Recently I’ve found myself distressed about the hyperlocal dictum of journalism. The argument (today at Jessica DaSilva) over whether hyperlocal is successful has me wondering if newspapers are just grasping at straws — covering the only thing we can cover in the Internet age — or if readers have really wanted well-done local news all along.

And then, what is well-done local news? A recent expert-led undertaking in Loudoun, Va., was apparently a disappointment. So I tried to find some success stories. Here are a few:

1. neighborsgo by The Dallas Morning News
   A January post at the Bivings Report points to a NAA study that showcased how the paper works with people in the community to come up with stories and see them through. It started with a reader submission tool on dallasnews.com.

   Now, 15 editors and four assistant editors sift through information submitted online for content to include in the print editions, which run from 16 to 40 pages with circulations ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 readers.

   “We’re saying, ‘This is your turn to speak up first, and we’ll take it from there,’ ” says Oscar Martinez, managing editor of neighborsgo. “We’re not creating a need to share information. We’re providing tools to be able to do so.”

2. The Point Reyes Light, California
   This 2005 OJR story recounts when the editor at this small community paper fell under hard financial times, the community “came together and basically passed the hat and bailed him out.” Its success is credited to its interaction with its readers made newly possible by the Internet:

Even a small operation like the Light can integrate the Web into its operation. And it’s not by putting all its content on the Web and hoping that readers will go there – it’s by using the Web and its readers in a way that allows it to report on the community better than ever.

3. The Anniston Star, Alabama
   In a 2004 post (see why I said this was a reminder?) by Media Center, then-Star editor Chris Waddle stresses the importance of participatory journalism. By 2006 in this NPR feature, it had the funds to maintain a staff twice as large as what was recommended. Waddle credits the success to staying connected with communities.

So to me, it looks like hyperlocal can work, if you listen to your readers. The best strategy is to stay loyal to your readers and let them speak out. Now I wonder if we’ve discovered the best tactics…

Meranda Watling has a good post about newspaper.coms’ online databases:

There are hundreds of useful databases on news Web sites today. But what’s increasingly sad — almost as sad as the tendency to create and dump unrelated databases without any context into data ghettos — is the increasing tendency to create databases of information that, really, a database isn’t useful in helping to understand. In the worst instances, it really just complicates the information for the sake of saying, “Look at all the databases we’re giving you!”

Data ghettos? Nice. I agree.

First of all, I don’t think “database” is a very sexy word to the average reader. I’m having a hard time imagining people I know searching through databases. So, second, databases have to be inviting. I can’t stand to see databases like these that require user input before you can see anything. Did Tom Smith graduate this year? No. How about Molly Baker? Yes. It’s a shot in the dark. The database needs to be presented in a way that catches attention, or at least lays out all the data in a tabular format. Like this.

My heart dropped a little bit when I read this at Rogue Columnist. It’s an opinion by Jon Talton on a recent WSJ piece on the so-called demise of LoudounExtra.com. HT to Pat and ehelm on Twitter.

Loudoun, which covers a small affluent Virginian community, is the hyperlocal Web brain child of the The Washington Post, and it’s not doing so well. From WSJ:

Almost a year later, however, the Web site is still searching for an audience. Its chief architect has left for another venture in Las Vegas, and his team went with him. And while Post executives say they remain committed to providing so-called hyperlocal news coverage, they are re-evaluating their approach.

Talton says:

This was sadly predictable, and indicative of the group-think that is causing newspapers to commit suicide.

So I’m sitting here thinking, dang, if my editors ever get a hold of this they’re going to think I’m a moron. In my practical capacity as a Web producer, I’m always chiding people for putting national stories on the front of the site. That’s about as far as this argument affects me, but underneath that is a big philosophical question about what is more important to my readers. The answer I always get is, “Hyperlocal!”

But what if I (and they) are wrong? Some national stories get big traffic on the site. Anything having to do with the presidential primaries inspires a debate, even if it’s Hillary speaking in Puerto Rico. Some local stories flop. You could attribute that to good vs. bad journalism, which the WSJ suggested:

…One reason: the team of outsiders didn’t do enough to familiarize itself with Loudoun County or engage its 270,000 residents.

