By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
Editor’s note: This story contains bonus video material featured in our free SmartEdition available at http://newsandtech.newspaperdirect.com
Football is serious business in the Lone Star State and that can be seen by how the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News’ Pigskinreview.com covers the local high school teams.
“We wanted this to be a one-stop-shop for high school football in our area,” said Darci Heiskell, online editor of content for the Globe-News. “Providing quarter-by-quarter scores on Friday nights is a number-one goal as no one else in our region provides the scores from all the area games as they happen.”
The site just wrapped up its second football season, offering readers a rich menu of stats, interviews and video features.
The Globe-News provides coverage of 72 regional high school teams, using home-grown software built to reflect the needs of the market.
Heiskell said that the response to Pigskinreview.com has been overwhelming.
“The coaches and teams love the Web site and armchair quarterbacks are checking out the v-cast religiously each week to see how they match up against our sports writers on picks,” said Heiskell. “When we’re at games on weekends taking photos or video, we get comments from students and parents as we walk through the stands.”
The site offers a home page for each of the region’s high school football teams. Each is a sports junkie’s dream with rosters, photos, coach interviews, schedules, stats, scores, recaps, standings and player profiles.
Other features include a game of the week highlight, Friday night scoreboard, a compiled fantasy team, an MVP player of the week, photo galleries and other news.
Video package
Videos include a Pigskin v-cast that features a recap of the previous week’s games and predictions of upcoming weekend matchups.
The v-casts last about 10 minutes, along with a 15-second commercial, Heiskell said. Game-of-the-week videos are between two minutes and three minutes. “It takes an entire day to produce our three weekly videos,” Heiskell said. “This takes a while because we add photos, background graphics and other media to the final product.”
The site requires the work of at least three people, with more during certain days of the week.
“On Tuesdays we film the Pigskin v-cast, which involved two sports writers, plus a field reporter and two production people,” she said. “On Fridays, our content people are busy with updating quarterly scores on our Friday Night Live scoreboard.”
These staffers also update the stats, scores, recaps and standings every weekend.
Pigskinreview offers three levels of sponsorships, one gold and two silver. McDonald’s, which purchased the gold sponsorship, receives premier placement on the site, each school’s homepage and in print ads.
McDonald’s also gets recognition through the MVP selection, in which a top football player is identified each week.
The Globe-News promotes the site at McDonald’s with wall posters that feature individual teams and players.
“This was very popular and we received very positive feedback from this in-store promotion from McDonald’s as well as the students, parents, coaches and teams in our coverage area,” Heiskell said.
Heiskell said Pigskinreview continues to evolve.
“The scoreboard works great on Friday nights, thanks to our ‘superfans’ from all over the region that call in scores,” she said. ”The participation from the coaches and staff has been outstanding and our advertisers have really enjoyed supporting this program; it’s truly been a community effort.”
Heiskell said Pigskinreview wants to provide even more detailed high school football information to readers in the coming seasons.
“With current staffing this becomes a fairly daunting task,” she said. “We may look to the coaches and players to help input some of this data for us in the future.”
Saturday, March 1, 2008
NYT launches free text messaging
The New York Times in January launched a free text messaging service that delivers news, features and columns from the paper and Sunday magazine to cell phone and mobile devices.
“With our mobile site experiencing triple-digit growth, this is the next step in our efforts to make full use of this medium,” said Rob Larson, nytimes.com’s vice president of product development and management, in a statement. “We intend to use every available platform to disseminate The Times’ quality news and information.”
By sending a text message with the appropriate keyword to 698698 (NYTNYT), users can receive articles and columns.
Articles can be displayed on any type of cell phone or PDA. The text message keywords will appear in the appropriate sections of the newspaper. Although The Times isn’t charging for the service, standard carrier charges may apply.
The service follows on the heels of an earlier agreement between The Times and AT&T Inc., that allows the telco’s wireless subscribers to access the newspaper’s site at no extra charge.
