With changing TV viewing habits, First Coast News in Jacksonville, Florida, is experimenting with augmented reality and 3D technologies to grab viewers’ attention and enhance the storytelling experience.

First Coast News is the news operation for Tegna television stations WTVL, an NBC affiliate, and WJXX, an ABC affiliate.

During recent newscasts, First Coast News anchors in the studio have dodged a school bus and shared the screen with a circling shark — both virtual, of course.

I visited with News Director Meagan Harris about the experiments.

Why is the station experimenting with 3D and augmented reality technologies?

Meagan Harris: The whole point is to improve storytelling. It’s more than just the look. We want to make the story easier to understand. And more importantly, we want to make the story memorable. Movement within a shot adds interest and energy.

We’ve been doing news the same way for too long. If you were to Google “1980s newscast,” the show is going to open with a two-shot, animation and then a reporter live in the field. We have to be better than that. The virtual set allows us to be creative. Instead of building a newscast we’re building a show.

What resources, such as extra staff, funding and equipment, has this project required so far?

Harris: We had to buy the virtual set, which is cheaper than buying a real set.

Tegna, which has a graphic hub that works out of Denver, makes a lot of the graphics for us. I also hired one employee who does 3D animation and we had another employee who dabbled in that as well. For six months we’ve been training them on how to use this system and how to make things through the system. We’re teaching our people how to make the augmented reality elements like the shark and the school bus. It takes an incredibly long time to make any kind of high quality augmented reality element but the finished product is worth it. I also utilized the employees I already had and cross-trained people on how to shoot the virtual set with a jib and a steadicam.

Most of our conversations center around “how can we best tell the story?”

How do you decide which stories and projects warrant these technologies?

Harris: We use the virtual set every day for every single show. We can transition from the real set to the virtual set seamlessly. As far as the augmented reality-type stuff, it takes a really long time to make these. We can’t order something to be made that day and get it that day. We have to think weeks and months in advance. Before school started we ordered a 3D augmented reality element of a school bus. We know the Jaguar’s season is coming up. We try to order one augmented reality element a month because we’re starting from scratch. We have to build a database of elements we can utilize. For now, as far as augmented reality elements, we can only use what we have. Most of our conversations center around “how can we best tell the story?” That’s the conversation we have from top to bottom from producers to photographers to reporters. That conversation starts in the morning meeting and we continue it throughout the day.

What have been some of the challenges of using this technology?

Harris: The anchors had to get used to it. They’re use to sitting behind a desk and now you can see them from head to toe. They can’t see where they are beyond the monitors. It’s extremely uncomfortable for the on-air talent in the beginning. You’re literally standing in a green room. You have to know where the virtual monitor is going to pop up from the virtual floor or where it’s going to fall down or what’s coming in and how to move around it to make it look as if it’s real.

Getting high quality graphics done in a timely manner has also been a challenge. It just takes time to get them produced.

What advice would you have for other newsrooms that are interested in experimenting with this technology?

Harris: Be patient. Many people in television are like me. We’re instant gratification kind of people. The reality is if you want it to be good, sometimes it takes a little bit of time to get it done and do it right.

It might seem like an eternity, which is like six months in my world, because I wanted it on the air yesterday. Now I see the product on the air and it was worth the wait. You have to do it right. You don’t want to rush it. With that said, if you look at the way television is changing, we don’t have time to wait, so you have to find a happy medium.

You also need buy-in with the staff. You have to have a newsroom that embraces doing new things and is excited about it, because if they don’t buy in, it’s not going to work. You have to have producers who want to do it and anchors who want to practice and get used to it and feel comfortable in that space. They’ll look ridiculous if they don’t.

How has your audience responded to this?

Harris: We get a lot of feedback. I haven’t really seen any negative feedback on it. It just drives home the fact that if you want the viewers to notice that you’ve done something, it has to be something drastic. It has to be bold. Viewers are not watching newscasts every single day. They’re watching the news on their phone. If you want viewers to notice, and to get new viewers, it has to be bold.

I’m not going to lie: I can’t look at my ratings and say, “Oh I’ve seen this massive increase when we started to do this.”

