Editor’s Note: When it comes to engaging readers or viewers, it’s tough to beat a good animal story. Few papers have developed a finer appreciation of such stories over the years than the Detroit Free Press. The paper’s technology columnist, Mike Wendland, who is also a Fellow at Poynter, added a new dimension to the genre this week with a video sidebar to a column about a pesky squirrel. “In more than 25 years of journalism experience in print, broadcast and the Net,” Mike says, “I have never received such an immediate, warm, supportive response from the public.”
The column was meant to be fun – a look at the frustration I experienced in trying to use technology to thwart a persistent little Pine Squirrel I call Rocky, who has bested every attempt I’ve made over the past couple of years to keep him out of my birdfeeder. You can read it by clicking this link.
But in describing for print Rocky’s hilarious and never-say-die antics as he beat the latest high tech bird feeder I installed, I really wanted more than just words and a still picture to tell the story.
So I shot some video on a home digital camcorder and then used the iMovie editing software on a new G4 733Mhx PowerMac I was testing to produce a two-minute video I call “Persistence.”
I had to post the video on my own Web site, www.pcmike.com, because the Freep’s Web site, for a bunch of technical and policy reasons, wasn’t able to accommodate the files I needed to upload to their server.
No problem, I thought.
I had no idea how huge a hit the video would be. In the first 24 hours, some 10,000 people tried to access the video, first posted in the Real Video format. I normally buy about 8 Gigs of bandwidth a month, plenty to handle the 3,500 daily visitors my site gets. But the extra demands of the streaming video and the massive interest soon exhausted that and the site went down until I contacted the hosting company and shelled out another $80 for more bandwidth.
But after lots of reader feedback asking me why the video wasn’t in Apple’s proprietary QuickTime streaming format, I found a free service Apple offers that allows its customers to store streaming video on and Apple server. It took me ten minutes to transfer the video over.
You can see the QuickTime version of the video by clicking here.
I’d send you to look at the Real version on my site but I can’t afford the extra hits. But trust me, there is no comparison to the quality. QuickTime is faster, cleaner and plays back in a larger box than RealVideo. And setting up the page on Apple’s servers was a breeze. As was editing the piece in iMovie.
I really like the way using the Net and video to enhance a print story completes the reporting process. So did the readers, who went to the Net to watch the video, and then e-mailed me their reaction. In turn, I posted e-mail summaries on my online e-journal, even including pictures of some of the weird contraptions people suggested I use on Rocky. Before becoming the technology columnist at the Freep, I spent most of my news career as an investigative reporter. My stories have sent people to jail, sparked governmental reforms and exposed corruption and wrongdoing. But in more than 25 years of journalism experience in print, broadcast and the Net, I have never received such an immediate, warm, supportive response from the public.
Besides the 10,000 Web site video visits, I have received more than 300 e-mails from people all across the country and even England and Australia. Many said they forwarded the column and video link to friends. And several dozen urged me to keep making Web videos available to accompany my columns.
I really like that idea. Think of Web videos as sidebars. They’re a terrific way to add more depth to our journalism, drive traffic to our Web sites and then back to the newspapers. And, most importantly, the whole process creates a strong bond to the reader as it develops a sense of converged community.
I owe this newfound appreciation for multimedia to Rocky who, last I saw him this morning, was clinging to the feeder contentedly munching away, oblivious to his new-found celebrity.
I just hope he doesn’t invite his relatives over to dinner.
