In a wide-ranging talk, Lacroix touched on CBC’s mandate, public funding, access to information and the feud with Sun Media.

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Online video has been around for more than a decade but it has taken some time for journalists that video on the web is not the same as video on television.

Best practices of online video are evolving. It is not just about giving all your reporters a Flip cam and asking them to shot some video.

Much as with any other act of journalism, key decisions should be made about the best way to tell a story.  When it comes to video, reporters should consider:

• the message they’re trying to deliver
• the kind of story they’re trying to tell
• the audience they’re trying to reach

The medium affects the content, so it is important to consider what kind of video works best on the web. Here are some suggestions:

Experiential: This is the kind of video that takes you straight into a situation and conveys a sense of being there. It has a feel of immediacy and rawness, but this does not mean that it is shoddily shot.  This video report by CJ Chivers for the New York Times on a firefight in the Helmand province draws the viewer into the action in a visceral manner.

Direct: This refers to the video that shows the action. It may have been captured on a cellphone by someone at the scene or a journalist. The video just shows that one dramatic instance of a story. It is based on the premise that viewers will be familiar with the story and just want to see the dramatic footage they have read about. Clearly, there is a danger that divorced from context, the video may be misleading.

Speak: Here the characters of a story are speaking directly to the viewer. Even though the clip may have been edited by a journalist, there is no reporter in the video. Instead, time is given over to a character to talk to the audience, as my students did in this report on a community garden in Vancouver.

Show: In these instances, video is a powerful tool to literally show viewers what a journalist has written about. Having a piece of video may be more effectively in demonstrating the essence of the story than words alone. Here, the BBC uses a short piece of video to show viewers how a programming tools for children works.

Explain: Video can be a powerful tool to guide viewers through a process and explain the different stages. The video can be mediated by a reporter, as in this video on genetic testing by one of my students, or just involve one of the characters in a story.

For me, one of the best examples of online video was an online video by CBC, where the son of a Canadian victims of the Haiti earthquake pays tribute to his father. The broadcast version is narrated by reporter Nahlah Ayed. The online video just features the son’s recollections and has far more emotional impact than the TV video.

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She started by stressing the importance of journalism and showed dramatic images of the aftermath of the disaster in Japan.

Like for other news organisations, Japan has proved a major draw for CNN. In the 10 days since the Japan quake on March 11, CNN had:

• 75 million average page views per day on PC
• 15 million average video starts
• 1 million mobile app downloads
• 9 million average page views per day on mobile

Artley went on to talk about some of the work under way in CNN in participation, video and mobile.

One such initiative is “Open Story” that pulls together traditional reporting, user-generated content and data. Open Story is a collaborative story-telling interface, such as this one on Japan.

Another project to let users leave a video comment on stories will go live this summer. And potentially, said Artley, the videos could be used on air.

She also previewed a new video interface, with a more cinematic feel and video in HD.  CNN also wants to create a more integrated viewing experience, so that video viewing can pick up from PC screen to iPad.

On mobile, CNN gets 174 million page views a month in February and these are expected to be over 200 million in March due to Japan. On the iPhone and iPad, CNN has had 5 million downloads.

Artley compared CNN’s strategy to Pilates: strengthening the core and stretching into new areas.

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During my time covering the North Africa for the BBC in the early 1990s, I visited Libya a couple of times. One of my TV reports from the time sought to explore how Gaddafi was trying to shape Libyan society.

Though it is from December 1994, I am sharing the video as think it helps us understand what life was like under the Libyan ruler.

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10 O’Clock Live is described as “an intelligent, informative and – more importantly – funny take on the world of current affairs with a mix of debates, interviews, topical comedy, investigations and opinion pieces.”

The line-up of hosts is impressive: Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell.

The trailer is a delight, especially if you’ve worked in TV news.

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The guidelines acknowledge the importance of social media tools “for gathering information, as well as disseminating it.”

But add that “when using social media as an information-gathering tool, we apply the same standards as those for any other source of newsgathering.”

The guidelines advise against using social media to talk about unconfirmed reports:

We are consistent in our standards, no matter what the platform, in disseminating information. If we would not put the information on air or on our own website, we would not use social media to report that information.

In the section on sourcing, the CBC stresses that “our standards apply to all types of sources, including those coming via social media, when they are used for news gathering purposes.”

This suggests the CBC would not do what the BBC did during the Mumbai bombing, publishing unverified tweets alongside material from its reporters.

The section on the personal use of social media also draws from general CBC principles. It implicitly acknowledges how social media tends to blur the line between the personal and professional, advising staff to “maintain professional decorum and do nothing that can bring the Corporation into disrepute.”

Rather than forbidding staff from expressing their opinion on personal social media accounts, the guidelines advise that “the expression of personal opinions on controversial subjects or politics can undermine the credibility of CBC journalism and erode the trust of our audience.”

