Mojo Evolution

Photo: Lone Black Rider. CC 2.0: Some rights reserved.

Have you ever tried “double dutching”? It’s bloody difficult. If your rope swingers don’t handle the task or you don’t get your rythm, it will be ugly and not a memorable occasion. But if everything is in sync you will amaze both your viewers and yourself. It’s pretty much the same thing when introducing video into your internet articles. Want to try a different approach?

As embedded video are used more and more, it’s important to think about how you design your storyline. On most pages there seems to be little coherence between text, pictures and video. So, what’s the best use of embedded video?

Non-coherent story

In most cases, I find that newsrooms tend to “double dutch” their articles in a bad manner. Meaning that they’ve actually got two different storyline’s out of sync in the same article. They tend to make one storyline with text, links and sometimes pictures, and a separate line with they’re video stories.  In this analogy it’s like double dutching when you’re out of sync.

Produce for web

In my opinion, the problem for newsroom’s is that they’re adopting too much of the storyline thinking from television. The goal seems to be transferring what’s good on television to web. This could be due to the fact that a lot of the clip producers come from traditional television, and that they’re base of knowledge is traditional TV stories. Since they often are more experienced than the “new” clip producers, they tend to control the development of use of video on web. It’s nothing wrong with producing a good television story for web, but when it’s combined with a text story, the two things seem to battle for attention. A lot of newsplayers out there gives us good standalone stories. What you should avoid is making a standalone story for embedding.

As mojo’s are growing in numbers, I hope we will see a shift in who controls the development. Articles with video from major newsrooms should be made for web, not being some sort of mixture of traditional TV and newspaper.

I’m not stupid

One of the first things you will notice when you read/watch an article/video that’s “double dutching” in a bad manner is that you at least get the story twice. In my opinion it’s both unnecessary and expensive. Building video stories on web in the same way you do on TV, is extremely time consuming. What we know from a lot of eye tracker studies, is that most users won’t read an article thoroughly. Bad coherence between text and video won’t make it better.

Studies from the BBC shows that people don’t like long video clips in articles. They don’t like video that’s not relevant for the story, and they don’t like video with bad quality.

What they do like is short relevant video clips. It could be a relevant statement or a relevant situation.

Snakeline

Eye tracking gives a lot of information about how people read an article. As we get more and more elements to choose from when producing an article, I guess the pattern would change also.

People tend to read an article in an F-behavior. This means that you’re able to call on people’s attention for clips placed in the right side of the article, but they’re also likely to skip it if it’s not relevant. This is also the most common place for pictures.

When you’re building a story for TV, you have to use an efficient way of packaging to keep the viewers attention. Pictures to illustrate words in the manuscript from the reporter are used a lot. The reporter tends to tell facts and the interviewee talks about his or here’s opinions or feelings.

On web it’s much more efficient to write all factual information as text in the article and still let the interviewee present opinions/feelings in embedded video. You can place the video where it’s natural according to your factual text. Written successful you should be able to get you’re users to “snake” they’re way down the article.

My belief is that it’s much easier to succeed when building a newsstory with the “snakeline”, than “double dutching”. I don’t say that using a thoroughly built TV story is to be rejected at all times, but on a day to day basis, breaking up your material will give a better result.

 

If your Flash Player is a bit advanced, you will also be able to control where in the timeline of the interview you set your still image or you can use the player both for showing pictures and playing video. An example of a good player is the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

The “snakeline” should also be perfect for bigger newsrooms using mojo’s. It’s much easier for the staff in the newsroom to gather facts and let the mojo get the interviews. Longer stories could still be put in your newsplayer or at the top of the article.

As always, I’m happy if you would like to share your opinion about this topic. If you’ve seen good examples, leave a url in the comments field.

Edit:
A colleague also tipped me that Andy Dickinson has written this peace about the same subject: Top ten tips for newspaper video

Tags: Storytelling //