But what if it’s more than bad journalism? Are we overlooking an obvious question? What if it’s good vs. bad content? In other words, what if your locality is boring? I mean, that’s why we run nation/international stories in the first place. They are more interesting than the softball game on the corner or the chess club tournament in the middle school gymnasium. Even our market studies show our online audience wants local stories the most, but they also want national stories.

Now, Talton (whom I’ve never read until today) seems generally cranky about new media in journalism, so that may have something to do with his distaste for “Web geek” control in newsrooms and new approaches like at Loudoun. I do appreciate another perspective, but I wish someone would get it right instead of finding someone else who did it wrong. I need some peace of mind here.

Some discussion has developed over at News Videographer about music copyright in Web videos. This issue is pretty hard to pin down.

As I’ve said before, if I use copyrighted music, I only use 15 seconds. Gannet lawyers recommend this but say under fair use there is no time percentage, only that the amount used must be fair to the “substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole,” as the copyright law reads.

I also only use music I record at the scene. I only let it play alone for no more than 15 seconds. I let the music continue playing quietly under interviews for as long as it remains natural sound. I repeat: the music is nat sound, not mood. I’ve heard many videographers use music this way — we’re all on a Gannett video listserv and this issue comes up a lot. Examples would be my videos about a ballet performance or a piano recital for a girl who has a disability. Also a video about American Idol candidates singing popular songs during their auditions would work.

These examples really just can’t be done without the music. However, they should be done with something besides music — interviews, other nats — or else they’re ripping of the musical work.

Things that are not OK (taken from the listserv):

• Event montages, i.e. clips laid over copyrighted music gathered from the scene, aka a “music video.”
• Any performance (played alone) of a work the performer didn’t create, i.e. high school band playing “Louie, Louie,” Elvis impersonator singing Elvis songs.
• Any performance in the public domain that is performed by someone with a copyright on that performance. For example, a Tchaikovsky piece as performed by the Boston Pops is probably copyrighted by the Boston Pops.

If you need random mood music, there are many ways to get your hands on music you have every right to use in its entirety. Final Cut Pro comes with music, as does Avid. GarageBand comes with loops and has more for purchase. If you get rights signed to use original music from local bands, then natch, that’s fair game too.

My alma mater’s newspaper, The Daily Reveille (LSU) has won the EPpy for for best college newspaper Web site.

Editor Justin Fritscher has been pushing breaking news updates and multimedia for a while now. In April, they pushed to have eight updates a day, and in March, individual page views had increased by 100,000. The site has done some innovative stuff with multimedia, including this fun shoes gallery (my idea), and at one point it was averaging three Web videos a day.

I can remember when I was a video stringer at the Reveille a whole year ago. Ah, college.

Congratulations to everyone.

Music performance pieces are always challenging to edit. Even performances that only involve music are pesky. Take a children’s ballet recital:

I was pretty satisfied with this piece. The project’s director provided details and the girls provided emotion. The piece had music and a variety of interesting shots, so it was interesting to watch. And I think it holds attention since it clocks in at only 1:19.

Here’s another one that’s not as good. You notice here I ran out of b-roll that would not look out of sync with my audio track, so I used some shots twice.

While I was editing the ballet video, one of the reporters came up behind me and asked how many people we sent to shoot. “Uh, one. Me,” I said. He thought that was pretty impressive, so I guess I did something right.

That’s the importance of getting a variety of shots. The problem with getting a variety of shots during a musical performance is that you can create gaps for yourself that are impossible to edit around. So here’s a list of guidelines:

• Press record, and leave it alone. Record the entire performance. This is not how you should shoot every story, but for performances with music, you need to capture the entire song in every number you want to use
• Get plenty of crowd shots. They provide emotion and are your savior when you’re in an editing bind.
• Think sequencing. Imagine how you’ll edit as your shooting. Try to get shots where your subject moves out of frame.
• Get very close shots. These make great cutaways for editing and sequencing. Try to get shots you can put anywhere, shots that are constant throughout the performance, like someone’s foot or the back of his head. Not a singer’s mouth or a pianist’s hands. You can use shots like these, but they have to match your audio track and you have to build everything around them.

When editing, lay down the entire musical audio track as well as the few video clips you have that match that audio track. Then fill the rest in with your out of sync cutaways. Keep the audio levels low in the clips that are not your main audio track, lest one part of a song interfere with another.

