Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis (Part 2)

Mulvany says his newspaper is "in the midst of a massive redesign of our site" and that maybe people will get more serious about monetization once the redesign is completed. Like Gitner, he says, "I’m not connected to that part of the business," referring to advertising. "I’m not sure where this is going," he continues. "We’ve been a little slow on the advertising on our website, but it’s picking up. We’ve got ads associated with our Video Journal, but I’m not sure whether they are making money on them or not."

Pre-roll ads have become the primary way of monetizing video clips on most newspaper websites, but Mulvany isn’t sure they are the best way. "I hate pre-roll but that’s what the big newspapers are doing and they’ve got a captive audience and they’re making money with it," he says. But there at The Spokesman-Review, "There’s no talk yet about doing pre-roll because everybody hates it. But what else is there? I’m not really sure yet about where this is going. What can you do with it?"

But Mulvany points out that even though his videos are not making money directly from pre-rolls, they are being supported by general site banner ads and embedded ads. "You can package ads around your video content. We used to do everything in QuickTime, but now that we’re using Flash, we can embed video right in a page. So you can have an ad adjacent to the video window. But doing pre-rolls, that requires investment. Someone has to produce the video ads. You have to hire producers, and that’s financially risky."

Mulvany says that he has put up a few of his videos on iTunes but without pre-rolls, so the paper isn’t making any money from them. "To me it’s still just this kind of goat trail out there in terms of trying to find ways to make money. Revenue won’t come until the advertisers find a way to make money off of it. Today the answer is pre-roll. Maybe the audience is going to warm to that, but I sure won’t. It’s awful."

With the bigger newspapers, the situation seems to be more upbeat, and there seems to be no hesitation about using pre-rolls.

"A lot of newspapers have advertisements on their websites, so they are obviously bringing in money, but it’s hard to say how it works out for their bottom line," says Glaser. "Some are making money with video or they wouldn’t be doing it. If you look at the bigger sites like The New York Times or The Washington Post, they have tons of video. And they have pre-roll ads and they are making money. But I don’t know what their costs are, and I don’t think they would even tell you. They don’t break those things out; they’ve even stopped breaking out their digital versus print revenue."

While newspapers may not yet be making tons of money from their online videos, they may not need to, says Glaser. "Video production is inherently more expensive than audio production or print, when it comes to online. That being said, the costs of doing video are coming down. And depending on how professional your production is, you can do it relatively cheap. So making back that money may not be that difficult."

It was the low entry-level cost of easy-to-use software and hardware for multimedia production that really got the ball rolling for online video at The Spokesman-Review, says Mulvany. "When I first started compressing my videos I used QuickTime Pro, and it worked great for $29," says Mulvany. "And for me that was the ‘eureka’ moment. I shot a video and figured out how to compress it in about 15 minutes, and then I took it to our online people and said, ‘Here you go.’ And 15 minutes later our first video was up online. And I was, like, ‘Wow!’"

Even deep-pocketed media organizations like Dow Jones are appreciating the low cost of digital video production. "In terms of techniques, what used to take ten people now takes one person. And what used to cost $50,000 worth of equipment now costs $2,000," says Leverone. And the equipment is not that difficult to learn how to use. "I tell the reporters around here that they owe it to themselves to start learning how to use a video camera. I mean, I have a family with two children, so I know how to work a video camera. There’s not that much difference from videoing my kids on the beach and videoing a CEO," [Needless to say, we know plenty of professional video producers who’d disagree.—Ed.]

Are Newspapers Competing with TV?
Robert Leverone works for a very big newspaper—The Wall Street Journal. When asked if he thinks broadcasters are starting to feel threatened by newspaper-generated video news, he answered emphatically, "Yes."

Internet-based video news offers a distinct advantage over scheduled broadcast news, says Leverone. "A lot of people talk about news on demand, but I call it instant gratification. People want to click on something and see it right away. When they search for something, they want to get it immediately. If you’re a conventional broadcaster, you want people to come to your channel on your schedule—and this is the difference between TV and online video."

