign rally videos or the CNN punch-drunkness vids hopefully to come after tomorrow night’s election coverage.

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

Read more

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.

Meograph — the site that lets you mashup stories using video, maps, text and links– launched a new set of features, making it a more promising tool for newsrooms.

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.