Can Online Video Save Newspapers?

[00:08]
Matthew: Everybody, it’s permission TV live, and today’s May 7th, 2009. We’re live here in Waltham, Mass.

[applause]

[00:19]
Dave: Thank you, thank you, adoring fans.

[00:21]
Matthew: We’re excited to be here again today. Just wanted to let everyone know that we’re live on twitter as well, so please tweet to the PTVLive hash-tag with any questions or comments you have on the things that we’re talking about. We have a full agenda for you today, so we’re interested in getting going, but before we do, we just wanted to remind everyone that you can download the archives on iTunes. PermissionTV.com/itunes will take you to our video podcast link. You can also get in touch with us via facebook, as well as linkedin, we started a linkedin…

[00:54]
Dave: Absolutely

[00:55]
Matthew: ..group, all about conversational video. We’ve already got a good number of people from different companies that are involved in putting video online, or measuring video for online, or producing video for online

[01:05]
Dave: Lot of good topics

[01:07]
Matthew: We’re interested in getting the conversation going, both here on the live show as well as on linkedin and facebook, so feel free to join up and let us know what you think.

[01:16]
Dave: Continue at home

[01:20]
Matthew: [chuckles] So, first up is a topic that’s been kind of going on for a couple of weeks now about newspapers.

[01:29]
Dave: Yes, absolutely

[01:30]
Matthew: The concept that newspapers are dying is not new, that’s been around for a little while.

[01:35]
Dave: The slow decline of the last couple of years.

[01:37]
Matthew: But what is new in the past couple of weeks is there’s been kind of a resurgence of newspapers going online specifically with video.

[01:45]
Dave: Right

[01:46]
Matthew: And some are calling it the newspaper’s last gasp, some are calling it the newspaper’s revival, revolution. We put together a couple of articles that talk about how newspapers are rushing to online video.

[02:01]
Dave: Well that’s great because, I mean, part of the article talked about video streams are up on all fronts, which is really not surprising. I mean we talked about this for 17 episodes, actually. And a lot to do with recent…Chicago had a really bad outing, Boston, especially with the New York Times, it’s not surprising that they’re going to start going in this new direction. I mean, you really need to start, I mean, the advertising dollars that they lost, with craigslist, they need to make up somewhere. And video seems to be a good avenue for that right now.

[02:38]
Matthew: So for those who aren’t necessarily in New England, who may not have heard what’s going on with the Globe, The Globe is owned by The New York Times, the parent company is The New York Times. They’re basically being threatened with being shut down, unless the unions can re-work their contracts because they’re hemorrhaging money so much that the Boston Globe, which is a venerable newspaper, at least in New England, this is probably the top newspaper.

[03:07]
Dave: They were looking at..I think $83million losses here? I mean, it’s a lot, so…

[03:15]
Matthew: So what specifically can online video do to kind of, you know, bring this industry back to life?

[03:23]
Dave: Well I mean if you start introducing, obviously, the same stories you are reading about in print, if you have, not just your web department, but your actual reporters who are doing these stories, do a little bit of video just about what they’re doing. Maybe product reviews, I know the New York Times just started doing product reviews. People who are on the front of war writing about the war, writing in different parts of the country. Have a little camera, and just record yourself doing the actual story. It’s much more compelling, it keeps the eyeballs, and you can tie ads right into that.

[04:01]
Matthew: So I guess in the traditional, the newsie had a little reporter’s pad, you know, they wrote what they saw. Now the reporters can have a little flip-cam, and be recording everything they see.

[04:12]
Dave: Absolutely.

[04:13]
Matthew: That takes, as you said, if we’re talking about stuff that’s going on in Iraq or Afghanistan, on the front lines, that can be pretty compelling stuff. One of the articles that we pulled for today had a quick graph on who is most likely to shoot web video. At the top of the list were, obviously, photographers, they’ll have their equipment and they can easily adapt that. Reporters, online staff, videographers and then ‘other’. I’m not sure if you can see it, because it’s kind of washed out behind me, but there is the chart, in all of it’s washed out glory. You can check that online, John will send out the link to that if he hasn’t already.

[04:59]
Dave: But I thought part of that what was mentioned by that graph was photographers and reporters were higher than videographers. So it just goes to show you that everybody’s doing this now. And the cost is coming down.