Can newspapers compete with television? You bet they can, says Leverone, because they can be more flexible, efficient, localized, and focused. As an example of flexibility putting a journalist in the right place at the right time, Leverone points to Kara Swisher, co-editor of Dow Jones’ All Things Digital website. Swisher recently did an interview at Lucasfilm, and she took a small digital camera into the building, filming as she went. Her resulting video got a lot of attention from Star Wars fans. "Look, ABC television could have done that, and it would have looked really nice," says Leverone. "But Kara did it and the camera was a little shaky—but you know what, we did it, and it’s out there. We can’t wait around for ABC to come up with the idea. It’s out there."

Do the local TV stations feel threatened by Spokesman-Review videos? "Not yet," says Mulvany, "but there’s a trend here. All three of the local TV stations here in Spokane have ramped up their websites. They are doing video on demand, but what they are doing is shovelware. They are just repurposing video that was on TV, and most of it is not very compelling. And it’s all driven by on-air talent. What we are doing differently is we are allowing our subjects to tell the story. And as we improve our storytelling and our volume, they are going to get nervous. They are not cutting their videographers free to do new online-only stories. We can compete with TV. Look, when it gets to the point that the local newspapers have 50 reporters out there and they all have the ability to do video storytelling and do it well, TV stations will be shaking in their boots."

Are Newspapers Merely Cloning TV?
Both Mulvany and Gitner reject the idea that newspapers are simply cloning television news. Gitner says his newspaper’s video program, TimesCast, is different from TV news. "It comes out every day at 3:30 and there’s a different type of audience for it. We’re not sure yet what the ideal audience for it is. We’re trying to figure that out," says Gitner. "But it is a different type of news, with a different type of presentation. And for us TimesCast is an experiment. It is constantly evolving."

Mulvany sees that a lot of newspapers are "trying to be like TV," he says. "And that’s not going to work. What you want is not to be like TV. You want to be more of a storyteller. People want to see stories about people in their community, so we try to find the sort of stories that we don’t usually do in the newspaper. We try to find news stories that aren’t being told in print. Sometimes I’ll see a story that a print reporter is doing, and I’ll go out with a video camera and tell the same story in a whole different way. When you are a reporter, you are so concerned about facts and figures. But with video you can showcase emotion. So sometimes we’ll host a video story along with the same story told in print. People can get the facts and figures from the print story, then they can click on the video and hear the person and see the person and connect with the emotional part of the story. Multimedia provides an extra layer of information that you can’t get from a photo or a print story. Multimedia is a layering of media. You add another layer on top of text or a photo."

Like Mulvany, Gitner is also enamored of multimedia and the new opportunities it promises. "This is a great way for me to tell new and better stories. And our reporters are starting to realize the same thing too. It may not be what you’re used to getting from traditional video. The video may not be sequenced really well. It may be just informational. Maybe the bulk of the story will still be told in words in print, but maybe the video can be used to show the reader something different that they can’t get out of the word."

No Easy Answers
Over the next few years newspaper professionals will continue to grapple with issues created by the transition from paper to internet and from print to multimedia. It’s nothing short of a revolution in journalism, and the only thing we can say for sure is that things are changing and that newspapers will never be the same.

"It’s moving quickly," says The Wall Street Journal’s Leverone, referring to the trend. And he assures that there at Dow Jones, the adoption of streaming video is more than just the latest fad. "It’s not just a newspaper dabbling around. This is a real movement here."And big papers and small papers alike are all in this together, says The Roanoke Times’ Seth Gitner. "We are all trying to figure out where newspaper video will go and what kind of stories we can tell and what kind of stories we should tell using video on websites at newspapers."

Of course, this movement is still in its infancy, and the state of the art of multimedia on newspaper websites is still far from impressive, says The Spokesman-Review’s Mulvany. "Right now the quality of the multimedia is all over the map," he says. "But give us five years and you’ll have thousands of newspaper reporters out there who have learned the craft of video storytelling. And when you turn them loose, it’s going to be a different world out there. It’s going to be a very different landscape for newspapers."