“With our mobile site experiencing triple-digit growth, this is the next step in our efforts to make full use of this medium,” said Rob Larson, nytimes.com’s vice president of product development and management, in a statement. “We intend to use every available platform to disseminate The Times’ quality news and information.”
By sending a text message with the appropriate keyword to 698698 (NYTNYT), users can receive articles and columns.
Articles can be displayed on any type of cell phone or PDA. The text message keywords will appear in the appropriate sections of the newspaper. Although The Times isn’t charging for the service, standard carrier charges may apply.
The service follows on the heels of an earlier agreement between The Times and AT&T Inc., that allows the telco’s wireless subscribers to access the newspaper’s site at no extra charge.
MNG updates Web architecture
MediaNews Group last month deployed software that lets it automate how it synchronizes content across scores of Web sites.
The Denver-based group publisher rolled out RepliWeb Deployment Platform version 4.0, said Chad Bolk, a network administrator.
The software, from Coconut Creek, Fla.-based RepliWeb, eliminates the need for companies to manually oversee if content across multiple Web sites is consistent.
“It makes sure all of the images and (Microsoft Internet Information Services software) is replicated,” Bolk said.
MNG oversees 150 Web sites from its Denver-based data center. Content is updated 24 hours a day seven days a week, and ensuring all the sites are synchronized and replicated is a must, Bolk said.
The upgrade “gives us a real comfort level,” Bolk said. “If a server crashes, all the images will continue to be displayed. It’s really IT’s best friend.”
Setup
The app runs on two servers, overseeing images and content, respectively. As MNG papers post new content, the information is replicated immediately. “We have thousands of very small image files, and every other app we had used before would choke (trying to replicate the data),” Bolk said.
“We needed something that was extremely robust to support our data needs, and this is as close as it can be to 100 percent uptime,” he said.
RepliWeb released the update late last year, said Chief Executive Officer Yossi Moriel. “Large enterprises stand to lose a great deal of money if their information doesn’t get deployed in a timely and accurate manner,” he said. “This automates several deployments that were once dependent on manual script writing.”
The Denver-based group publisher rolled out RepliWeb Deployment Platform version 4.0, said Chad Bolk, a network administrator.
The software, from Coconut Creek, Fla.-based RepliWeb, eliminates the need for companies to manually oversee if content across multiple Web sites is consistent.
“It makes sure all of the images and (Microsoft Internet Information Services software) is replicated,” Bolk said.
MNG oversees 150 Web sites from its Denver-based data center. Content is updated 24 hours a day seven days a week, and ensuring all the sites are synchronized and replicated is a must, Bolk said.
The upgrade “gives us a real comfort level,” Bolk said. “If a server crashes, all the images will continue to be displayed. It’s really IT’s best friend.”
Setup
The app runs on two servers, overseeing images and content, respectively. As MNG papers post new content, the information is replicated immediately. “We have thousands of very small image files, and every other app we had used before would choke (trying to replicate the data),” Bolk said.
“We needed something that was extremely robust to support our data needs, and this is as close as it can be to 100 percent uptime,” he said.
RepliWeb released the update late last year, said Chief Executive Officer Yossi Moriel. “Large enterprises stand to lose a great deal of money if their information doesn’t get deployed in a timely and accurate manner,” he said. “This automates several deployments that were once dependent on manual script writing.”
Software helps papers in mission to go local.
By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
Mapping out the news is becoming a booming business for online companies as one supplier unveiled a new service while another one made its debut in three cities.
Last month, mapping software vendor MetaCarta Inc. introduced GeoTagger OnDemand, a hosted service that identifies the places and points of interest mentioned in text documents, Web pages and blogs and relates them to their appropriate latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
The service allows geographic points to be automatically displayed on maps, retrieved through a variety of search engines or dynamically displayed with other geographically relevant content.
