Surgery video is actually a field in itself. I worked for a time at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, which had an entire office dedicated to taping surgeries. This assignment was low budget compared to that, but it was interesting. The real trick to this video was being able to be where [...]
This video ran on clarionledger.com‘s niche site, Get Fit Mississippi. As you probably know, Mississippi is the most overweight state in the U.S., and this website was a way to motivate people to get healthy. This video was the kickoff in a series of weight-loss success stories. Alisha DeVille, a mother of three, managed to [...]
I was handed this assignment to complement a feature story running in The Clarion-Ledger. It turned out to be one of the more enjoyable assignments I’ve ever had. “Between the Lions” moved production to Mississippi years earlier, and every since it has been dear to the creative community. Let’s face it, Mississippi isn’t Hollywood. It [...]
I was completely schooled today. Somehow I knew nothing about AppleScript, a Mac function that works like Photoshop Actions by automating repetitive actions. It’s not new, and many books have been written about it. I’ve actually used it before without knowing. Today our newsroom computer guy sent me an AppleScript that solves a common problem [...]
I’m getting a little low on video ideas, so I decided today to brainstorm. I get my ideas for most of my videos from the following: 1. Live news stories 2. Assignments for future stories 3. The features (lifestyle) budget that comes out in advance. This one most often provides the best video ideas But [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]