Thursday, December 13, 2007, 15:55
Section: Journalism
In a news story Friday (�Spectrum holds Condom Olympics to educate on safe sex,� page 3), it was incorrectly stated due to a reporting error that health and wellness educator Beth Grampetro and Tim Hegan, an ORL area director, said Fruit Roll-Ups are adequate protection against STDs. No health officials said or advocated this use at the Condom Olympics. The Daily Free Press apologizes for the confusion
Wednesday, December 12, 2007, 18:59
Section: Journalism
Once again, the new issue of the American Journalism Review seems to be talking specifically about the High Desert newspapers. Two articles in particular jump out:
Predictions about where the Internet is headed are, of course, hazardous. A dozen or so years after it began to become a fixture in American life, the Internet is still in a formative stage, subject to periodic earthquakes and lightning strikes. Google didn’t exist a decade ago. Five years ago, no one had heard of MySpace. Facebook is just four years old, and YouTube is not quite three. Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. compares the current state of the Internet to television in the age of “Howdy Doody.”
Even so, a few dark clouds are starting to form in the sunny vista. Consider a few distant rumbles of thunder:
–After years of robust increases, the online newspaper audience seems to have all but stopped growing. The number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites was almost flat – up just 2.3 percent – between August 2006 and August 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The total number of pages viewed by this audience has plateaued, growing just 1.8 percent last year.
–Newspaper Web sites are attracting lots of visitors, but aren’t keeping them around for long. The typical visitor to nytimes.com, which attracts more than 10 percent of the entire newspaper industry’s traffic online, spent an average of just 34 minutes and 53 seconds browsing its richly detailed offerings in October. That’s 34 minutes and 53 seconds per month, or about 68 seconds per day online. Slim as that is, it’s actually about three times longer than the average of the next nine largest newspaper sites. And it’s less than half as long as visitors spent on the Web’s leading sites, such as those run by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Many news visitors – call them the “hard-core” – linger longer online, but they’re a minority. Greg Harmon, director of Belden Interactive, a San Francisco-based newspaper research firm, estimates that as many as 60 percent of online newspaper visitors are “fly-bys,” people who use the site briefly and irregularly. “Everyone has the same problem,” says Jim Brady, editor of washingtonpost.com. The news industry’s continuing challenge, Brady says, is to turn “visitors into residents.”
–As competition for visitors grows, news sites are rapidly segmenting into winners and losers. In a yearlong study of 160 news-based Web sites (everything from usatoday.com to technorati.com), Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard University found a kind of two-tier news system developing: Traffic is still increasing at sites of well-known national brands (the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, etc.), but it is falling, sometimes sharply, at mid-size and smaller newspaper sites.
The news may be the primary product, but the way the news is served online needs to be updated, too, says Mark Potts, a Web-news entrepreneur and consultant. He says newspaper-run sites are falling behind the rest of the industry in their use of technology. “For the most part, once you get past the bigger papers, newspapers are not up to date” online, he says. “They’ve got some video, a podcast, some blogs, yes, but mostly…they’re just pasting the newspaper up on the screen. That was barely OK five years ago.” Potts ticks off the tools that news sites usually lack: social networking applications, database-search functions, mapping, simplified mobile-device delivery technology, services that let readers interact with one another, etc. His one-word description for the state of newspapers online: “Stodgy.”
None of this could have happened just a few years back. In the first place, newspapers weren’t willing to pay for $40,000 cameras and costly editing stations like the TV people use. Now, lower-priced digital video cameras and editing software have arrived. A Sony CX7 camera that shoots in high definition can be had for $700 or less. Spend another $300 for a mic and a tripod and you’re in business. If you can’t afford that, Chet Rhodes says he has picked up used but serviceable cameras on eBay for $129 each.
Some people argue that Internet video, which is shown mainly in small boxes on small monitors, can get by with fewer pixels and a less polished appearance than TV visuals. Some think a less smooth quality actually looks more “real” online. “It’s overstatement to say the rougher the better,” says the Tampa Tribune’s Janet Coats, “but there is a certain veracity if you haven’t spent so much time making it refined.” (That Washington Post piece about the violinist in the subway is an example. It was shot surreptitiously, with a camera that was duct-taped to a ceiling; it looks more like police surveillance than professional videography, but it gets the job done.)
Video requires roughly 10 times more work on an assignment as [still photography] and then 100 times more work as you’re editing it. Imagine filling a 16-page special section with a hundred pictures–out of a routine city hall meeting assignment. That’s shooting video. You have to shoot every detail in the room, every angle, every expression–just to get a few seconds of video to put on top of the few seconds of audio that you’ve edited down from two hours of tape.
Two years earlier, on assignment in Iraq, he had carried two still cameras and one video camera. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his still pictures. The videos he edited into a documentary called “War Stories,” which aired on WFAA-TV in Dallas. It won the Edward R. Murrow Award and a National Headliner Award. It was a very good year for Leeson.
By the time Hurricane Katrina came along, Leeson knew firsthand the inconvenience of trying to shoot in both formats simultaneously, but he also was aware of something else–that with a high definition camcorder it is possible to extract or “grab” individual frames from the video. These cameras shoot 30 frames per second, which is akin to having 30 still photos per second. It’s like an extremely fast motor drive. So before heading off to cover Katrina, he asked for one of those HD cameras. It was delivered to his house on a Saturday, and the first thing he did was try for a frame grab.
“I got the camera, popped the tape in and went and found my dog,” he says. “I shot a video of the dog, and I pulled a frame grab off of it. I uploaded it within minutes and sent it to the news-paper as a test, transmitting it just as I would be doing from Katrina, and the results were astonishing.” The picture’s quality was good enough for a four- or five-column photo on a news page.
So when Leeson headed for Louisiana, all he used was the video camera. Every picture he sent back to the paper for print publication was a frame grab.
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