yelvington.com

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."

Ummm... is this supposed to be new? Startribune.com had continuously updated news, staff-produced video and audio a decade ago. We had a formal protocol established for handling breaking news before we began publishing online in the pre-Web, dialup era.

Perhaps the suggestion is that now they're doing it with quality, you know, people from the newsroom.

In our first round of hiring in 1994, we picked off just about every net-literate journalist in the newsroom, people like editors Ben Welter and Dennis Buster. Our outside hires brought in two Pulitzer laureates -- Will Outlaw and Jackie Crosby. We hired Regina McCombs from KARE-TV as a videographer and producer in 1997, and I think we hired Loren Omoto from Minnesota Public Radio about a year later to beef up our ability to turn breaking stories quickly, with quality.

As for engaging with the real newsroom, Brian Peterson's extraordinary photo essay "Testing the Human Spirit" -- sadly, gone from the Web now -- was one of the first major multimedia packages created by any news organization. Combining images, sound, and words from Kurt Chandler and Kimberly Hayes Taylor, it told the story of a rural Minnesota family infected with AIDS, and it's the only thing on the Web that ever made me cry.

So there.

[For those who don't know, I moved from the world of print to the online world on April Fool's Day, 1994, as editor of "Star Tribune Online." It launched in a limited fashion later that year on a proprietary platform called Interchange, and moved to the Web in 1995.]

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.

That's why entertainment television producers and local TV broadcasters should be afraid, very afraid. Keep in mind that a lot of what they're viewing is, by traditional broadcast standards, pretty shoddy stuff both in terms of technical quality and narrative quality, yet it's pulling people away from the traditional one-way tube.

Once again, it's broadband adoption that is pushing this behavioral change.

Pew notes: "Video viewers who actively exploit the participatory features of online
video, such as rating content, posting feedback or uploading video, make
up the motivated minority of the online video audience. Young adults are
the most active participants in this realm."

My middle daughter, the one with 13,770 pictures in her photo gallery, recently began shooting videos that she posts to YouTube and then embeds in her blog. Again, the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed.

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."

For the last couple of months I've been carrying around a cheap Aiptek video camera and showing it off, describing it as "the rebar of video." That's a reference to one of the Innosight/Clayton Christensen stories about disruptive innovation. The big steel mills were brought down by mini-mills that initially could only produce low-quality rebar (reinforcement rods, typically embedded in concrete). Well, here's the rebar. Here's the entry level.

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.

Like Bradshaw, I was puzzled by a report on journalism.co.uk last week decribing how Trinity Mirror plans to "re-launch all its regional and local newspaper websites by the end of the year to refocus on interactive elements" -- because the article goes on to describe nothing but video plans for the "interactive" website.

Unless your users are producing it, "interactivity" just isn't the right word. Video is not only linear, watching video is fundamentally passive. At least print requires the consumer to take some sort of action in order to acquire each word.

Don't get me wrong; I think news sites ought to be equipping themselves to do "professional" video. I bought a $150 Chinese video camera a couple of weeks ago and I've been showing it to pretty much everybody who will look and listen. I took it to the ONA conference. I didn't shoot very much -- the place was far too noisy and lighting was poor. But I'm convinced that we're at a breakthrough point in terms of price/capability.

The real revolution will be in video produced by the people formerly known as consumers. And I think that's just getting started.

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.

Do we still need to travel? I hope we do, as I love to travel and always find that traveling abroad changes me in unexpected ways. But webcams and ubiquitous broadband are opening virtual doors that we only imagined not too long ago.

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.

Try as I might, I can't get my undies in a bunch about ShareSleuth. Cuban is using the information Carey churns up to short stocks, and Cuban has access to that information before the rest of us. He's also open about that fact.

It's not unusual for journalists to leave the news profession and work as researchers and analysts for investment companies -- Rich did that, in fact, before returning to journalism for Bloomberg. What's unusual is that Carey is publishing his findings (and inviting tips). The combination is different than the way WSJ makes money on the unequal distribution of information in society, but I won't jump to the conclusion that different is bad.

If you haven't looked at the work Carey is doing at ShareSleuth, you should. Fascinating stories, especially if you're not unlucky enough to have invested with the pondscum he's exposing.

Cuban was asked what newspapers should be doing online, and his answer -- get members of the community to video their lives and their kids' lives and upload them into a shared local space -- is basically what we're already doing with Spotted (and with great results). We do not yet support video with Spotted but it's in the pipeline and I don't think our timing is at all bad. Despite all the hoopla about YouTube, the number of people shooting video is still very small and the future growth opportunity will be great.