It’s a slow process and you have to believe in it and continue to do it for viewers to notice. Do viewers notice? Absolutely. But you’re fighting changing viewing habits. It’s just a reality. When I look at my news product, it’s no longer a television station, we’re a media outlet. We provide content on many platforms.

This story was originally published on RJI Online.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post How Jacksonville Local TV Stations Are Enhancing Storytelling with AR and 3D appeared first on MediaShift.

RJI recently asked newsrooms and ad agencies what they are doing today that they weren’t doing a year ago. Turns out quite a lot! This new RJI series will highlight some of the innovations and experiments we discovered and share what leaders are learning along the way. 
This Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.

Photo courtesy GateHouse Media

Although news stories can be fed automatically from a CMS to Alexa-equipped devices like the Amazon Echo, Christopher Biondi, senior director of digital development at GateHouse Media, believes tailoring the content to the new platform is the best way to provide a good listening experience.

This is just one takeaway GateHouse newspaper leaders are learning as they try out the voice assistant technology. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch is one of the newspapers hand-picking its content.

Producers select stories they believe their audiences are interested in and then summarize them into four or five sentences for the text-to-audio briefings. Only five stories can be sent to the platform at a time, but content can be swapped out for breaking news and other stories throughout the day.

Part of helping audiences have a better listening experience includes making sure the stories are being read clearly. For example, Dispatch staff are discovering which words are hardest for Alexa to pronounce. Using a phonetic spelling often helps alleviate this, says Gary Kiefer, managing editor of new media at the Dispatch.

Senior Information Specialist Jennifer Nelson interviewed Kiefer, Biondi and Karina Pagano, director of digital products at GateHouse, to learn more about their efforts.

This is what the Columbus Dispatch sounds like on Alexa

Why are GateHouse newspapers using this technology?

Biondi: We wanted to be an early adopter so we could experiment and adjust as the platform grows. Early on, we see this more as an audience extension platform, and are only beginning to discuss how news on an Echo or another device could be monetized.

What kinds of resources, such as extra staff and funding, did the newspapers need?

Pagano: Out of the gate, no additional staffing was needed, because we are using automated feeds for Alexa to read. However, we do want larger [newspaper] sites to curate and perhaps rewrite tops of articles to fit the platform. Ultimately, we could see some newsrooms producing audio files. These two phases would take additional resources.

Gary, how has this new task fit into your staff’s workflow?

Kiefer: We have a team of eight producers who have primary responsibility for updating the website, sending out newsletters, editing videos, doing podcasts and other tasks that don’t affect the printed paper. We’ve just made this one of the assignments. Typically, the person who is going to pick the stories for the newsletter that day will also handle the Alexa feed.

How do you decide which five stories to use?

Kiefer: We usually pick things we think people will be talking about, so obviously if we have a big breaking news story, we’ll use that. We also use stories we consider pop culture. Last month we had a review of Twenty-One Pilots because they played a whole concert series here. Quite often we have a sports story, with this being a big sports town. We try to keep them to newsy stories as opposed to features, in part, because it’s easier to write a summary for a more straightforward story.

How do you get the stories onto the Alexa platform?

Kiefer: GateHouse has provided us with an easy way to get the stories from our CMS to Amazon. We add a specific category to the story, and that creates a feed to Amazon. It runs off an RSS feed.

What kind of feedback have you heard from customers?

Pagano: The reviews in the Alexa app’s Skills listings so far have been mostly positive. Though in some cases, the automated feeds can push content in that does not work well in text to speech — lottery results, for example. This is why we want to move to at least a basic level of curation.

Kiefer: Mostly a lot of curiosity. When we launched, we ran a story in the paper and we did some promotion on the website. We had a number of people who weren’t that familiar with the whole thing and they were wondering, “What’s this all about?” We sent out a bunch of information about how this works. This year we have seen how the awareness has increased about these voice assistant systems. We have an Echo Dot in our office. We show it off to visitors all the time. For somebody coming into a newsroom, seeing that in action has more of a “wow” factor than looking at a bunch of people sitting at desks working on computers.

Do people have to be a paying newspaper subscriber to get this news on their device?

Kiefer: No, this is a free service. We consider it a sample of our work, just like a grocery store might offer shoppers samples of some foods.

Gary, what’s a challenge you’ve had and how have you overcome it?

