Star-Ledger is putting its newsroom staff through an intense training program to pump up the volume of video.

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., is ready to kick up its video news coverage, thanks to an intensive training program geared toward changing the way it covers news in the Garden state.

Last month the newspaper (Monday-Friday, 345,130; Saturday, 281,901; Sunday, 500,382) put 20 newsroom staff through an intensive five-day video training boot camp, covering topics such as how to shoot and produce video.

The additional training, conducted by New York-based Rosenblum Associates, is part of an effort by the Newhouse paper to feed more video content to its Web site, said John Hassell, deputy managing editor at the daily.

“The initial boot camp we are doing with Rosenblum Associates is the first step toward two things,” he said. “First is getting video training spread more broadly across the staff and second is putting together a noontime webcast that we hope will be something new and different for newspapers.”

The Star-Ledger, with 300 editorial staff members, hopes to provide video training to everyone who needs or wants it, Hassell said.

Boot camp members had their schedules arranged so that they would spend five straight days telling stories only through video. The boot camp also introduced the staff to new techniques they could use to cover news stories.

The class teaches students how to bridge the gap between gathering news intended for both video and print distribution, Hassell said.

“What a lot of people do is when they first get a video camera and are sent out to shoot video they come back with a lot of video and that creates an inefficient post-production result because you get back and have three hours of footage that you have to watch and edit,” said Hassell.

“We are teaching people how to think about what they need to shoot for the story they want to tell so that the process of producing video stories” becomes more efficient.

The concept mirrors how a reporter and photographer traditionally prepare to cover a story. Each knows what he must do to gather the information he needs, Hassell said.

Multimedia kits

The Star-Ledger made a “significant” financial commitment in buying the equipment to outfit the first class of 20, Hassell said.

Each received a video kit that includes a Sony HVR-A1U digital camera and an Apple MacBook Pro laptop with Final Cut Pro editing software. Other accessories include a Sennheiser Evolution G2 100 series wireless lavalier microphone to capture high-quality audio.

The Star-Ledger is still planning its five-minute nooncast video program. It’s building a set in the newsroom and is in the midst of purchasing the mixing board and other production equipment needed to support the show, Hassell said.

“We still have a lot of work to do to figure out exactly what it looks like, the content and tone of the program,” he said. “The idea is to do a short five-minute nooncast that is combination of live and taped footage.”

Hassell said the daily believes the five-minute length of the show is the correct format, citing current trends favoring shorter videos.

“The evidence I see suggests that’s about as long as you are going to get somebody’s attention, except for the most extraordinary videos,” he said. “We are operating on the assumption that shorter is better and we have to be able to tell a story in two minutes.”

The Star-Ledger didn’t have a shortage of volunteers when asked for people to participate in the training session.

“We let everybody know there were 20 slots available for this boot camp, and we received 105 volunteers, “ he said.

Of the 105 candidates, 65 submitted three-minute video audition tapes. Rosenblum Associates then helped the paper whittle the remaining list down to the final 20.

“There is no shortage of interest. That’s true not just of video but of almost everything we do on the digital side,” Hassell said. “We trained the entire staff in blogging and we have reporters calling in audio clips from the field on breaking news.”

Mastering videography is one step in several that traditional newsrooms have to take in order to learn how to cover news in a multimedia environment, Hassell said.

“For us video is the next frontier in that evolution, but it’s important to make sure that everybody in our newsroom understands how video can best be used to deliver news content,” he said. “I think we should agree that we have to be platform-agnostic, but if a story is best told in video, great.”

News&Tech interviews guests from The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. about their recent intensive video training to pump up the volume of video at nj.com. Guests include John Hassell, deputy managing editor; Sharon Russell, assistant managing editor for video; and Seth Siditsky, video enterprise editor.

Making the video push

As newspapers continue to push into the online video marketplace, they need to overcome the psychological roadblocks inherent in adapting to a new medium.

That’s what video and journalism consultant Michael Rosenblum said about newspapers attempting to become more video-active as they migrate to the Web.

“It’s incumbent upon these organizations to incorporate video as part of their whole package they have to deliver or they are going to look a bit remiss,” he said. “Luckily, the cameras are now cheap and simple enough to use so that making the transition to video is a relatively simple thing to do.”

Last month, New York-based Rosenblum Associates worked with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., to develop a program to train 20 newsroom staff as videographers.

Rosenblum fashioned the Star-Ledger’s video boot camp after one he conducted for the BBC and other broadcasters.

“The training is straightforward,” he said. “We take a group of 20-25 people and we put them through an intensive boot camp where we isolate them from everybody else and force them to work only in video,” Rosenblum said. “We take away all text and all writing and go out and shoot pieces, critique them, take them apart and put them back together.”

Rosenblum said he is interested in creating a new generation of digital journalists that use video as a component to their reporting.

“Television itself is for television, but when you take video to the Web, it’s non-linear, on-demand and people watch it in a much more fragmented way,” he said.