Video is an essential tool for online journalism today. But rather than make a separate TV section, news sites should integrate videos as part of the relevant content, says Stephen Dunn, head of technology strategy at The Guardian. In this interview from Beet.TV he explains how guardian.co.uk uses video on its site.

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As most news sites, guardian.co.uk has a section for multimedia.  But Stephen Dunn argues that his is not the most important area to display videos. Rather videos should be integrated with relevant content, for instance as part of articles.

I think he is right, and to me it seems that more and more news sites are following this approach in their journalism. In fact context is king for a quality news site, I believe. Rather than splitting up the content according to how it was produced, sites should integrate it to make as rich user experience as possible.

With all the speculation about the coming Apple Tablet:  What Apple really is looking for is a new revenue stream from the publishing industry. That is the claim of Ben Kunz in this interesting video.

Apple Tablet Saves the World from Ben Kunz on Vimeo.

Ben Kunz is an expert on internet advertising trends and director of strategic planning at Mediassociates.  (Twitter: @benkunz).

I came across this interesting video on the advertising blog Thought Gadgets. It is worth looking through – and he makes some valid points about possible consequences for both the publishing and advertising industry.

For publishers the most interesting aspect of the tablet will not be the technological possibilities built into the tablet, but what type of business model Apple will present for media content. Will it be subscription based or will the products be disaggregated with the single piece of article being the core unit for sale?  How much of the revenue stream will be given to the publishers?

Ben Kunz’ thinks a major interest of Apple in launching the tablet will be to tap into the revenue streams of publishers, just like Apple did in the music industry with iPod and iPhone.

But he also points out how mobile advertising never has taken off. Every year experts have lowered their predictions for mobile advertising revenues. The reason, according to Kunz, is that mobile advertising is not working, one of the reasons being the small screens. He thinks Apple’s Tablet will create a new opportunity for mobile advertising to take off.

What do you think?

Almost all Norwegians followed today’s ceremony in which US president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize. Here are snapshots of how 5 of the local news sites covered the live event.

For a small country like Norway (4,5 million people) a visit by the president of the USA is a huge news story in itself. Add to that the controversy around awarding Barack Obama the Nobel peace prize, and you have one of the biggest events of the year.

All major news sites thus have been planning for weeks how they will win users on this big news day, especially during the peace prize ceremony itself. This is a type of event you would expect editors to try to be innovative in their journalism online.

Here are live snapshots of how the five biggest news sites covered the peace price ceremony as it was taking place. It is not an attempt to analysis the total coverage. Naturally all of the sites had comprehensive coverage in addition to what I show you.

It is the first time I try to blog in this format, so please apologize if not everything is top quality.

Here are the 5 news sites mentioned in the report:

Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama

• VG.no: This news site, run by the newspaper VG, is by far the biggest news site in Norway. With 3,5 million unique visitors every week, it is also one of the biggest newssites on a global basis. Live feed. Main story of ceremony
• Dagbladet.no: The tabloid newspaper is struggling for survival, but the web site has been doing quite well. About 2,2 million unique visitors per week. Live studio.
• Aftenposten.no:  Run by Norway’s leading quality newspaper. About 1,1 million unique visitors weekly. (Disclaimer: I work for Aftenposten, but have not been involved in planning the peace prize coverage)
• NRK.no:  The web site of Norway’s state-owned broadcasting corporation. Has achieved significant growth in traffic during the last year, especially due to its popular weather site Yr.no. Currently around 1,8 million unique visitors weekly.
• TV2.no: The web site of Norway’s largest commercial television station. Around 1 million unique visitors weekly. Live page.

As you will se from the video blog many of the news sites used the service of Coveritlive to add speed and interactivity to their coverage.

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Just a note at the end: This blog post was created using the Procaster tool of Livestream. It is an experiment for me. Please let me know what you think.

There is a revolution going on, both with regard to video content and the use of smart phones. Soon video content  will be created for small screens first and then later adjusted for bigger formats, predits Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch in this video interview.

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I found this interview from Beet.TV very interesting.  Adobe‘s CTO Kevin Lynch gives his views about where video content is moving, particularly with regard to the fact that smart phones sales is outpacing PC sales.

Lynch points out that video content is exploding. Currently producers are struggling to find efficient ways to present the content on all kinds of platforms and in different formats. Adobe’s goal is to create a platform which work across all types of screens, says Lynch.

• Mobile internet usage will be biger than most people think
• Where half the population use Facebook every week

Increasingly videos are being consumed on smart phones. Kevin Lynch predicts that we soon will see that video producers prepare their content for the small formats first. This is a total reversal of how it normally has been done so far. Typically producers think about larger formats first and then try to make it work on small screens. We will now see the opposite process more and more often as smart phones is developing into a major platform for videos.

- That is where more and more of the connetiveness is going and more people are engaging with content, Lynch says in the interview.

So you have a small news site, but no technical resources to do all the exciting web 2.0 stuff? Here are five great tools any news site can use to add interactivity to your content. And I promise: No programming required!

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Opportunities are endless in modern journalism. If  you have the resources, that is. Take The New York Times, for instance, with 13 full-time staffers in the R & D Lab alone. Then it should be no problem adding all kinds of features, should it?

That may be so. However, today there are numerous tools which help web masters add exciting functionalities. And many of the don’t even require a single line of code. All you need to learn is to “embed”. It is so simple that any journalist can do it  (and that means simple, folks!)

I have mentioned a couple of these before. But here are five tools which can give you great results with small resources.