[05:13]
Matthew: It’s not just something that a certain segment of people do. That’s kind of where you’re going with that. What used to be the domain of videographers is now part of the medium that anyone can take advantage of. We actually have a question here, on twitter, ‘escoglak’, who is down there in Kramer, how are  you doing, Steve? “If newspapers can go toward video, will they organize around topics, or stay with the general news model?”. I think that’s part of the $64,000 question, what do newspapers in general perceive as their value to their readership going forward? Traditionally newspapers were the source to get all of your late-breaking news, on-topic news. We can get that now from digital sources much faster. So we’re not going to wait around and read it online, or in print I should say. So the question is, if they are going to be a day late and a dollar short, are they going to need to shift around more in-depth analysis in opinion setting on topics? So we hear when the DOW goes up or the DOW goes down, we hear when the jobless reports come out, we hear that as soon as those reports get released. Who is telling us what to think about that? Who is telling us how to interpret those results? I mean, that’s traditionally where journalism comes in. Out newspapers are going to have to – that’s my opinion – our newspapers are going to have to shift away from short blurbs on ‘this is what happened and this is the impact it had’ to more ‘what does this all mean?’.

[06:51]
Dave: Well I’d like to see, personally, a more legitimizing news in general. I find that I don’t watch evening news at all anymore, because it’s all about disaster and famine and run for the hills, we’re all going to die tomorrow.

[07:07]
Matthew: Certainly these days.

[07:09]
Dave: Right, and I find that with newspapers, you don’t really get – I mean some newspapers but not all of them, but legitimate newspapers? It’s not about that shock and awe about those news stories. That’s the kind of news stories I want to read. Though-provoking stuff that’s going to get me informed without hearing about the puppy up a tree or swine flu is going to kill you tomorrow or blah blah blah. I digress

[07:34]
Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I think you can make a case for the shock and awe as something that came out of the cable news. So it was the broadcast TV that kind of did that to all kinds of journalism. The whole Fox-alert threat-down, that’s kind of where all of that was born from. So it’ll be interesting to see how journalism in it’s entirety moves forward in this new, ever-changing digital age. But I think there is some hope for reporters, photographers, and the people who are on the ground at the event to be shooting video and putting it
online and kind of recapturing some of their glory. So if you have any comments on that, feel free to tweet to us. It’s PTVlive is the hash-tag you can use. Use the twitter player that we have right there on the page that you’re watching us at, or you can use your own favorite twitter client. We got a comment in from Greg North, hey Greg, who is actually just on the other side of the wall, but it’s nice to see that he’s…

[08:43]
Dave: Paying attention

[08:44]
Matthew: Paying attention and twittering us. He’s getting back to, video is so easy, and he was recently in an amateur film group that created a movie in 48 hours. He posted the link up to the PTVLive hash-tag, so check it out, I did, myself, check it out the other day. It’s very funny, they did a great job. I think what he’s getting at here is, again, you don’t have to be a videographer. Here’s what a couple of guys put together.

[09:14]
Dave: You still need to go through the process. There’s still the typical process, the creative process that you learn about in school, still has to go through, but everything that goes into it is so slim and sleek and getting it done and getting it out there.

[09:29]
Matthew: So Greg, tweet to us and tell us: what did you have to do for equipment? So the folks that saw your tweet on the PTVLive hash-tag and are watching the video or will be watching the video soon, what did you need to do to create that? I think that it’s a great case study, because when you look at the video it does look pretty well produced.

[09:47]
Dave: It does. It looks really professional.

[09:48]
Matthew: And I think people would be surprised to find out the amount of effort from a logistical side anyway, there was a lot of creativity that went into it, which was Dave’s point, so let us know about that. Let’s see, what else we got, on the newspaper topic, anything else?

[10:09]
Dave: No, I just wanted to really talk about bringing back legitimate news, and I’d like to see newspapers do that. With video. That’s one of the things I really want to see, especially. I mean think about The Daily Show for instance, I don’t mean to go off topic, but it’s starting to talk about people are getting their news from The Daily Show now, instead of going to CNN, to see how CNN and NBC and Fox sensationalize everything. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Why do I have to go to The Daily Show to legitimately see what’s going on in the world?

[10:43]
Matthew: It’s a sad…

[10:46]
Dave: It’s a sad state of affairs.

[10:47] It’s a sad indictment if the guy who is doing a comedy show appears to be most reliable authority, voice in the news world.

[10:54]
Dave: Exactly! It doesn’t bode well.

