For a journo who has found success with decidedly old-school methods, Ed Gordon has some advice for aspiring broadcasters: get on YouTube. “In today’s world… it’s about producing and owning your content,” he told Mediabistro in the latest installment of So What Do You Do?. Gordon also advises young people with dreams of being on the small screen to “learn where your craft is headed,” and talks about the importance of perseverance when it comes to career success.

“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?

Would you ever let a subject put your interview on Youtube for everyone to see? That’s what Chad Witacre, the founder of online gift exchange program Gittip requests for each and every one of his interviews — something he likes to call an “Open Interview.”

The philosophy behind an open interview, to Witacre, is supremely simple: as a transparent company with an accessible open source API and clear funding partners, it only makes sense to bring out discussions with the media to the general Internet community and ensure users that there’s literally nothing to hide.

“With journalists I’m much more comfortable requesting openness,” Witacre writes in his article on Medium. “They’re writing for the public record, and it benefits readers and keeps us both honest to have the raw material on record as well.”

Read more

On the surface, it’s been a huge year for Youtube and its string of premium content providers. The website is becoming bigger, and has recently acquired startup Epoxy to help developers and distributors get their work on the site faster and more frequently. In addition to the rise in Youtube developers like Maker Studios  and Machinima, new premium channels are popping up left and right — fashion and lifestyle network StyleHaul netted $4.4. million in Series A funding this February, and Demand Media’s newcomer Tastemade plans to do the same for food.

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. Read more

We’ve already discussed how short-form featured videos are changing the landscape of journalism by incorporating virality, but that does not mean that the longform feature video is slowly becoming left in the dust. In fact, many documentary companies are producing shareable, longer form feature videos that are pushing the boundaries of storytelling in the digital era.

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:

Read more

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