Kiefer: Alexa is really good at a lot of basic text-to-speech things. We have a couple things here that pop up a lot that she can’t pronounce. One is the name of our governor who is John Kasich. She mispronounces that. We have taken to spelling it phonetically in our summary. We also have a river here called the Scioto and she stumbles over that.

In news stories, when we talk about a legislator we often write “Rep.” and then the name and an “R” in parentheses to indicate Republican. Those don’t really translate so we have to spell those things out. Also, a straight period after “Rep” can make her stop, if she’s near the end of the last sentence, because she sees that as the end of a sentence.  We’re sort of learning her pattern. There are some other things that are really done well, surprisingly. The goalie from our hockey team here is a Russian. His name is Sergei Bobrovsky and that comes through almost exactly like he would pronounce it.

What advice would you have for other news organizations that are considering using this technology?

Biondi: To really think about the content you are pushing to Alexa. I don’t think you will get many shots at engaging a user, and if the content isn’t written in a way that works for news radio, the poor text-to-speech user experience will make it difficult to grow your audience. I think curation will be key to writing to the platform or at least tweaking existing content so it works.

What’s next for this technology and your newspapers?

Biondi: A future phase could include some newsrooms producing true audio files, with a reader presenting from the newsroom — a much better news experience than text-to-speech. But we expect text-to-speech technology will continue to improve as Amazon and others press ahead.

Gary, anything else you’d like to add?

Kiefer: For the staff, there’s a little bit of a fun factor for this. So much of what we do is well established. We’ve been putting together a newspaper since 1871, so there isn’t much new there. But this is new. People get to learn and they get to try these things and they get to hear Alexa read their stuff and see if she got it all right. I think it’s just a little bit of diversionary fun.

Interested in learning more about GateHouse newsrooms using Amazon Alexa? Send an email to Chris Biondi at cbiondi@gatehousemedia.com.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post What GateHouse Media Learned with Amazon Echo Experiments appeared first on MediaShift.

RJI recently asked newsrooms and ad agencies what they are doing today that they weren’t doing a year ago. Turns out quite a lot! This new RJI series will highlight some of the innovations and experiments we discovered and share what leaders are learning along the way. 

This Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.  

Anthony Quintano and Landess Kearns, Honolulu Civil Beat Office Hours.

The Honolulu Civil Beat’s weekly Facebook Live broadcast is an ongoing experiment for the two-person team behind it as they try out new technology, locations and formats.

During Office Hours, which streams every Friday, Engagement Editor Anthony Quintano and Audience Development Editor Landess Kearns talk about the latest news, ask the audience for feedback and answer viewers’ questions. But they’ve also used the broadcast to raise money for their nonprofit news site, and share internal news.

One lesson has stood out: Greeting folks and reacting to their inquiries on air leads to more interest from viewers, says Quintano.

The duo’s also learned that they get more viewers when they leave the newsroom and take their show outside, whether at the beach or the state capitol.

Typically, Office Hours brings in between 2,000 and 4,000 views but a 42-minute broadcast at the beach resulted in 113 shares and more than 24,000 views. Quintano attributes the higher numbers not just to the scenery, but also people’s interest in seeing the “higher than normal” recent king tides.

Quintano and Kearns recently experimented with 360 video during one broadcast in the newsroom and attracted more than 7,000 views.

RJI Senior Information Specialist Jennifer Nelson visited with Quintano and Kearns to learn more about Office Hours and Civil Beat’s other uses for Facebook Live.

What is Office Hours and what prompted you to launch it?

Kearns: It’s basically an effort to have full transparency with our readers. We have pretty loyal readers so they’re pretty engaged on our Facebook page. But we really just wanted to open a conversation with them so they could give us direct feedback.

Quintano: I came up with the idea last year when I started but I never really pursued it myself. But when Landess came on board with us in January, I felt like it would be better to have someone to banter with.

I come from a real social background. I worked at NBC News for five years and did a lot of livestreaming stuff back then. The biggest way to be successful with livestreams is through engagement and talking to the people who are watching. We streamed a lot of things like press conferences but we didn’t do a lot to directly engage with our readers. We really wanted to have a platform that we could talk directly to folks.

What kinds of resources — extra money, equipment or staff — did it require to launch Office Hours?