[10:57]
Matthew: I mean, you had a quote from one of the articles that I think bears mentioning. The survey that was done that showed that online video that was done was not solely the domain of the web department, although online producers are involved in shooting, editing and publishing video for the newspaper’s website, reporters and photographers are also heavily involved. So again, just another example, this one backed up by data from a survey, that shows that video is becoming a pervasive media. So moving on to the next topic, which is social TV. Is that right? Is that where we’re at? So we talked a little bit about this in previous weeks, and I see that this is a really interesting topic because it’s come out back in January with CBS where people were trying to sell TVs with things like twitter clients embedded right into them. Getting social put on the TV. Now what we’re seeing is that there are websites that are social with video in it. Most notably is TV.com which has a lot of social built into it. These articles talk more about some of the new sites and apps that are available, so, what did you learn when you read these?

[12:14]
Dave: I mean, a lot of this is themes that we’ve talked about. The owner of this website called mynameise.com, basically said that the video actually cost us rental money for the cameras and drinks and pizzas. The amount of awareness that it generated, just from that single video alone, you can’t pay enough for that type of stuff. And that’s all it really took. Some creativity, and just some decent equipment, and lo and behold, there you go. Again, themes that we’ve talked about in episodes past, every month you hear about more and more stories. It’s kind of funny how you talk about it, a couple weeks back, and every single month it’s more and more a legitimate story. It’s come out that you can do it, we’re not spending a lot on it, and we’re getting a good return on it.

[13:08]
Matthew: And then the other article in this topic was watching hulu with your facebook and myspace friends. So again, coming at it from a different perspective, you’re watching TV, but TV has become a social event. You know, you’re watching shows and you’re talking about it with your friends online, and you’re getting reactions from the people that you know, “know” online.

[13:33]
Dave right, or even the people that you don’t. So Imagine you’re watching LOST, LOST is a big show for a lot of people, right? So some big hook comes in – I’m not a fan of LOST so I don’t know, but some crazy event happens and you can just watch hundreds and hundreds of reactions all at the same time of all these people going ‘oh my god I can’t believe that happened’ or ‘this guy jumped off a cliff’ or…

[13:57]
Matthew: How does the..you know, LOST is a very complex show, so people are going to be saying ‘what does this mean?’ ‘I need some help kind of deciphering this event’. I don’t watch it either, but I know that I missed the first couple of episodes so that means you might as well not bother trying to get into it now because that means I’ll never be able to catch up.

[14:16]
Dave: Get the DVD set.

[14:17]
Matthew: So, yeah. This particular article from mashable says we don’t think that TV will be replaced completely by these watch with friends applications. That’s not really a big surprise. But, it would be interesting to see how much of a dent it can make in broadcast TV viewership. Again that’s the $64,000 question that companies like hulu are grappling with because they licensed this content, they struck deals, they’re trying to get the content out online and monetize it, but at the same time, they’re afraid when there are sites that syndicate that content out beyond the boundaries of hulu.com. We’ve mentioned my media player, we’ve mentioned other aspects of hulu’s distribution “strategy” that seems to be ‘we don’t want you to watch this video anywhere but on hulu’. It’s just going to be a continuing evolution of what’s the right balance, who knows?

[15:14]
Dave: Well I mean I think another thing that came out of it was this idea of social interaction is probably going to take a stronger hold within a younger audience, right. So for instance, I don’t know if it would be interesting to you, but me personally, if I’m sitting down to watch TV, I don’t want to have a laptop on my lap and start talking to people. I just want to relax and watch my television show. But on the flip side, I would also like to think that kids, maybe high school kids, college kids, who are watching these things who would love to talk to other people at the same time. Maybe it’s just a generational thing.

[15:52]
Matthew: Yeah, and I think to the generational point, when you’re thinking about accessing the internet, you’re thinking about the laptop. That’s how I think of it too, but there’s probably a new, younger set of people that are thinking about the mobile device. So, a much smaller footprint, it’s on the table next to them or it’s just sitting around. They can pick it up and quickly IM someone or update their facebook page or SMS somebody or whatever. So, the way that these screens are starting to be present in t
he same room now is also another factor of convergence. So that’s another thing to look for. While we were talking, Greg did tweet back and let us know what his camera equipment was. He says that this year they did use an expensive camera, but the first year they used a consumer HD cam, and he sent another link from his previous year’s show.

[16:48]
Dave: But I mean, to keep in mind just for pricing, for those of you who are ‘well what does that mean?’. It’s a difference between a $600-700 camera, and between a $6000-7000 camera. So a prosumer HD camera, don’t get me wrong, it’s a little pricey. And the baggage that comes along with that is…I mean all the batteries and bags and filters and lens covers and then you need a good editing suite to go along with it because you’re generating really high quality high file size videos. So you need a lot of memory, you need a good machine to bring all that in. Right now the big thing is those S-2 cards where you’re actually writing to – I think they’re S-2 cards – hard drive media on your camera. So you’re recording, when it’s all done, it writes to an editable format, you take the card out, you stick it into the machine, you bring it right up on the machine, it’s ready to edit.