YourStreet, www.yourstreet.com, is the first customer to use GeoTagger OnDemand. The site aggregates stories from more than 10,000 newspapers, magazines and local blogs and links those stories to specific geographic locations that in turn can be meshed with neighborhood-specific social networks.
Free service
The service is free and once users are registered, they can begin conversations about places in their area and connect with neighbors who have signed up for the service, said James Nicholson, chief executive officer and founder.
“YourStreet is transforming the way users experience local news by indexing and mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level,” he said. “We scan thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each day and use MetaCarta to help with location identification.”
In addition to YourStreet, MetaCarta said Lowell Publishing Co. will roll out its Local Alerts mapping software to underpin its Web operations.
The Local Alerts software, delivers personalized news and information.
LPC publishes the Sun and the Valley Dispatch, both in Lowell, Mass., as well as the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg, Mass., the Broadcaster in Nashua, N.H., and a number of weekly publications.
The LPC agreement follows a deployment of the software by The San Antonio Express-News, which rolled out Local Alerts last year.
New kid on block
Meantime, MetaCarta has been joined in the mapping marketplace by start-up EveryBlock.com, which launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco in January. The site, developed by Web designer Adrian Holoyaty, is funded in part by a Knight News Challenge grant.
The company’s aim is to collect news and civic information and sort it out geographically, by neighborhood and city block.
Users can read news and information that includes government data, crime reports, restaurant inspections and other public records data.
It also meshes with social networking features found from such sites as Flickr, a photo-sharing site; local business reviews from Yelp and missed connections — a personals section — from Craigslist.
Associate Editor
Mapping out the news is becoming a booming business for online companies as one supplier unveiled a new service while another one made its debut in three cities.
Last month, mapping software vendor MetaCarta Inc. introduced GeoTagger OnDemand, a hosted service that identifies the places and points of interest mentioned in text documents, Web pages and blogs and relates them to their appropriate latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
The service allows geographic points to be automatically displayed on maps, retrieved through a variety of search engines or dynamically displayed with other geographically relevant content.
YourStreet, www.yourstreet.com, is the first customer to use GeoTagger OnDemand. The site aggregates stories from more than 10,000 newspapers, magazines and local blogs and links those stories to specific geographic locations that in turn can be meshed with neighborhood-specific social networks.
Free service
The service is free and once users are registered, they can begin conversations about places in their area and connect with neighbors who have signed up for the service, said James Nicholson, chief executive officer and founder.
“YourStreet is transforming the way users experience local news by indexing and mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level,” he said. “We scan thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each day and use MetaCarta to help with location identification.”
In addition to YourStreet, MetaCarta said Lowell Publishing Co. will roll out its Local Alerts mapping software to underpin its Web operations.
The Local Alerts software, delivers personalized news and information.
LPC publishes the Sun and the Valley Dispatch, both in Lowell, Mass., as well as the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg, Mass., the Broadcaster in Nashua, N.H., and a number of weekly publications.
The LPC agreement follows a deployment of the software by The San Antonio Express-News, which rolled out Local Alerts last year.
New kid on block
Meantime, MetaCarta has been joined in the mapping marketplace by start-up EveryBlock.com, which launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco in January. The site, developed by Web designer Adrian Holoyaty, is funded in part by a Knight News Challenge grant.
The company’s aim is to collect news and civic information and sort it out geographically, by neighborhood and city block.
Users can read news and information that includes government data, crime reports, restaurant inspections and other public records data.
It also meshes with social networking features found from such sites as Flickr, a photo-sharing site; local business reviews from Yelp and missed connections — a personals section — from Craigslist.
Freedom Communications unit breathes new life into Web sites
By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
Freedom Interactive, the online arm of Freedom Communications, this month plans to cap a company-wide redesign of all of its Web sites.
Freedom Interactive handles Web sites for 33 daily and 77 weekly newspapers across the country, including sites supporting The Orange County (Calif.) Register and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, kicked off its renovated site last fall and was one of the first papers to roll out the new design.
