Throwing stuff against the journalistic wall
By David Poulson
Last week at Great Lakes Echo we launched a minor experiment.
The Echo Chamber is a standard Q & A interview you might see in a print publication, but with the answers given as short video clips. It gives us a chance to venture more into video while imposing some length limits that I hope overcome the long-windedness that’s a drawback of a lot of the journalism videos.
The idea is to pose no more than five questions and to severely limit the time of response.
The first effort went fine, but limits are tough. We couldn’t resist throwing in a bonus feature of invasive species expert Jeff Alexander reading an excerpt from his book. My reasoning was that readers could always choose to ignore it. But I think some of the answers went a bit longer than needed.
We’ll see how things shake out. This is hardly a new advance in journalism. But my colleague at Michigan State University, Eric Freedman who runs the Capital News Service, had an interesting thought of how such a feature could be a 24/7 source of quotes for other journalists. I hadn’t thought of it in that way. My hope is to build a “library” of such features that our readers and writers could tap. But there’s no reason that other writers could not use it in the same manner.
This experiment also prompted a balance of aesthetics and function. Our initial interest was to adopt a “frame” for the video that we use in some Knight Center online education modules. It looks like this. The advantage is that it creates a compact and neat package. But as Echo reporter Jeff Gillies noted, this feature seemed like something “out on an island” and not integrated into the look and feel of our site.
What’s more, integrating the video into the flash components and posting it into WordPress was a hassle. We opted instead to stack embedded YouTube videos into a typical Echo post. It looks like this.
It’s nowhere as neat or as elegant as the other option. But you know what? Neither is Echo. The feel of this feature is more consistent with our site. And the trade off in functionality - being able to post quickly - over aesthetics is one I think is worth making. Others may disagree.
There may be some middle ground here. MSU graduate assistant Mike Reed found a nifty WordPress plug-in that may be the best solution. It’s called Apture and it’s used for embedding multimedia into posts in a way that keeps readers on your site. Here is an example of how New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin uses it on his Dot Earth blog.
