AP Will Roll Out Online Video Network
I was in Augusta, Georgia today as a presenter at a daylong workshop on multimedia sponsored by the Georgia Associated Press Association. Lots of talk of vlogs, moblogs, podcasts and audience involvement via citizen media . There was real progress being made at several Georgia newspapers and interest at the rest.
Only one argument over: But is it journalism? The Augusta Chronicle has a feature called Spotted, where they recruit volunteers from high schoolers to folks in their 50s to shoot events for them. Then they post the photos. One month they had more than a million page views. The idea is to get lots of photos of folks at the events.
So the audience apparently loves it, but the Augusta Chronicle’s photography department, which has nothing to do with it, except giving some shooting tips, isn’t too happy about all these amateur shooters being mistaken for staff photographers.
I thought the photography department should take it over and use it to their advantage, but two guys I talked with said it isn’t journalism. And they are right, it isn’t journalism, and they are also right that the audience doesn’t make the distinction. So what do they do about that? Get mad? That’s the aggressive/defensive stance.
The whole thrust of my talk was that newsrooms have to get past that, they have to figure out how to bring the audience on board without compromising their own ethical and professional standards. Maybe these workshops will help to make that happen.
The AP has already started to launch its own Online Video Network and will do a full roll out soon. They will be rolling out about 40 video stories a day, most with an ad tacked on in the front with revenue sharing for their member newspapers depending on views. About half will be domestic stories and about half international. There will be hard news, business, celebrity and the offbeat.
Eventually local papers will be able to upload their own videos, some of which will get national play and the paper then gets a share of the revenues the video generates.
Tags: Newspapers, journalism, citizen journalism, photo journalism