“The new site is easier to navigate and has a more pleasing look and feel than the previous version,” said Ernie Rodriguez, The Monitor’s director of Internet operations. “It has a truly interactive events calendar” — from Zvents —“and commenting tools on all articles.”
Rodriguez said it took about six weeks to launch the new look.
Better experience
“The hope is to provide our users a more engaging experience, in a more pleasing environment that will entice them to stay longer on our site,” he said.
The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, was one of the first Freedom papers to roll out a revamped Web site.
Freedom Interactive Vice President of Marketing Linda Fisk said among the most prominent features in the redesign is a tabbed A-box that highlights the most requested and most-viewed stories on each paper’s Web site.
“We created a fixed promotional rotator to highlight special content features, contests, sweepstakes and promotions,” she said. “This allows our audience to quickly see what’s new and exciting on the site.”
Each site also includes a community area that features photos, polls and online exclusive content.
Fisk said that this area is especially popular with users and allows each paper to provide content with a uniquely local focus.
The redesign also included prominent placement of online classified information to help increase visibility of marketers’ ad messages.
Fisk said the redesigns were based on consumer research efforts designed to determine what customers were seeking online.
“We implemented a network-wide consumer survey asking representative samples of our users in every Freedom market about their experience on each of our Web sites,” Fisk said. “We asked about their visitation habits, the content they liked, what they thought was missing and why they visit our sites.”
Based on that quantitative research, Freedom Interactive conducted more qualitative research through a series of usability tests where managers and site designers watched consumers navigate through the sites and complete a series of tasks.
“We asked for the consumers’ opinions, their impressions and their recommendations,” she said. “We asked what they liked and didn’t like about the design, the content, the products and services, the navigation and more.”
Freedom tested the new look in two markets before making final revisions and launching the final redesign company-wide.
Associate Editor
Freedom Interactive, the online arm of Freedom Communications, this month plans to cap a company-wide redesign of all of its Web sites.
Freedom Interactive handles Web sites for 33 daily and 77 weekly newspapers across the country, including sites supporting The Orange County (Calif.) Register and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, kicked off its renovated site last fall and was one of the first papers to roll out the new design.
“The new site is easier to navigate and has a more pleasing look and feel than the previous version,” said Ernie Rodriguez, The Monitor’s director of Internet operations. “It has a truly interactive events calendar” — from Zvents —“and commenting tools on all articles.”
Rodriguez said it took about six weeks to launch the new look.
Better experience
“The hope is to provide our users a more engaging experience, in a more pleasing environment that will entice them to stay longer on our site,” he said.
The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, was one of the first Freedom papers to roll out a revamped Web site.
Freedom Interactive Vice President of Marketing Linda Fisk said among the most prominent features in the redesign is a tabbed A-box that highlights the most requested and most-viewed stories on each paper’s Web site.
“We created a fixed promotional rotator to highlight special content features, contests, sweepstakes and promotions,” she said. “This allows our audience to quickly see what’s new and exciting on the site.”
Each site also includes a community area that features photos, polls and online exclusive content.
Fisk said that this area is especially popular with users and allows each paper to provide content with a uniquely local focus.
The redesign also included prominent placement of online classified information to help increase visibility of marketers’ ad messages.
Fisk said the redesigns were based on consumer research efforts designed to determine what customers were seeking online.
“We implemented a network-wide consumer survey asking representative samples of our users in every Freedom market about their experience on each of our Web sites,” Fisk said. “We asked about their visitation habits, the content they liked, what they thought was missing and why they visit our sites.”
Based on that quantitative research, Freedom Interactive conducted more qualitative research through a series of usability tests where managers and site designers watched consumers navigate through the sites and complete a series of tasks.
“We asked for the consumers’ opinions, their impressions and their recommendations,” she said. “We asked what they liked and didn’t like about the design, the content, the products and services, the navigation and more.”
Freedom tested the new look in two markets before making final revisions and launching the final redesign company-wide.
