The topline summary suggests that pay-for-view news is going to be a tough sell as 79% of users say they would no longer access a Web site that charges them. 

However, the study also found that about 8% of people have already paid for newspaper content at some point and more than 40% say they would consider paying.  For radio news/talk, about a quarter of those surveyed say they might pay for the privilege of listening. 

Though the survey did not ask specifically about TV news, about 50% of people said they would consider paying to see “professionally produced video” (and yes, there was a separate category for theatrical movies).

But here’s the rub — the survey also indicates that “71% of global consumers say that if have to pay for online content it must be considerably better than what is currently available for free.”

The new report from Nielsen surveyed 27,000 consumers from 52 countries.

We wanted to speak to how speed and space limitations can compromise accuracy and fairness. We wanted to speak to the frictions that occur when journalists “friend” people on Facebook. We wanted to say something about how journalists are always journalists, even when they are off the clock. We also thought it was important to speak to how journalists sometimes say or post things online that they would not say or show on the air.

Additionally, we wanted to say loudly that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other such sites have a legitimate place in the distribution and collection of news and information, but that like any tools, they should be used carefully.

In addition to all that Tompkins mentions, one of the guidelines that strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the suggestion that news organizations correct their social media mistakes.  As someone who turns to Twitter and other social media sites during breaking news, I can tell you that many news organizations do report inaccuracies, but few seem to own up to it.  It seems to me that preserving journalistic integrity is critical to preserving journalism’s future — and that every station ought to be developing a social media corrections policy.  How about you?

It was very simple, I set up an account, had someone hold their iPhone up during the show, and voila! We were streaming. I teased viewers and friends via Facebook and Twitter, telling them to tune into our behind-the-scenes broadcast of the 5 o’clock news.

The stream was very casual, informal and candid. There were several viewers who tuned in and were able to comment during the show. We started streaming from right before show time, explaining to viewers what we were doing, introducing them to production assistants and just talking casually about what to expect. We streamed throughout the first block of the show, and then commercial breaks, where I interacted with viewers via a chat-like setting on LiveStream. We even had a few random people from different countries!

It was a simple and easy way to let the viewers in on a little piece of the news that they don’t normally get…the long-time weather man who everyone in our market adores, what the studio really looks like, and how it all works.

Burdine went on to say that the station does plan to do it again, but “not too much.”

And that raises the big question: How much IS too much?

Certainly there seems to be nothing wrong with taking viewers behind the scenes of a newscast. And people who spend a lot of time in the “social media space” see absolutely nothing wrong with reporters sharing via Facebook or Twitter details of visits to the Wendy’s drive through or trying to get cat hair off their clothes, but sometimes I wonder how all this changes our notions of journalism?

Is the end result a “personality-driven press” where everyone is vying to win a popularity contest with the audience? Will journalists be known more by their private lives than by their publications?

Perhaps not, but you can follow Nikki Burdine’s day today on Twitter: @NikkiBurdine.

“Local TV news in general is infamous for a condition similar to attention deficit disorder, characterized by stories that are reactive in nature, and that are here, then gone,” Carr said.

Carr, who is working for the second time at KGUN in Tuscon, Ariz., says his station is taking a very different approach.  Case in point, a story they’ve been following for more than five months involving the firing of a local superintendent.

The head of the school board refused to give a reason for the firing and KGUN refused to let the story rest.  They’ve recently published Douglas Stonewalling Day 129 on the station’s Web site.

“This series is an example of a station with modest resources (66th largest TV market) attempting to distinguish itself (in other words, get away from a slavish devotion to event-driven stories such as crime) through enterprise reporting, commitment to follow-ups, Web-exclusive content and a particular style and philosophy of journalism,” Carr said.

So, how is KGUN doing it?  They’ve been cross-training photojournalists to report and reporters to shoot, just like many other stations, but Carr is also trying to produce more enterprise for the newscasts and more exclusive Web content in a couple of innovative ways.

“We’ve trained our assignment editors to be Web contributors.   They are driving the vast majority of our Web content in fact,” Carr said.   “We have one assignment editor, a former newspaper reporter, who is a slightly different model.   On the weekend, she runs the desk and contributes Web content as outlined above.   During the week she organizes viewer tips, does research and helps coordinate the efforts of our enterprise reporting team.  But last week she researched, did an interview for, wrote and posted her first Web-exclusive story, exactly as if she were writing an article for the morning newspaper.”

Carr says the station is using its radio partner to develop Web stories, too.

“This week we hired a somewhat experimental position, a journalist who will write and present radio newscasts for one of our co-owned radio partners within the building (104.1 “The Truth”) and also help drive content to the TV station Web site.”

Carr says the innovation has to be ongoing.

“It’s all a metamorphosis; some areas of the newsroom are progressing more quickly than others but there are not many people who won’t be touched by some aspect of it,” Carr said.