Quintano: We didn’t want something that took up a lot of resources or inconvenienced anybody because everybody here is very busy. It’s been the two of us for the most part but we have had some special guests.

Kearns: In terms of equipment it’s as complicated as we want it to be. The first couple of times we streamed, we just used an iPhone — no mics or anything — and a tripod. We’ve also used a camcorder and two microphones, so we’re kind of experimenting with equipment as we go and seeing what works best.

Quintano: Office Hours has given us the opportunity to experiment with the tools we have so we know how to best use them for our other livestreams.

How has your audience responded to Office Hours so far?

Kearns: A lot of people just pop in and say “hello” and say where they’re watching from.  That’s been one of the coolest things. Some people are watching from Scotland. It can get really cool to see what kind of reach we’re having. Other times it’s slow.

Quintano: We’ve seen ups and downs in viewing habits but have learned that viewers love when we go on location. We’ve streamed on beaches and on an Air Force base. We’ve seen that viewers love acknowledgement. When we verbally respond to their comments and questions, it keeps them sticking around longer. We also did an Office Hours live in 360 and people got a kick out of the experience. Our last Office Hours we used the donate button on our broadcast and asked folks to support Civil Beat and received donations from five people totaling $200 in a window of 30 minutes.

Now that you have several episodes under your belt, what would you do differently if you were launching Office Hours for the first time?

Kearns: I don’t think I would do anything differently. It’s been such a growing experience. I kind of feel like we begin new each week. We’re just constantly trying to find ways to improve. It’s fun to see the progression.

Quintano: We’ve definitely become more comfortable on camera. If anyone is going to start doing this, it’s really helpful to be on camera regularly to get comfortable. Even if you’re doing it on the web cam on the computer in your office, it’s still a little nerve racking. The hour before we start we always get a little nervous.

Is there any topic you talk about that seems to make your audience engage with you more?

Quintano: The most engagement we’ve seen has been when we respond directly to the viewers and answer their questions in real-time. There hasn’t been any one particular topic that has stood out among the others.

How else are you using Facebook Live?

Quintano: We cover a lot of press conferences and town hall meetings, especially when nobody else is streaming them, to make sure we can bring that information to people who can’t be there.

We also stream our events to make sure those who can’t attend in person can still view or participate from home or on the mainland. For our last event we coordinated watch parties at multiple libraries across the neighboring islands to view a discussion on news literacy.

Interested in trying Facebook Live in your newsroom? Send an email to Anthony Quintano at aquintano@civilbeat.com or Landess Kearns at lkearns@civilbeat.com for more information.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post Here’s What Honolulu Civil Beat Is Learning from Facebook Live appeared first on MediaShift.

As the news crew at KTVB in Boise, Idaho, has learned, launching their drone for news coverage can draw a crowd. Executive News Director Kate Morris says this has been a good opportunity to educate the public about the opportunities the new technology offers journalists and assure folks of the TV station’s commitment to ethical journalism and safety.

But crowds have also posed challenges. Morris says her team has learned that it’s best to have additional staff on hand to answer people’s questions so the drone operators can stay focused on the job at hand.

Senior Information Specialist Jennifer Nelson recently visited with Morris about KTVB’s drone efforts.

This Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.

Jennifer Nelson: What inspired you to begin using a drone for news coverage?

Kate Morris: I think we’re in a rapidly changing environment for newsgathering and presentation. We don’t have a helicopter in this market. The drone allows us to capture images and perspective we think helps us or allows us to tell better visual stories.

What kinds of resources did you need to launch this coverage and keep it going?

Morris:  We knew that our parent company [Tegna] was working on developing specific protocols for the drone. We wanted to be ready to participate once they were in place, go through Tegna’s program and launch one.

We had put aside money in our budget. I want to say our drone, all together with the drone and batteries, was about $10,000. So, there was a bit of planning in terms of buying a high-quality drone that was going to be safe to fly.

We didn’t add any staffing but chose two drone champions within our newsroom — two people who are always open to trying and learning new things. It’s quite a process to go through the training. We paid for an online course; it’s not required. We paid about $100 for this course and our two drone champions spent a lot of time studying. Then they had to take the Part 107 certification test required by the Federal Aviation Administration, and that’s about $150 a person.