Clickability updates to hosted version of Web app
Clickability Inc. launched a hosted version of its Web content management software that allows newspapers to produce content for a variety of channels, including smartphones.
The Clickability On Demand WCM Platform includes hosting, security, data storage, service-level agreements and provisions for disaster recovery, said Robert Carroll, vice president of marketing.
The software lets publishers tailor content for myriad channels, including PDAs, smartphones and electronic readers such as Amazon.com’s Kindle. Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, an early user, tapped the app to enable the distribution of philly.com to Kindle customers. Other newspapers could do the same thing, Carroll said.
“In the future content could potentially go out to the entertainment system of your car, your home and a whole variety of outlets,” Carroll said. “We’d like to think of the software as a device-agnostic, multichannel delivery” system, he said. “That’s becoming a big issue as people are getting newspaper content from a variety of different devices.”
The versions and their costs:
• Clickability Express Edition, with a one-time implementation fee ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 and a $2,999 per-month subscription fee.
•Clickability Professional Edition, for mid-range sites, with a one-time implementation fee ranging from $30,000 to $75,000 and a $4,999 per-month subscription fee.
• Clickability Enterprise Edition, for global publishing and complex enterprises, with a one-time implementation fee beginning at $75,000 and a $7,999 per-month subscription fee.
The Clickability On Demand WCM Platform includes hosting, security, data storage, service-level agreements and provisions for disaster recovery, said Robert Carroll, vice president of marketing.
The software lets publishers tailor content for myriad channels, including PDAs, smartphones and electronic readers such as Amazon.com’s Kindle. Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, an early user, tapped the app to enable the distribution of philly.com to Kindle customers. Other newspapers could do the same thing, Carroll said.
“In the future content could potentially go out to the entertainment system of your car, your home and a whole variety of outlets,” Carroll said. “We’d like to think of the software as a device-agnostic, multichannel delivery” system, he said. “That’s becoming a big issue as people are getting newspaper content from a variety of different devices.”
The versions and their costs:
• Clickability Express Edition, with a one-time implementation fee ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 and a $2,999 per-month subscription fee.
•Clickability Professional Edition, for mid-range sites, with a one-time implementation fee ranging from $30,000 to $75,000 and a $4,999 per-month subscription fee.
• Clickability Enterprise Edition, for global publishing and complex enterprises, with a one-time implementation fee beginning at $75,000 and a $7,999 per-month subscription fee.
ChiTrib using video chat as chit to bring readers together
By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
The Chicago Tribune wants readers to use its Web site to strike up two-way video conversations with its reporters and newsmakers.
The paper’s Video Chat, launched last May, is a half-hour program that lets readers ask journalists or other personalities questions about specific stories or subjects, said Mark Hinojosa, the Tribune’s associate managing editor of electronic news.
Guests answer the questions, usually sitting in the Tribune’s television studio. Readers can see the questions displayed on their Web browsers as the guest addresses the topic.
An infinite number of people can watch the chat live, but participant access is limited to 500 simultaneous users.
Video Chat is the brainchild of Dwayne Pallanti, a Tribune video engineer, Hinojosa said.
“He has also developed the paper’s in-house transcoding system and developed compression schemes for video out of Iraq with a satellite phone,” he said of the engineer. “He had been working on this idea on his own and brought it to see how we would use it.”
Jumping in the video sandbox
Chicago Tribune Interactive Executive Producer Clark Bender said chat allows the paper to engage its audience in a new and different way.
“We wanted to have a little more interactivity with our audience,” he said. “You can do regular chat, but it was good to try video chat because we liked the connection that it had with the audience.”
A Video Chat requires three people plus a host or a guest. A producer feeds the questions to the host while a camera operator and a technical director make sure everything is running correctly. Sometimes a floor director will be added if one is available.
Bender said Video Chat’s immediate feedback and the show’s ability to allow users to submit questions are some of the program’s strongest hallmarks.
“We felt like it added another level of personalization and that made it a more interesting experience.”