“Especially if you’re working in journalistic video right now, the doors are kind of open,” Farrell said.  “It’s unlike the nightly news where there is sort of a rigid model that works – a stand up, b-roll, interview – it’s very formulaic.  I think what we do at the Times is often a miniature documentary.”

For one of his pieces, Old Man of the Mountains, Farrell flew to Washington state, collected archival footage and created a piece that comes close to the five minute mark.  But Farrell says video online does not have to be long-form to be effective.

“Sometimes just a snippet of sound from an interview can enrich the audience’s knowledge of whatever the subject is,” Farrell said.

He sees many newspapers really changing their attitudes about multimedia.

“I think newspapers are starting now to think of their readers as an audience,” Farrell said.  “They’re no longer just consumers of newspapers.  The paper is no longer just a paper; they’re a news organization with audio slide shows, photographs, video, interactive graphics.”

Farrell says those changing attitudes have created an environment for experimentation.  For example, he likes the way that stills and video can be combined to capitalize on the strengths of each.

“There’s nothing like looking at a person and hearing them tell you their own story,” Farrell said about video.  “It’s also important to see them in their place, sometimes a still photo does that better than video, so it can work well to meld the two.”

Farrell says some of the most exciting things he sees going on with video involve interactive graphics.  He described a project for which the Times created “almost a searchable PDF,  posted alongside a video.”  In the case of a presidential debate, Farrell says you could search the word “freedom,” for example, and the word would be highlighted in the text and at the same time, you would be linked to the exact places in the video where the candidate mentioned the word.

“Then there’s another layer which is analysis of the debate by seasoned political reporters,”  Farrell said.  “So beyond the technology is this melding of years of political knowledge mashed up with exciting use of technology, but at the end of the day, it is good storytelling.”

Later this week Advancing the Story will post more links to Farrell’s work and tips for how to tell good video stories.

Now, according to the Florida News Center, we  have a GM and news director at WPMI in Mobile, Ala. who have been suspended for a week without pay following an inadvertent tweet on the station’s electronic billboard, which features the anchor team and a Twitter feed from the station.

There may be more to this billboard story than we realize, but the incident reinforces a couple of important points:

1.  News organizations are going to make mistakes when using new technologies (think gyro cams on news helicopters and some of the privacy issues raised with those).

2. Because the technology is new, those mistakes will be magnified by the critics and used by them as evidence that the journalists involved are being reckless.

Knowing this, newsrooms and individual journalists would be wise to go above and beyond their usual verification and pre-publication checks.  Continuing to educate themselves on both the potential benefits and drawbacks of these new tools is important, too.

According to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.

Also interesting, Nielsen says the amount of time social media users are spending on video is up 98% year-to-year.  But have TV newsrooms taken notice?  One of the most popular local TV news pages I’ve seen on Facebook is that of WPTV in West Palm Beach, Florida.  With it’s 5,600+ fans, it regularly features meaty posts and good community-building interaction.  But a recent check of the page found just one video post.  Even the links back to the station’s Web site seemed to favor slideshows (for more hits?) and text stories.

It may be that TV newsrooms are still unsure about the value of sharing their video freely.  (For more thoughts on this topic, read our previous post Online video for TV journalists.)  It seems to me, though, that this is another area of opportunity for news organizations to disseminate content to expanded audiences.

Andrew Fitzgerald oversees the online news efforts for Current TV. His view on video for the Web was echoed by the AP’s Kevin Roach and YouTube’s Olivia Ma. All three took part in RTDNA’s “Video-Free-For-All” webinar.

One of the fundamentals expressed is that the Web is changing audience expectations for video online or on the air. These days users and viewers seem to be more accepting of lower quality video, if it’s truly compelling. As one speaker put it, “It comes down to what camera you have in your hand at the time the news is happening.”

Case in point is the video shot by a bystander as demonstrators set up a barricade in Iran back in June.

Roach, who runs all U.S. based news operations for the AP, says they’ve found tremendous value in posting raw video online and says there’s no more waiting for the next newscast to get great video published.

“It’s really simple, first wins,” Roach said.

Camera quality

The panelists also reinforced the notion that inexpensive cameras are a major boon to news organizations, referring to $200 dollar Flip cams as “an insurance policy.”

Roach told the story of a “text-only” AP reporter who had the presence of mind to stop at a Radio Shack to buy a Flip camera on her way to track down South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford.

“Having a Flip cam in every reporter’s hands is not a bad idea,” Roach said. “And while you’re it, the GM and every engineer should have them, too.”

Roach says that if the subject matter is strong enough and you have “the only shot that exists, it’s acceptable.”

Cameras mentioned include:

• Flip camera      $150-$250
• Canon HV30    $1,000
• Sony Z1U           $3,500
• Sony EX1           $7,000

Sharing video

The speakers also questioned the wisdom of news organizations that refuse to share their video. 