[17:48]
Matthew: Can you do HD in that?

[17:50]
Dave: HD. All high quality, I mean, 19, 20, 1080, 1080p fantastic video.

[17:58]
Matthew: So you bring up a good point that Steve Goglak just tweeted in, he said that video can be easy, but making bad video can be easy too.

[18:06]
Dave: Oh, absolutely.

[18:07]
Matthew: I mean Look at this show and you can see a perfect example of that.

[18:12]
Well, all right, we try our best.

[18:13]
Matthew: So it’s important to keep in mind who your audience is. So obviously we’re talking about this 48 hour film festival that Greg took part in, that’s a much different audience than producing video for a B2B market. So you need to know who your audience is, what their expectations are, for online video. If you’re watching PTVLive right now, you probably have pretty low expectations in what to expect in terms of content and production value. It’s a live weekly show that we just put together.

[18:41]
Dave: Well, I mean let’s be honest though. From comments that I’ve heard is that the quality of our live stream tends to be much better than what you typically see online.

[18:51]
Matthew: Are you talking about video quality or content quality?

[18:53]
Dave: No, video quality. Well, content quality is always much better. But video quality is, you know I hear it a lot. So we’re using, obviously, a higher definition camera for our show, but typically it’s really all about the equipment and your audience.

[19:14]
Matthew: So just going through the tweets, Matt Sullivan says mobile devices are convenient but they wont replace the PC or the netbook. The netbook is another whole machine that we kind of haven’t really talked about. So there’s been a, you know what a netbook is? It’s a small -

[19:34]
Dave: A small version, they’re like $600 now, or even cheaper?

[19:37]
Matthew: I don’t even know what the price is. But it seems to me like they’re too small to be easy to use kind of qwerty keyboards, but they’re too big to be convenient in terms of mobile, so I think. I’ve read on things like techcrunch that it’s destined to die before it even begins. So I think we’ll find out.

[19:57]
Dave: But it also depends, also if you think about it, on how you want to view this. You know if it’s a smaller device, the video that you want to shoot needs to be formatted differently than for something that you want to display on your television.

[20:10]
Matthew: True. All right, next up is Permission Marketing has turned 10. Permission Marketing is a book that was written by a guy named Seth Godin. If you’re into B2B marketing than you probably know who Seth is. For the people who are tweeting in to the show right now you probably don’t know, based on the quality of tweets we’re seeing. So let me tell you who he is. He is the person that wrote Permission Marketing, he really understood when the internet first came out in it’s mass-produced form, 10 years ago, that it was going to usher in a new age of marketing to people based on them giving their permission to learn more about your products or services. So it first came out in terms of email marketing. So you send someone an email and say ‘if you’re interested in what I’m talking about, click here’, and you’ll find out more. And that revolutionary idea ensued was that you now have the ability to understand this particular person, how he or she fits into the overall audience groups that you have as clients, or prospective clients, and how you can market to them more effectively. I wanted to talk about that today because this idea is kind of the namesake of this company, PermissionTV, a lot of people ask us ‘what’s PermissionTV?’ ‘What do I get permission to do if I’m your client?’ Well, it’s really more of an homage to this idea of permission based marketing. So that the applications and the capabilities that we provide allow our clients to put video that speaks to the specific personae of their targets, allows our clients to market to them in a more on-to-one fashion.

[22:00]
Dave: Right, much more meaningful.

[22:02]
Matthew: So he goes on to talk about a lot of things in this article which is actually a little bit long for Seth, he usually just writes a couple of sentences blog post each day, this one’s a little bit longer. He says the biggest measurable impact of permission marketing, is the growth of truly opt-in marketing. From close to 0, to a number big enough that we’ve all seen it, and are part of it. Not just email lists, but RSS feeds, and yes, Google AdWords. So when you think of RSS, that is the ultimate opt-in permission based marketing. So we have an RSS feed about this show, we have an RSS feed from our blog, and you can choose to subscribe to it. And by doing so you’re basically saying ‘yeah, I’m interested in online video, I’m interested in online marketing, I want to learn more about it, and I’m giving you permission to send me marketing messages and sales messages’. So when you think about web 2.0, RSS was really the foundation of that. It was really built on the idea of permission based marketing. So we want to just take a note that it’s been 10 years since we’ve been doing this. For guys like you and me, 10 years comprises a big percentage of our professional career.