We then participated in a weeklong special drone training program, which was required by Tegna. The two drone champions practiced with each other on operating the drone, operating the camera and communicating with one another; as well as paying attention to what was in the sky. They went through a really thorough process before we even launched.

In order to keep it going we have to make sure we fly regularly. Those two drone champions must keep up with their education and FAA requirements. They must take meticulous care of the drone. There are certain checklists that they review to take care of all the parts. They do regular maintenance on the drone like you would your vehicles. There’s quite a checklist when your number one priority is safety.

What goes into planning and executing a successful drone shoot like your coverage of the McCall Winter Carnival?

Morris: We had to secure a location — a roped off area in this case — to safely put up our drone. We alerted the FAA and kept in contact with airport officials to ensure air safety. Weather was a major factor that day and nearly prevented us from putting the drone up. We are carefully monitoring conditions including temperature, wind and visibility.

How do you decide what stories to use the drone for?

Morris: Everyone is super excited about the drone in the newsroom. A lot of folks say, “Let’s go put the drone up.” It’s not as simple as putting the drone up because our number one priority has to be safety, so it depends on weather conditions. You can’t fly a drone for a weather story if it’s too windy or rainy. There are so many different things we have to factor in before we put it up. That isn’t to say we haven’t been able to use it day of coverage. We do have special waivers where we can put it up pretty much anywhere in our DMA, as long as we’re not right next to the airport.

We just have to make sure that we go through our checklist and that safety is our first priority. Then the drone is something we’re able to use. It’s not something we’ve used on a whim or for every single instance. But if it makes sense, then we put it up. We put it up recently for a court story. We just got drone footage of the Ada County Courthouse here in town. It was visually not an exciting story otherwise.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you were going to launch the drone today for the first time?

Morris: I would say the hardest part is being able to operate the drone and communicate with your partner. I would recommend as much practice time before a live launch as possible.

We chose to launch at a big community event. As you might imagine, that drew a really large crowd. A lot of people who were curious, had lots of questions. I would have someone on standby just to do crowd control and Q-and-A because that instance to us was very distracting for our operators. Fortunately for us we had other staff out there that could come help but it was a little bit distracting. I would make sure you have people there who are very knowledgeable about the process that you put in place, someone who just answers basic questions.

It sounds like you have more than one drone operator at a time. Why is that?

Morris: FAA requires that there be at least two people operating a drone for commercial use. One is a visual observer, the other is the remote pilot in command. This allows us to make sure the drone is operating safely, not flying over people, or in the direction of power lines and so forth.

You had mentioned that one of the hardest things is for the drone operators to communicate with one another. Why is that? Are they in different locations?

Morris: The operators are near one another. Eyes must be on the drone at all times. The drone operator and camera operator must communicate to make sure someone has their eyes on it.  I think in the beginning it’s a learned process of how to work together. This becomes easier with time and practice.

How have viewers responded to the drone and the coverage it has provided?

Morris: I think people have responded really positively. We’ve gotten really great comments and compliments. Lots of talk about the drone. People think the footage looks great and they’re very impressed with that. Our latest drone shoot received over 200,000 views between Facebook and YouTube. It was of Shoshone Falls.

I will say that every time we put the drone up we’ve had people comment about and ask questions. At least one person is always concerned about what we’re taping and privacy.

What we’ve tried to do is be super transparent and overly communicative on air but then also in person. We’ll step down and show them our licenses and waivers. We’ll explain to them exactly how it works and work to reassure people.

We also remind people that we’ve had telephoto lenses for decades. We don’t spy on people in their backyards or peer through windows with our telephoto lenses. We could go on top of a building and shoot down to street level. Our goal is not to invade privacy. We operate under the same journalistic standards of integrity that we do with our regular cameras. So for me, ultimately, it’s about building trust through transparency.

Do you plan to continue to shoot drone footage and, if so, what’s next for the drone?

Morris: Yes, absolutely. We plan to update all our marketing footage. We’re talking about going out and shooting a lot of scenic shots around our DMA and using that as daily show closers. We’ll be using it for several sweeps pieces coming up this month to kind of give people a different perspective and enhance our storytelling.

We’ll also continue with day-of coverage as it makes sense because, as I mentioned, safety is our number one priority and we take that responsibility very seriously.