Archived copies
Once the program is over, readers can access archived episodes and explore the broadcast by clicking on specific questions as they are displayed.
“When we finish the show we encode it in Flash and put it back into the player in a different format,” Hinojosa said. “You can see all the questions that were asked and you can click on the questions and get the answer.”
Thus far, Tribune Interactive has produced more than 25 Video Chats, covering such topics as Chicago’s professional sports teams and financial pressures plaguing the Chicago Transportation Authority.
The shows aren’t regularly scheduled, but Bender said that is one of Tribune Interactive’s goals. “We’ve done a few dozen but we don’t have a particular time every week that we do them,” he said.
Prior to each show, Tribune Interactive solicits questions in advance so that producers have a backlog of questions to start the program.
“As great as it is to have something live, it’s kind of hard to drive people (to the site) at the exact time you are doing it,” Bender said. “We tend to try and do them over the lunch hour because we are assuming that people are at their computers at the office and have some time to watch.”
Room for improvement
Bender said the show has faced few technical bumps.
“The bigger learning curve has been determining good programming to do with this,” he said. “Sometimes, we’ve had writers come in and the topic was too broad and other times we’ve had more specific issues like real estate zoning in Chicago.”
With no set host or style the show can be like a box of chocolates, but the different topics also bring different people to the news site, Bender said.
“It’s been interesting to figure out what some of the programming challenges are in terms of what’s appealing to people,” he said. “It’s more about engaging our audience, keeping them on the site, keeping them interested and engaging them in issues of the day.”
Although Bender said the Tribune has received positive feedback from the show, it’s too early to tell if Video Chat has translated into a dramatic upswing in Web traffic.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had any delusions that we’re going to have thousands and thousands of people watching these chats. Maybe someday we can grow into that. Right now it’s something of a toe in the water as we figure out what we are going to do,” he said. “The bigger issue is getting the chats in front of more people, either live or archived.”
Looking for a draw
Hinojosa said that Video Chat has allowed the Tribune to cover a variety of topics in a different way, but that he is still searching for “franchise” subjects that would guarantee a consistent audience draw.
Sometimes, inspiration occurs when least expected, he said, citing one idea he thought of to conduct remote chats. “All of a sudden my boss asked if we could use it,” he said. “Then we started playing with the format, doing remote chats in New Hampshire and in Arizona when the Cubs were in the playoffs.”
The Tribune’s most recent Video Chat effort covered last month’s Super Tuesday primaries and featured six separate Video Chats with presidential primary coverage spanning three cities (see sidebar, page 46).
“We would like to put it on a more permanent schedule so that people could know it will be on every day or every Tuesday at a certain time,” said Bender. “We are going to do this but we are feeling our way through what we think is going to be worth that kind of regular effort.”
Super Tuesday for Video Chat
Feb. 5, 2008 was also a Super Tuesday for Chicago Tribune Interactive when it produced six Video Chats with presidential primary coverage spanning three U.S. cities.
The Video Chats were hosted by a moderator in Chicago who spent time with guests from Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., the Los Angeles Times and Tribune’s Washington D.C., bureau, all of whom provided news and updated the latest returns from the 22-state primary.
The idea to do the Super Tuesday Video Chat was spawned in early January, said Mark Hinojosa, the Tribune’s associate managing editor of electronic news.
“We were looking at the map saying we have newspapers in three of the biggest states competing on Super Tuesday,” he said. “Ideally, we wanted to do the CNN way, which means we would be able to jump between all four sites at once.”
Although the Tribune couldn’t do that, it did figure out a schedule where it could run six chats. Each one would start in Chicago and go out to the other sites.
Election night saw 13 Tribune employees working to produce the chats, but they were joined by other personnel who worked on the project leading up to event.
Their contributions included setting up high-speed, secure connections for each video feed.
“We had connections from our papers to their partner television stations but we had to make sure they could get their feeds to us,” said Hinojosa.