Finally, keep in mind that most songs are copyrighted. Gannett’s lawyers advise we include a voiceover of some kind in any track with music. Any one song should not play alone for more than 15 seconds. Doing so would be akin to creating a “music video,” which is infringement.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to do this and wondered if it were even possible. Well, it seems it wasn’t — until now.

Now you can embed Google Maps in Flash applications thanks to the Google Maps Flash API. HT to Google LatLong via Journerdism.

I’m kind of surprised this took so long.

Apparently with the API you can build Google Maps with ActionScript instead of JavaScript. This will be great for streamlining those projects that call for an interactive map as well as other interactive elements. Of course you could have always abandoned Flash for more HTML/CSS and JavaScript. The functionality would be the same and would certainly be more accessible to average computers. Maybe that’s why the Google Flash API took so long.

But it is always good to have options. Many newsrooms aren’t structured to allow constant fiddling with the backend from anyone who has the fancy. That’s where Flash and Google Maps come in handy. And now they can work together.

I’ve twice been on assignment to shoot town hall meetings, special gatherings where residents can voice concerns about targeted issues. These are some situations where the video could be good, say if everyone goes mad and chaos ensues. But they also have the propensity to be pretty average. In such case, I have to create a video of the event anyway because I dropped an hour or so of my day to be there.

But considering the video is good, what about audio? How in the world do you get quality sound from only the people who will stand up and speak at the meeting, and perhaps only the people who stand up and say something interesting?

You want to avoid audio like in this video I shot:

The only audio I got was from the camera’s front mic. Then I duplicated that channel twice to turn it up while avoiding too much hiss (rather than just cranking up the volume level).

My best solution is two-fold: First, mic the podium. Second, mic everyone else.

To do the latter will likely require some teamwork with the other videographers on the scene, if there are any. Gather them in a huddle, and suggest one of you carry one mic to each person who speaks from the crowd. Have all the videographers set their audio receivers to the same channel and voila. Cake.

You’ll need to ask the meeting’s organizers if this is OK. Chances are they may then decide to have one from their staff mic the audience for you so everyone can hear, if they haven’t arranged this already. Then all you have to do is plug into the sound board.

The problem with doing this in my example video is that the subject was kind of touchy. The meeting was held to discuss a murder in the neighborhood. Still, two TV reporters ran and crouched next to the speaker when she began. You can catch a few glimpses of them. If the media had decided in advance to work together to collect good audio, it wouldn’t have been such a circus.

So newspapers are going ker-plunk. But magazines are doing dandy. This is odd to me because I think most newspaper writing styles show a magazine envy. You’d think newspapers would just follow their noses. That’s what Pat Thornton thinks will happen anyway:

Print can be a great medium when it concentrates on its strengths. The Economist does a fantastic job of this. It is not trying to break news — print can no longer do that — but rather it is trying to take a look back at the news and provide context.

Pat proposes newspapers create an additional Sunday edition that will focus more on analysis. He adds that this would probably be best as a glossy.

For someone who works in the newspaper industry, I subscribe to a lot of magazines. I’ll spare you the list. I like magazines because they are more permanent than newspapers. You can put them in your bathroom or on your coffee table. They’re also nicer; they’re easier to manage and probably no one will be allergic to them. Earlier this month The New York Observer posited that magazines are becoming luxury items.

The Economist may be a little too luxurious for me; it is God-awful expensive. The Economist’s Web site provides some, but not all of its content. Instead it acts like a portal to subscribing to the magazine. That definitely sounds like something newspapers could do.

But I’m not quite sure that is going to happen very soon. Writers already whine about having to write a story for Web AND a story for print. Two stories for print?? Forget it …

Now your Web design 101 notes are even more outdated. Turns out people don’t mind scrolling anymore (at least vertically, I’d venture to say). This from Polish researcher Michal Pryslopski via this E-Media Tidbits post at Poynter Online:

Eyetrack research showed that conventional wisdom was changing — his audience had become more inquisitive than previously assumed. They are abandoning the habit of focusing on the top-left corner of the page.

Looks like readers are treating the Web less like print and more like the Web.

I wonder how many news Web sites still try to cram everything into the above fold?