2005 Annual Report - Online Newsroom Investment

One area where there has been some development is Web video.

Over the past few years, it has become more sophisticated and user-friendly, particularly in the amount of time required to connect, buffer time and rebuffer time.² And considerable percentages of young people feel the quality of Web video has caught up with or even surpassed television. In September 2004, the Online Publishers Association conducted research that showed that two thirds of people 18 to 34 years old (67%) said watching a short video clip online was the same as watching highlights on television, or better.³

Much of that video, moreover, is journalism. A study by AccuStream iMedia Research, which conducts studies on interactive broadcasting and streaming media, shows that news captures 18% of all streaming video, second only to music videos at 34%.⁴

One of the biggest developments heading into 2005 is the emergence of search tools for video, a move that could have a wide impact on online advertising and copyright law in particular. Media companies will surely lobby Congress to adopt a more muscular position on protecting copyrights for movies and television. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft were all developing new search tools for digital video. How the story develops in 2005 could be critical in the online media universe.

A leading online newspaper in using Web video is The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware. Because Wilmington has no local broadcast stations of its own, The News Journal has begun providing local breaking-news footage to Wilmington residents online. The site runs a three-minute newscast, produced by the paper and featuring an anchor from the paper's staff, twice each day. The paper is considering doubling the number of newscasts, adding sports coverage and even offering a live stream. According to the paper's vice president of new media, traffic to the site has been growing 20% each week.⁵

The New York Times began using its Web site in 2004 to run video created by the columnist Nicholas Kristof. The Times even broadcast the political conventions live on its site, which made it a competitor of the television networks. As a BusinessWeek Online editor put it, "Publishers now have to think of themselves programming in day parts, which is much more like TV than magazine publishing."⁶

In late November 2004, The Wall Street Journal Online launched "The Wall Street Journal Video Center," which houses video clips of both breaking news and financial information from Journal analysts and from partners like CNBC.⁷

Some papers are using the Web to create more transparency in their operations. When the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board sat down with the mayoral candidates in the last election - a proceeding that is normally closed to the public - the paper took advantage of its site, sfgate.com, to post unedited video of the meetings. In the three days after the videos were posted, 35,000 page views were recorded. The site also included information on how the editorial board made its endorsement decision.⁸

Smaller papers, too, are finding ways to invest in technology to provide additional content. When a fire threatened Carson City, the 17,000-circulation Nevada Appeal created a blog to keep track of the fire's movement, updating it every 10 minutes. As a result, Web traffic jumped to 15 times the norm. The blog ended up costing the paper only about $2,000 in overtime pay for staff members.⁹

During the hurricane season of 2004, blogs became a critical source of information for delivering the news when the hurricanes shut down the normal capacity of newsrooms. The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi, used a blogger to post frequent storm updates from staff people out in the field, who filed using laptops and cell phones.

For now, those are examples of the potential of the medium, and they probably represent exceptions, not the norm. A University of Texas study found that more than half the papers they studied updated their Web sites occasionally from their print editions (aptly called shovel-ware).¹⁰