While the Chats ran successfully, Hinojosa said they didn’t receive the audience he had hoped.
But he contributes the low participation to the fact that the papers didn’t have the time to properly promote the event.
“We didn’t do a terrific marketing campaign,” he said. “And one of the things we are learning is that when you drive somebody to a new site, you are asking a reader to do a lot to leave a page where all the information is and have him or her do something they aren’t familiar with.
“We’re playing with ideas on how to make the experience more immediate and how to give somebody a better example of a video chat.”
Associate Editor
The Chicago Tribune wants readers to use its Web site to strike up two-way video conversations with its reporters and newsmakers.
The paper’s Video Chat, launched last May, is a half-hour program that lets readers ask journalists or other personalities questions about specific stories or subjects, said Mark Hinojosa, the Tribune’s associate managing editor of electronic news.
Guests answer the questions, usually sitting in the Tribune’s television studio. Readers can see the questions displayed on their Web browsers as the guest addresses the topic.
An infinite number of people can watch the chat live, but participant access is limited to 500 simultaneous users.
Video Chat is the brainchild of Dwayne Pallanti, a Tribune video engineer, Hinojosa said.
“He has also developed the paper’s in-house transcoding system and developed compression schemes for video out of Iraq with a satellite phone,” he said of the engineer. “He had been working on this idea on his own and brought it to see how we would use it.”
Jumping in the video sandbox
Chicago Tribune Interactive Executive Producer Clark Bender said chat allows the paper to engage its audience in a new and different way.
“We wanted to have a little more interactivity with our audience,” he said. “You can do regular chat, but it was good to try video chat because we liked the connection that it had with the audience.”
A Video Chat requires three people plus a host or a guest. A producer feeds the questions to the host while a camera operator and a technical director make sure everything is running correctly. Sometimes a floor director will be added if one is available.
Bender said Video Chat’s immediate feedback and the show’s ability to allow users to submit questions are some of the program’s strongest hallmarks.
“We felt like it added another level of personalization and that made it a more interesting experience.”
Archived copies
Once the program is over, readers can access archived episodes and explore the broadcast by clicking on specific questions as they are displayed.
“When we finish the show we encode it in Flash and put it back into the player in a different format,” Hinojosa said. “You can see all the questions that were asked and you can click on the questions and get the answer.”
Thus far, Tribune Interactive has produced more than 25 Video Chats, covering such topics as Chicago’s professional sports teams and financial pressures plaguing the Chicago Transportation Authority.
The shows aren’t regularly scheduled, but Bender said that is one of Tribune Interactive’s goals. “We’ve done a few dozen but we don’t have a particular time every week that we do them,” he said.
Prior to each show, Tribune Interactive solicits questions in advance so that producers have a backlog of questions to start the program.
“As great as it is to have something live, it’s kind of hard to drive people (to the site) at the exact time you are doing it,” Bender said. “We tend to try and do them over the lunch hour because we are assuming that people are at their computers at the office and have some time to watch.”
Room for improvement
Bender said the show has faced few technical bumps.
“The bigger learning curve has been determining good programming to do with this,” he said. “Sometimes, we’ve had writers come in and the topic was too broad and other times we’ve had more specific issues like real estate zoning in Chicago.”
With no set host or style the show can be like a box of chocolates, but the different topics also bring different people to the news site, Bender said.
“It’s been interesting to figure out what some of the programming challenges are in terms of what’s appealing to people,” he said. “It’s more about engaging our audience, keeping them on the site, keeping them interested and engaging them in issues of the day.”
Although Bender said the Tribune has received positive feedback from the show, it’s too early to tell if Video Chat has translated into a dramatic upswing in Web traffic.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had any delusions that we’re going to have thousands and thousands of people watching these chats. Maybe someday we can grow into that. Right now it’s something of a toe in the water as we figure out what we are going to do,” he said. “The bigger issue is getting the chats in front of more people, either live or archived.”