Some may see this as extending professional codes of conduct into personal social media spaces. One of the aspects of social media is how it combines both the personal and professional in usually publicly accessible platforms.

(Full disclosure: I am married to the director of digital media for CBC News, Rachel Nixon)

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One of the most significant improvements is the 5 megapixel camera, with the ability to shoot video in 720P HD.

The more powerful A4 processor and the new screen resolution will also make it easier and faster to edit video on the go.

At the UBC Graduate School of Journalism where I teach, we have been one of the journalism schools trialing multimedia editing apps created by Canadian company Vericorder.

The latest version, called 1st Video, offers the ability to record, edit and send video, as well as photo slideshows and audio.

Using an external mic, such as this mini mic sold by Vericorder, the quality of the sound recording was very good.

A device that you carry all the time loaded with a mobile multimedia editing suite is a powerful combination for a journalist, let alone people caught up in news events.

Oone of the main limitations has been the quality of the video that the iPhone 3GS could record. At best, it was 640 by 480 resolution.

The new camera addresses this limitation. Of course, there are still questions over the actual quality of the video and it is not going to replace professional or prosumer HD camcorders.

But it might just out of the newsroom the pocket HD cameras from Flip or Kodak, with a quality good enough for broadcast.

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CBC News editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire said the News Balance Report “adds to a considerable body of research we use to ensure our journalism continues its leading role in establishing and performing to best industry practices.”

Among the areas covered by the report is a comparison of the issues covered by TV, radio and online. The study found that broadcast ranked the top stories in a similar manner.

However, CBCNews.ca gave more coverage to crime and economic news than TV and radio, and less to political news. It also devoted more space to disaster stories and health than radio or TV. (The Haiti earthquake and H1N1 happened during the period studied.)

The study found slightly less diversity of the issues covered online than in broadcast. The five top issues account for 59% of all internet coverage, compared to 50% of radio and 48% of television coverage.

The time was measured by time for radio and television and by word count for the internet.

The current report is based on a 10-week sample of television, radio and internet news between October 26, 2009 and January 17, 2010.

(Cross-post from Newslab.ca)

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The updated guidance take account of the spread of services like Twitter which were not widespread when the advice was first published in 2008.

As well as offering specific advice on friending and retweeting, the guidelines set out the BBC’s social media principles:

• With conversations, participate online; don’t “broadcast” messages to users
• Don’t bring the BBC into disrepute
• With moderation, only police where we have to; trust our users where we don’t
• Be open and transparent in our social media dealings

These offer a broad and practical approach to social media.  They acknowledge that social media is about community and conversation, rather than about controlling content.

It is good to see an organisation like the BBC, with its roots in a patriarchal, broadcast era, talking about trusting users and entering into a dialogue with them.

Some of the specific advice to staff reflects the BBC’s concerns about editorial impartiality. For example, when it comes to retweeting, the guidelines say:

In some cases, you will need to consider the risk that “retweeting” of third party content by the BBC may appear to be an endorsement of the original author’s point of view.

Instead, the BBC advises staff to add “your own comment to the “tweet” you have selected, making it clear why you are forwarding it and where you are speaking in your own voice and where you are quoting someone else’s.”

This strikes at the heart of one of the tensions in social media for professional media organisations: Social media blurs the line between the professional and the personal.

The guidelines seek to make some distinctions here, especially when it comes to on-air talent, where personality plays a big role:

Presenters of live chat shows, music and entertainment shows may sometimes refer on air, where editorially justifiable, to their personal microblogging accounts. This is where the account is used as a personal tool by the presenter; it should not be used as a normal or official means of contacting the programme but it can be used to gather instant feedback by the presenter.

The BBC, as other media organisations, is adapting to a social media ecosystem, so it is likely that the guidelines will evolve over time. But the general principles set out are a good place to start.

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The study (PDF) into three-year project into how NPR is changing from a broadcast network to a multimedia company was outlined by Patricia Riley, University of Southern California. They are two years into this project, so this is an initial assessment of what has happened to date.

One of the challenges for the transformation was that little content was created as text.  Initially, the web-first mentality was an impossible concept for people, said Riley.

The aim for NPR was to translate the cultural understanding of “NPR-NESS” and translate it to a digital platform.

The first training sessions took seven weeks and tried to teach journalists to do everything.  But they discovered it was very hard to teach everyone to do everything at a sufficiently high quality.

The new training was focused on teaching journalists to “think multimedia” and to consider how to engage the user.

Engaging the community became part of everybody’s job, said Riley.

NPR discovered there was no end state – this was a process.  They also found that internal cultural change was very difficult.

Riley said that the more distinct the journalistic identity, the more being entrepreneurial and focused on the user is a challenge.

She urged news organisations to engage with their community and see them as a resource.

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