Friend Michael Rosenblum forwarded word that the Star-Ledger in New Jersey was just nominated for seven local Emmys for its video work. Bravo for my old friends there and for Rosenblum, who trained them .
I remember when my old colleague Jim Willse, then editor of the Ledger, told me he wanted to get the paper into video and I begged him not to do what other papers had done: turn out pale copies and unintentional parodies of local TV news, something that deserves no emulation. I introduced him to Rosenblum, who came in an politely toured the TV studio the paper had just built and then said, “This is bullshit.” Nobody wants to see fake TV, he said. The newsroom is the story; it’s where the action is. So he had them set up cameras in the newsroom and he trained staffers to make video stories with a small camera and a Mac. I’ve watched my own students learn the Rosenblum Method and come out empowered, like the Ledger’s old paper people. Yes, anyone can make TV.
If I had it to do over again, I’d do one thing differently: bring in ad people to train them so they would understand the power of making TV and would sell it to advertisers and make video for them: so they, too, would think video.
Kai Diekmann, the head of Bild, the gigantic German newspaper, is a journalistic celebrity of a sort we don’t have here: utterly charming, lustily egotistical, brashly opinionated, infuriating to those he infuriates (a friend of mine calls him Germany’s Roger Ailes), beloved to his fans, witty, quick, clever, innovative, and never afraid of the spotlight.
Now he has a blog. And a store. I’d heard about his blog for sometime but it wasn’t seen outside the walls of his office. Now it has gone public. He says he’ll do it for 100 days. I predict he’ll be addicted.
There’s a 360-degree tour of his office, starring him. Click on his possessions and learn more – about, for example, a piece of the Berlin Wall signed by Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George Bush (41). He has a bio and lots of photos. Diekmann interviews himself (Why are you writing a blog, he asks. “I’m just incurably vain,” he answers). He posts video he shoots himself – “ich bin Videoblogger-in-Chief für Bild.de” – including one in Baghdad and another of him getting a shot. He brags about the commercials for Bild made by Bild’s readers, who understand its brand well. He links gleefully to an interview with a competitive publisher and scion of a German publishing family (founders of Der Spiegel) who says the esteemed Süddeutsche Zeitung won’t be around on paper in 20 years – but Bild will. He tweaks the liberal competition, the taz. On his “fan club” page, he shows his critics (and I thought I was brave exposing underendowment). In his store, he sells books (starting with his own) and hoodies, buttons, totebags, and mugs with his own mug (as Che Diekmann) and Bild branding as “the red-hot chili paper.”
The guy has balls. And he’s getting attention, which surely is the goal.
I can’t imagine Bill Keller or Marcus Brauchlidoing this, can you? Not even Alan Rusbridger or Will Lewis. Not even the editor of the New York Post (who’s he?). Piers Morgan is the closest thing I can imagine to Kai in the anglophone world, but he had to leave editing to become a star. In Germany, Kai is a brand. In the staid world of anglophone journalism, that’ll probably be sniffed at. But on the social web, I see little choice but to be open and human and even – gasp – have a sense of humor.
I have some personal history here to disclose. See my own story about introducing Diekmann to the Flip video camera here. I later went to speak to editors and executives of Bild’s parent company, Axel Springer, at their retreat in Italy. There, Diekmann was constantly recording every event with his own version of the Flip camera, to his colleagues’ grudging acquiescence. Does he do this all the time? I asked. Yes, they moaned. Sorry, I said. At that meeting, I pushed them all to blog and I’m not suggesting that has anything to do with Diekmann’s effort. But I’m glad to see lots of blogs emerging from Axel Springer. On a very different level, see the blog by the editor of Die Welt. The form knows no limits.
Diekmann took the Flip and surprised me by not just equipping his journalists – other editors’ reflex – but instead equipping his readers. He took interactivity and didn’t just allow readers to comment on what his paper does – as other editors do – but instead had them define his brand. He now has taken the blog and surprised me again, making a comment on the form and his paper and his industry and himself. And it’s fun to watch.
: Later: I left a comment on Diekmann’s blog and in no time, I got email from him. He’s reading what his public is writing.
I’ve been privileged to hear Michael Rosenblum’s spiel often and it’s inspiring. Here is video of a particularly good version of it delivered to newspaper editors in the UK (part I, part II, summary). He makes it clear that the sane response to new technology is not to fight against it and he shows how. I brought him into the Star-Ledger, where he trained a roomful of pencil-pushers to make good video stories in a week, which yielded this, and I brought him into CUNY, where he empowers students to find that they can make good video. Michael, like me, gets attacked for attacking the defensiveness of old media. But he’s doing something about it. He’s renewing them.
Flixwagon, one of the companies offering the ability to broadcast live on the internet from your mobile phone, has added the feature I’ve been wanting: a widget-player you can put on your blog or web site so people there can catch your live broadcasts. Now, you have to put up a link to sites like Flixwagon’s and Qik’s and embed your video in your blog after it’s over.
Between this and Twitter, it begins to turn blogs live. Of course, we often live-blog events. But now we can also have a live flow of text and video from anywhere, anytime.
I’ve written about the challenges and opportunities live broadcast from anywhere brings to news. It’s also interesting to see the impact this will have on blogs. I can’t watch 10 bloggers at once. How can I know who’s live doing what where right now? It’s another need for live search — or call it live discovery. It makes me think I want an alert service — but then, the last thing I want is a bunch of those irritating tweets that tell me that so-and-so (you know who you are) is broadcasting live. I want context: the live TV Guide. But that’s hard, too: As I’m broadcasting, how can I tell you what I’m broadcasting? If someone else watches and alerts others to the fact that I actually have something interesting to say, then that’s necessarily syncopated; it’s not live.
All that aside, I’m glad to see Flixwagon’s widget and I look forward to seeing how YouTube handles live.
As near as I can tell, the first videos submitted to the Star-Ledger’s TVJersey blog are of a baby sleeping and hiccupping. Well, I guess that’s what a local newspaper’s all about: getting your name in the paper.
Cops in Canada and the U.K. use YouTube to try to get evidence in investigations. Another example of crowdsourcing, but then good police work always has been. So we’re dispatched not only to report but also to get their man.
This, from my friends at the Star-Ledger. I’ve been talking with them about the wonders of video. Clearly, I have been a corrupting influence. I’m so proud of them:
And while we’re tiding yule, take a look at the YouTube Choir singing you a Christmas Carol.
I’ve been wanting to know what viral videos had infected the most conversations and was thinking about trying to do something that looked at links and insertions into blogs and such. Well, somebody just went and did it. Scott Button unveils the Viral Video Chart. What’s interesting about this is that it isn’t purely traffic. It is about conversation. They explain:
We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we’ve had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 25 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what’s hot and what’s not. At the moment we only look for references to videos on the three most influential video sharing sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. We tried looking for references to videos on some other sites for a while, but nothing ever made the top 25 so we stopped.
Today’s top video, Keith Olberman slapping Bush around:
Mary Hodder, one of the most respected thinkers of the blog world, has launched her new company, Dabble. It’s a video search across many sites and a place where you can find the good stuff. In that sense, it is just what I was saying the world needs this morning: network 2.0.
