video

This pretty much sums up the last few years:

AJR has an overview of the mess in Minneapolis that manages to omit all the fun parts -- juicy details of the Par Ridder soap opera -- and includes this puzzling paragraph:

"One of the paper's local news editors is signing on as a Web reporter. A former local news editor is now in charge of updating breaking news stories for the site. A staff photographer has become the paper's first video reporter."

The remarkable thing about today's Pew report on U.S. online video usage is not that 57 percent of all online adults have viewed video online, but that 19 percent do so on any typical day.

Howard Weaver points to a Washpost piece on newspapers and video, and suggests a "good enough" approach:

"... we don't need to be creating 60 Minutes quality television to get in the game. In fact, you might well argue that the opposite is true. I'd love to see us using cinéma vérité video to add value to all kinds of reporting. In Fresno, they've had good success using little digital video cameras that sell for less than $200."

At the Online Journalism Association conference in Washington earlier this month, I heard several people say too many newspapers are grasping at video and because it looks like the easy path to multimedia. Now comes Paul Bradshaw in the UK, blogging the same point of view.

Mike Ward sends word from the University of Lancaster that a "Journalism Leaders Forum" Tuesday will be webcast live, and that one of the key participants, Tim Porter, will appear via weblink "from the States."

Dan Gillmor did a bit of telepresence for the University of Lancaster earlier this year from Hong Kong, as I recall. A few months ago, when I called on Dan to talk with the newsroom of the Savannah Morning News, we pulled it off with a couple of webcams, saving several thousand dollars and a lot of travel time.

Mark Cuban was a keynote speaker yesterday at the Online News Association conference in Washington. There were rumblings in advance of dissatisfaction with that selection because of ethical discomfort with his ShareSleuth.com project with former Post-Dispatch business reporter Chris Carey. There were some questions raised by Jeff Jarvis and Rich Jaroslovsky and I thought Cuban handled them fairly well.