Conde´ Nast recently hosted MediabistroTV at its Times Square offices. Lucky magazine style editor and network television morning show contributor Lori Bergamotto walked the crew through Lucky’s offices revealing the hidden corners where nail polish and make up are put through their paces, colors and fabric samples are checked by the art department, shoes and handbags await their close-ups and racks of outfits hang around waiting for their models.

Take a look at all the small parts that make up a big fashion magazine like Lucky.

Next Thursday MediabistroTV premieres, “My First Big Break: Ken Burns.” You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

My favorite part of the comment section of YouTube is the ability to link a timestamp (say “0:31″) to a particular point in a video, letting someone just click on the “0:31″ in blue and see, in full, the point you’re referencing.

It’s a great way of adding context to your comment, but unfortunately, it currently only works in the comment section itself. Discussing the contexts of a particular moment in YouTube videos, however, can also be advantageous for your journalism.

In my searching for other possibilities to add video context to journalism, I stumbled upon TubeChop—I suggest you give it a try.

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There’s a lot of pressure on journalists and news organizations to be everywhere, not just when it comes to feet on the ground reporting but also when it comes to tweets, pins, posts, etc. on all form of social media.

We’ve even encouraged the trend with tips to maximize your presence on everything from Google+ to Pinterest. Which is why this Pew Internet & American Life Project’s study about how photos and videos are shared socially caught my eye.

Their findings shed some interesting light on how many (or few) people are actually using these various networks. (This wasn’t the focus of the study but looked interesting, so I created this graph.)

Primarily, their questions were about how many adults post photos/videos online and how many share them, and whether the media they post/share was their original creation or that of someone else. Nearly half — 46 percent — of the online adult population surveyed indicated they post original photos, while 41 percent share photos they’ve found online on social networks. Overall, their study found that 56 percent of Internet users do at least one of those activities, posting their creations or sharing someone else’s. News organizations rely on both: The eye-witness videos from the scene of the event and the “curators” who share the organization’s videos and photos so other online users can find it.
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In the digital world where journalists are increasingly required to wear many hats, video is an important tool that can bring even more to the story. Manoush Zomorodi, author of the multimedia eBook Camera Ready: How to Present Your Best Self and Ideas On Air and Online, shared some tips with 10,000 Words on how to make video to better your story and attract more viewers. Zomorodi will be giving a conference on this topic as part of mediabistro’s upcoming Literary Festival. To find out more, check out the program list here. Read more

A yet-to-be-launched tool called Meograph promises to let you easily “create, playback and share beautiful stories in the context of when and where.” It’s a tool that’s still in pre-beta, but journalists and news organizations can get priority access for an invite.

Meograph released a demo of what the tool can do, using the fictional KVWM San Diego TV station as an example use case. Based on the examples, I wouldn’t yet call the resulting product “beautiful,” but the storytelling format is a compelling mishmash: timeline + audio + Google Maps + images + video+  hyperlinks (for adding more context and linking to stories).

Misha Leybovich, founder and CEO, told me this via email about Meograph:

Meograph helps automatically create, share, and watch interactive multimedia stories.  Our first product pairs Google Earth with a timeline and multimedia overlays to tell stories in context of where and when.

Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface.  Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in 2 min or dig into for an hour.  Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics … Meograph is both.

I’m not quite convinced that there are many use cases where this exact mishmash of media is the most powerful way to tell a story, but if you have any ideas, let me know in the comments. If you’re interested in testing the tool for a news organization, email journalism@memograph.com.