Looking for a draw
Hinojosa said that Video Chat has allowed the Tribune to cover a variety of topics in a different way, but that he is still searching for “franchise” subjects that would guarantee a consistent audience draw.
Sometimes, inspiration occurs when least expected, he said, citing one idea he thought of to conduct remote chats. “All of a sudden my boss asked if we could use it,” he said. “Then we started playing with the format, doing remote chats in New Hampshire and in Arizona when the Cubs were in the playoffs.”
The Tribune’s most recent Video Chat effort covered last month’s Super Tuesday primaries and featured six separate Video Chats with presidential primary coverage spanning three cities (see sidebar, page 46).
“We would like to put it on a more permanent schedule so that people could know it will be on every day or every Tuesday at a certain time,” said Bender. “We are going to do this but we are feeling our way through what we think is going to be worth that kind of regular effort.”
Super Tuesday for Video Chat
Feb. 5, 2008 was also a Super Tuesday for Chicago Tribune Interactive when it produced six Video Chats with presidential primary coverage spanning three U.S. cities.
The Video Chats were hosted by a moderator in Chicago who spent time with guests from Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., the Los Angeles Times and Tribune’s Washington D.C., bureau, all of whom provided news and updated the latest returns from the 22-state primary.
The idea to do the Super Tuesday Video Chat was spawned in early January, said Mark Hinojosa, the Tribune’s associate managing editor of electronic news.
“We were looking at the map saying we have newspapers in three of the biggest states competing on Super Tuesday,” he said. “Ideally, we wanted to do the CNN way, which means we would be able to jump between all four sites at once.”
Although the Tribune couldn’t do that, it did figure out a schedule where it could run six chats. Each one would start in Chicago and go out to the other sites.
Election night saw 13 Tribune employees working to produce the chats, but they were joined by other personnel who worked on the project leading up to event.
Their contributions included setting up high-speed, secure connections for each video feed.
“We had connections from our papers to their partner television stations but we had to make sure they could get their feeds to us,” said Hinojosa.
While the Chats ran successfully, Hinojosa said they didn’t receive the audience he had hoped.
But he contributes the low participation to the fact that the papers didn’t have the time to properly promote the event.
“We didn’t do a terrific marketing campaign,” he said. “And one of the things we are learning is that when you drive somebody to a new site, you are asking a reader to do a lot to leave a page where all the information is and have him or her do something they aren’t familiar with.
“We’re playing with ideas on how to make the experience more immediate and how to give somebody a better example of a video chat.”
4 papers wrap up AdStar installations
The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are among newspapers to recently install Web-based ad sales software from AdStar Inc.
The online app automates ad development and placement, allowing customers to create print and online advertisements for vertical classified ad markets, AdStar said.
AdStar’s technology is used on Philly.com’s auto; real estate and recruitment classified advertising channels. The recruitment ad channel is also integrated with Monster.com, Philly.com’s partner for job postings.
The online edition of The Star-Ledger recently launched its AdStar-powered real estate advertising channel and will be installing AdStar’s technology for auto, recruitment and general merchandise advertisements.
AdStar also completed the installation of software supporting recruitment advertisements on the Post-Dispatch’s STLtoday.com site and is in the process of installing software for the newspaper’s auto, real estate and general merchandise advertising sections.
The online app automates ad development and placement, allowing customers to create print and online advertisements for vertical classified ad markets, AdStar said.
AdStar’s technology is used on Philly.com’s auto; real estate and recruitment classified advertising channels. The recruitment ad channel is also integrated with Monster.com, Philly.com’s partner for job postings.
The online edition of The Star-Ledger recently launched its AdStar-powered real estate advertising channel and will be installing AdStar’s technology for auto, recruitment and general merchandise advertisements.
AdStar also completed the installation of software supporting recruitment advertisements on the Post-Dispatch’s STLtoday.com site and is in the process of installing software for the newspaper’s auto, real estate and general merchandise advertising sections.
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