News video on Irish broadcasters' websites

None of the websites of Irish broadcasters offer much in the way of web-specific video that accompanies articles. The focus is very much on offering a catch-up service and linking these to the articles. Here's a look at the journalistic video on offer from Irish broadcasters on their websites.

RTÉ

A huge back-catalogue of news bulletins, dating back to 1998 (an early example is here). Many of the earlier files are of poor quality however. In recent years, more and more news programmes have become available, including current affairs programmes such as Prime Time, and niche news bulletins like RTÉ News on Two, and breaking news programmes. RTÉ News Now (the top-right screengrab in the picture) launched in 2008. Since 2009, programmes are available in higher-quality Flash format via the RTÉ Player, but for a limited time only. Bulletins can be watched live.

Online realm is a new way of telling The Story

Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan are chiefly responsible for The Story, a website "dedicated to combining data and promoting transparency" in Irish public life. The blog is updated several times a day most days and mixes reports and information from other sources with its on FOI requests.

The site follows through on its promise to "promote" transparency. Not only do its operators send Freedom of Information requests, last December Mark Coughlan offered to fund requests that DCU students wanted to send for publication on the website. It does this through donations it receives, and it has so far received over €2,600 from donors. As the price of FOI requests can run into the hundreds, this is particularly useful.

Huge variation in news sites' use of embedded hyperlinks

Hyperlinking is one of the web's ways of showing you around the place. It's useful at finding out more about a story - for instance, if a piece refers to a report from the Central Statistics Office, it would be handy to be able to refer to the document itself.

Glancing at them can be a little distracting, however, and I find that they can disrupt your eye's flow.

There is a big difference among news websites' use of embedded hyperlinks. The results of a sample of 12 websites are as follows:

The Telegraph, recreated in wiki

As a part of our online journalism class, we've each taken a news website and recreated it in wiki form. Denis McEvoy, Ciara Ní Ghabhann and myself recreated the Daily Telegraph's website. The image here compares our attempt with the Telegraph's site.

Visit our Telegraph homepage

An example of an article page

Note: access to the CM265 course page on the DCU Moodle network is required.

Storyful beginning to take shape

Mark Little's new online journalism project has found its online home. Storyful has launched on storyful.com, and although it has a placeholder homepage at the moment (pictured right), it has an active blog. David Clinch, formerly of CNN, has joined the project and is a regular contributor to the blog.

Storyful's most recent post details the repsonse on Twitter to the volcanic ash crisis in Europe. David Clinch had a busy few days, and writes that apart from listening to RTÉ Radio's Morning Ireland, "Twitter was my mobile lifeline for information about the latest developments in what quickly became known as #ashtag.'

Contact the journalist

Some websites like to give out their journalists' email addresses while others don't. Some websites (like the San Francisco Chronicle) make it easy for its readers to contact its staff, and put the address either alongside the byline or at the bottom of articles.

How contactable should a journalist be? In some local newsrooms (like the Carlow Nationalist and the Roscommon Herald), the email addresses of all staff journalists are available. This is understandable, as given their small workforce they would be highly likely to read anything which came into a generic 'news' address anyway. With a comparatively small franchise area, the amount of unnecessary email would also be comparatively small. But the norm in local newsrooms, it seems, is to just give out that generic address (and, perhaps, the editors'). See examples here, here, here and here.

Stateside: New York Times vs San Francisco Chronicle

The two sites assessed on different criteria, to see which is making the most of its internet potential.

Hyperlinking

The New York Times uses this to good effect, linking to topics which it covers in other articles. The San Francisco Chronicle sometimes links to related articles, but doesn't use hyperlinks within the actual copy. Verdict: New York Times.

Video and audio

Other than live views of the Bay Area, there appear to be no video on SFgate.com. The New York Times offers both audio (as in this article) and video, which is embedded into the article and made available via its specific video section. The videos in this example come from Reuters. Verdict: New York Times

Sydney Morning Herald's strong emphasis on video

The multimedia content of the Sydney Morning Herald's website is understated on its homepage. The emphasis is very much on text and photos - the video section only becomes prominent once you hit the page down button twice (on a 1280x800 screen resolution) and the only graphic is beside the business section, a further 'page down' press away.

But with a little bit of digging, the multimedia content certainly is there. The video section is quite comprehensive, and features content from Reuters as well as its own content produced in-house. As we learned this semester, users are up to 20 times more likely to watch a video if it is embedded into the article as opposed to be linked to from it (Thurman and Lupton 2008). The SMH have the right idea by embedding their videos, like they have in this article.

What is The Huffington Post?

The Huffington Post - in its website header - says it's 'The internet newspaper: news blogs video community'. There are all sorts of oxymorons going on there, a newspaper is surely something which exists on paper? And how can a newspaper contain video? Is there really such a thing as an 'internet newspaper'?

Its tagline promises multimedia and it delivers. Not only does it have video attached to stories (as well as an entire video section), there are photos and graphics everywhere.

While there aren't any hyperlinks within the copy, articles like this one feature external links at the end. There is also an extensive external link section at the bottom of the section pages, subdivided into news websites and blogs and by category (e.g. politics, media, business etc.).

UK election: Guardian.co.uk vs Telegraph.co.uk

Just as RTÉ showed in 2007, there's nothing like a general election to get online news sources to try out new things. Here, I'll compare the use of multimedia election coverage of the Guardian and Telegraph websites. Multimedia isn't the be all and end all, of course, but it's a start in assessing which website is embracing online capabilities more.

What they've got

Both websites have a graphic-heavy constituency map and swingometer. The Guardian offers more ways of viewing these, including bar charts and geographical maps. Their swingometer allows you to swing across all three main parties at once, which The Telegraph doesn't (you can only do two at a time). The Guardian published the itinerary of the three main leaders, and linked these to an interactive Google Map. They also have a graphed tracker of reactions to the ITV debate. The Telegraph has a 'how I should vote' feature, and a comprehensive Flash-based poll tracker. The Guardian's Flash poll tracker is several weeks out-of-date, but goes back to the 1980s.