“Right now, the AP video player is on 2,000 sites and that number continues to grow.  It’s not about getting people to your Web site,  it’s about discovery,” Roach said.  “A good chunk of our video is on YouTube.  We get more than 50 million streams a month, and the ads go with it.  Even if the video is streamed on another site, AP gets the ad revenue.”

News manager for YouTube, Olivia Ma, said local newsrooms that share their video on YouTube are also reaching audiences they ”might not otherwise have access to.”

In addition, Ma described a new service called YouTube Direct.  According to Ma, the service will provide local newsrooms an easy way to create assignments and solicit content from users.  No launch date was mentioned, but it sounds like something worth checking out.

The results are often impressive, like this searchable database of US war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Web producer Josh Hatch says the goal was to give users a statistical view of the wars’ costs, but also a personal view. “People tend to want to find stuff that’s sort of about them,” he says. So the interactive lets users sort the casualty list by gender, race, age, hometown and other demographic information to find out if anyone who died is “kind of like me.”

A project like this will take a couple of months to build, so the team tries to choose its topics wisely. They look for topics with a “long tail” that will keep producing page views over time, Czarniak says. The goal is to build a graphic once and update it by adding fresh data.

Simpler multimedia graphics can be produced by almost anyone at USA Today, using templates the design team has created. “It democratizes the ability of people to participate,” says Czarniak, and it’s had the unexpected benefit of reducing errors. Because the templates allow users to save a draft version of an interactive, the copy desk can review it before it’s published online.

Hatch compares his job as multimedia producer to that of a utility infielder in baseball. “I can do a lot of things,” he says, “but there’s always someone on staff who can do it better.” So Hatch welcomes the opportunity to work with a photojournalist, as he did on this story, with both of them shooting some of the video:

Hatch began his journalism career as a newspaper reporter and eventually found his way to Web producing. Meeting with a group of journalists from around the world at USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va., last week, Hatch described his career path and talked about the skills journalists need in today’s multimedia newsrooms:

“Combining journalism and technology ensures that I’m always learning and usually having fun,” Hatch says. “Who could ask for more?”

Sourced from: NewsLab

The Online News Association convention in San Francisco included a session titled, “Design Solutions from News Experts.” While panelists from the New York Times revealed a glimpse into new features coming to the newspaper’s Web site, Adaptive Path president Jesse James Garrett offered practical advice from his company’s work on Web redesigns for CNN, PBS and NPR. During the session, one person tweeted that Garrett’s speech got him thinking of a news site as something like a “dashboard” and less like a “publication.”

Jesse James Garrett’s “12 Things I’ve Learned about Online News”

1. Know who you are.
Don’t try to be all things to all people; talk to your users. NPR believed its Web site was a place for breaking news but research showed its users use it for analysis after going other places for the basics. Focus your resources on what your users want from you. Focus on your strengths.

2. Be in the Web, not on the Web.
The Web is not the delivery channel for your product. Your product is part of the Web itself. It adds to the Web.

3. The Web is not the world.
Don’t approach your site as if it is the only source for users. Recognize the context. There are other sources of information.

4. Understand what people do with news, why people consume news.
Some people want to add to their knowledge, others want application. Some people want news in order to share it (for them it is a social engagement, a way of connecting to others). Recognizing the different uses for news is critical for meeting your audiences need. People consume news to absorb, apply, share, enjoy. Design and strategy must work around this knowledge.

5. Support different modes of engagement.
Design solutions that support scanning needs as well as deep dive needs.

6. Every page is the home page.
The main page is not the master entry point through which users will experience your site. Each page is a starting point, so each page must show the depth and range of coverage your site offers. If you are about investigative reporting or local news, etc. show it on each page.

7. Navigation is dead;  long live navigation.
People rarely use global navigation unless they are task-switching. What gets used is navigation that is textually relevant. Tailor links to drive traffic to other parts of the site.  What gets used more is navigation that is contextually relevant, so leverage what you can tell readers.

8. Put the “multi” in multimedia.
Use a variety of ways to tell stories: video, audio, etc. more than just offering blobs of text.

9. Headlines should tempt, not tease.
Make people want to know what’s on the other side of the link not just wonder what the story is about. Headlines should be straightforward, making a promise, not baffling readers because they are scanning for specific facts.

10. Think outside the blob.
Don’t just think multimedia, structure your data. Offer tools that let readers navigate through the data easily so they can consume and work with the news rather than creating tools that are simply delivery vehicles for the news.

11. It’s an application not a publication.
Create tools that allow people to work with the news, not just read the news. Interactivity is not a coat of paint. Elements need to add depth, understanding, deliver genuine value. It must deliver insight into the story that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

12. Try things out, throw things out.
Constantly evolve rather than falling into a few set patterns.