1. UMapper: Make interesting and engaging maps

Maps are engaging and visually attractive. But how to make them? There are numerous tools for this, some of them mentioned in this blog post from 10.000 Words (a blog I recommend). In my opinion UMapper is one of the best of these services. You can make maps very simply, yet they give meaningful information. Spend a couple of hours and you have a map with great journalistic potential. After you are done you just embed it into your article page.

Please note the GeoGame option, in which you can make a geography trivia game in a very short time. You may for instance check out the game I made for my other site, Asia Observer (find it on the bottom of the front page).  This one took less than one hour to make.

Geography quizes like this can prove very popular, and it is very easy to make your own local version. Also note the top score option, which allows you to run competitions.

Here is an example of how a geography quiz made by this tool might look:

2. Twitter – embed a search feed

Twitter is a great tool for journalism, and I have earlier described four different ways of using Twitter for news rooms.

Recently Twitter added some simple, but great, widgets to its service. For instance you will see my own Twitter feed in the right column of all pages of BetaTales using this widget.

When big news break Twitter users will often gather around a specific hashtag. The result is a Twitter feed with a lot of activity. Often it might be useful to include this Twitter feed in your articles. And it is actually very simple to do.  Just go to Twitter’s widget page and follow the instructions for a search widget. In a few minutes you will have a real-time Twitter feed included on your site, aggregating all the public engagement around your topic as a useful and engaging supplement to your own editorial content. In some cases you may want to ask your readers to use a specific hashtag.

3. Flickr – for including photos from users

For user photos and videos you can either have them uploaded directly to your own site or use external services like Flickr.com and Youtube.com.

Having readers upload to your own site usually takes a lot of work on your part, either because you have to develop the functionalities to do so or because you need to manually go through hundreds of mails with photo attachments. A much easier way is to use external sites and then embed it into your own site.

I love the photo sharing service Flickr. It is extremely easy to upload and share photos. And once you and others have shared them, it is quick to embed the results into a normal news page.

For a small news site the easiest is to start your own group on Flickr. Then invite users to contribute to the photo group. Flickr allows you to set your own conditions for joining the group, such as giving you the right to republish any photos that are posted there.

Photos from the group can then be republished on your own site, for instance as a slideshow. Flickr even has some great tools for doing this.  Check the bottom of this page on my site Asia Observer for an example. Alternatively you can pick the best photos manually and then publish them in an article on your site. Either way you get away with all the technical trouble with setting up a system of photo uploads and instead let Flickr worry about this.

You can do exactly the same with Youtube and many other sites.

4. IntenseDebate – for a more attractive commenting

Don’t you even have a way users can comment on the great article you write? Don’t worry – there are solutions. One of them is Intense Debate – a ready-made system for article commenting and the one we use here on BetaTales.  Intense Debate gives you a lot of functionalities out of the box, such as comment-threading and tools for moderation, and it is very easy to install.

A similar and much used product, which I have no experience with myself, is Disqus.

5. Qik – live video

So you realize you must have some video on your site, but have no idea where to start? Check out Qik.com. It is a video service connected to your mobile phone. Once you have it installed on your mobile, videos can be streamed live on the web and you can easily embed them into an article, like what I have done in the example below.

Qik works best with short videos or for live streaming. Install it on your reporters’ mobile phones and they are ready to stream live video from any news event in just a few seconds. It doesn’t get much easier.

I could have mentioned many other tools – and will later. In the meantime: Why don’t you share the tools you use yourself on your site? What are your best suggestions for simple tools to add interactivity on small sites without needing to ask programmers for help?

Please share!

Barack Obama brings the presidency into the online world. His weekly addresses to the nation will no longer only be broadcast on radio, but also as a video message on YouTube and other social communities.
Here is the first YouTube addresss of a president to be, recorded on November 15th, 2008:

Many expressions are used to describe the online policy of the new president, such as “Fireside Chat 2.0″ and “the YouTube president”.

Barack Obama’s channel on YouTube – with almost 2000 videos uploaded -is already extremely popular – and the first weekly address (above) had been viewed almost 500.000 times only a day after it was published. It certainly is an indication that more people will be watching the president’s speeches than ever before, as ReadWriteWeb points out.

An interesting detail: The option for users to comment on the weekly address video has been disabled on the YouTube video.  Is it an indication of the huge challenges the new presidents office will have in managing the online presence?

In any case – distributing the weekly address on YouTube certainly is a strong symbol of change, Mr. Obama’s main buzz word.

Any idiot can run a video camera, claims video visionary Michael Rusenblum.  Forget about expensive equipment and long training. It is easy. Just do it.

That was his message to the Society of Editors annual conference as he with great enthusiasm tried to explain to the newspaper editors how they had no time to loose. His presentation is worth watching, although the quality of the video contradicts his message that making video is just so easy.

Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.

Michael Rusenblum used to be a CBS news producer, but decided to become a video journalist instead. Since then he has trained video journalists in a number of big media companies, including BBC and Voice of America.

- The cost of making video is close to zero, Rusenblum claims. The technology is there. Everyone can do it.

So why don’t the newspapers send out all their reporters with a video camera then?

Rusenblum’s response: Because nobody really wants a new invention! It messes up our business!

This is his message to the editors: You are not in the newspaper business! You are in the business of going out into the communities and find the stories and change the advertisers for those eyeballs!

I think it is not a bad idea to spend few minutes listening to him, although the video is not that hight quality.   Here is part 2:

Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 pt2 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.