[23:18]
Dave: Basically.

[23:19]
Matthew: So it’s really all we’ve ever known. We’ve been doing online, or website development, or building in your case. I think it’s interesting to me that what I take for granted, just how I run my day to day activities, in the marketing space here at PTV, is really a relatively new idea in terms of the grand scheme of business schemes here in America.

[23:44]
Dave: A lot of new marketing techniques, especially in the last, I mean I want to say year or two? If that? Just typical new ways or marketing people, with twitter, social media right now. I really personally feel like it’s really come into it’s own in the last year or two. I mean maybe a little bit before, but I feel like it hasn’t been prevalent until then.

[24:10]
Matthew: It was easier to game the system, up until a couple of years ago. It was easier to kind of trick Google or trick Yahoo into thinking your website was something that it really wasn’t. And as the algorithm, and as the technologies, and as the people get more and more advanced, we’re seeing that it’s not possible to do that anymore. Communities are what they are. People are talking about your brand online whether you want to control it or not, because you basically can’t control it. So you have to adapt to that, and understand that you got to let go. You were talking
about social media, you’ve got to understand that people are going to tweet about you, you’re not going to like what they have to say, you may not be able to do anything about it, and there’s not much you can do about it. You’ve jut got to move on. We’re at 5 minutes left, I just wanted to move on to the final topic which was last.fm. Which I thought was an interesting note. For those of you that don’t know, last.fm is one of the first kind of commercially viable music sites online. Are you familiar with last.fm?

[25:20]
Dave: I am, I mean I think they’ve come out with a new version, but they’ve been around for a while. I haven’t used them as much recently, more so back in the day.

[25:31]
Matthew: Yeah, so I mean we’ve all heard about napster, we all used napster back in the day, all these peer-to-peer file sharing things. That was great, it was the wild wild west, but eventually record labels cracked down and said, ‘we’ve got to make this thing a more commercially viable entity’. So last.fm was one of the products of that effort. And it’s online radio. What they’re now doing is launching what they’re calling ‘visual radio’. So again, video is now being brought to this medium. It reminded me of the launch of MTV, and the idea that video is going to kill the radio star. What do you think?

[26:13]
Dave: Well, I mean, I was specifically looking toward some of the new features that last.fm came out with. Part of what this article really touched on is that it could be so much more, right? That it needs more user-generated content. So it’s streaming music, throw in a couple of videos, here’s some pictures, a bad will be here, merry christmas. You know? Nothing really that unique that’s going to draw much more attention. Well how about getting some more interactivity? How about getting some more user generated content that’ll keep people? That’s their biggest complaint. This is what people need to start thinking of nowadays. Because the same tried and trusted methods, tried and tested methods, rather, that worked back in the day just don’t cut it anymore. You’ve got to start thinking outside of the box. I think that’s what they need to start thinking about.

[27:13]
Matthew: Cool. So we’re coming up on the end of our half-hour, but before we go, I just wanted to remind everyone that next week we have a couple of guests coming in. A Rachel Levy, and Joseline Mone from Boston Tweet-Up are going to be on the show. We’re going to have to figure out how we’re going to get three people behind the desk because it’s kind of cozy as it is.

[27:33]
Dave: It’s going to be interesting.

[27:33]
Matthew: But for those of you who aren’t familiar with Boston Tweet-Up, it is another local Boston online weekly video show. They focus pretty much exclusively on social media events. I’m interested to hear what they have to say, I’m interested to hear how they’re finding their recent foray into online video, and we look forward to having them on the show a week from now. But until then…

[28:00]
Dave: Well actually before you leave, you forgot all about your fabulous webinar yesterday.

[28:04]
Matthew: Oh that’s right, we had a webinar yesterday with Mike Lewis from Awareness, and Matt Kaplan, who is our head of marketing and strategy here. They talked about pretty much the same topic, they came from pretty much the same angle. Mike works for Awareness Networks, which is one of the largest social network community platforms out there. We talked about how social, and how online video can be brought together to kind of put the human touch back into marketing to the audience. So you can check that out, permissiontv.com/go/webinar is where it’s located. You’ll have to register to see the video playback, but will get that video, that recorded session up there hopefully today or tomorrow. So check that out.

[28:49]
Dave: Absolutely

[28:50]
Matthew: Thanks for reminding me about that. All right everybody, I’m Matthew Mamet

[28:52}
Dave: I'm Dave Kilkenny

[28:54]
Matthew: That’s permissionTV live. Check us back next week, at 3pm. See ya.