You can contact Kate Morris for more tips by sending an email to kmorris@ktvb.com.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post ‘Trust Through Transparency’: Lessons In Drone Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

With nearly half of their website traffic coming from outside visitors, the staff of the Steamboat Pilot and Today in Steamboat Springs, Colorado — a ski resort community — is experimenting with a new technology to immerse visitors in the sights and activities.

Editor Lisa Schlichtman says when she saw The New York Times’ work with 360-degree video, she wanted to try the technology in her newsroom. The opportunity presented itself after Swift Communications purchased the newspaper last year and offered resources and training for a 360-degree video initiative.

After experimenting with the technology for several weeks, the Steamboat staff launched the “Wish You Were Here: Steamboat 360” video series.

The videos have attracted as many as 12,000 views, which is higher than regular video views, she says. However, they’ve encountered one challenge to overcome in terms of views: high bounce rates on the videos after a short time. A less expensive camera also means lower quality video. But Schlichtman says she sees a lot of potential for the technology so they’ll continue to experiment and look for ways to improve.

“Our audience seems to really appreciates that we’re continually looking for ways to enhance our storytelling through new technology,” she says.

RJI Senior Information Specialist Jennifer Nelson recently visited with Schlichtman to learn more about the project.

This Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.

Q&A

Jennifer Nelson: What resources did it take to launch this project?

Lisa Schlichtman: You do need to be able to purchase a 360-degree camera. We were given one through Swift. It’s not an expensive camera. It’s about $500. In addition, we also have one subscription to Adobe Premiere for production. My team can actually do the videos themselves without Premiere but if we want to add captions and stitch videos together, then they use Premiere. We were able to start up the project and have four of my photographers produce videos for under $1,000.

When my reporters go out on assignment, they are already expected to produce photos and video with their stories if applicable. The 360 project was absorbed within my current staffing but divided between four journalists, so it’s very manageable. Right now, a person can go out and get a video, and depending on what they’re covering, have the video produced in two or two-and-half hours. That’s without a lot of stitching together. With stitching, it probably takes about three hours total.

In terms of training, we basically learned by doing.

We also created a marketing campaign to promote the project. It started with a “From the editor” column from me, which introduced the concept to our readers. Then we ran house ads in print and online. We also printed “Wish You Were Here” postcards with the website URL and a brief explanation about the project that we have made available throughout town. When our reporters and videographers are actually covering an event, they’ll hand out these really cool full-color postcards to the crowds.

How has the audience been responding to the new video project?

Schlichtman: They love it. We’re getting more and more people saying, “Hey, can you do 360 video here and there?” Not everything lends itself to a 360 video. Sometimes just a plain video is better than a 360 video depending on what you’re shooting.

The video player on our website currently does not handle 360 video so we’re trying to kind of skirt around that. We have a posting mechanism with hashtags and specific titling to reach various audiences. We post to YouTube. We also post to Facebook. Facebook doesn’t do anything for our web traffic, but It is highly viewed. We get on average 4,000 people viewing the 360 videos, which is high for us. Some of our videos have been attracting upwards of 12,000 views. We also post the videos on a “Wish You Were Here” flatpage on our website and embed the videos within stories to further increase engagement.

The other interesting statistic that we found out was people, on average, are only viewing these videos for about eight seconds. There are three other Colorado papers — Vail Daily, The Aspen Times and Summit Daily News — which are also experimenting with 360 video so we have weekly video conference calls to discuss our successes and failures. They’re finding the exact same thing: People aren’t looking at our 360 videos that long. That’s going to be the tricky piece. I don’t know if we had a different video player, if that would change it.

We have other videos that my reporters shoot with an iPhone with limited production and those tend to keep people on our site longer and that’s why we include them with as many stories as we can because it really keeps people on our site and engaged.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you were launching this for the first time?  

Schlichtman: The video camera that we have is very easy to use and its output doesn’t require a lot of stitching together. The quality is not as high as a more expensive camera, but then what you run into with the more expensive cameras is there is a lot more production time. That’s the dilemma.

If we could create a commercial application and could monetize the videos, it would be worth investing in a more expensive camera. Right now, as far as driving web traffic, I don’t know if that translates to us purchasing a more expensive camera to improve quality. If people are only viewing the videos for eight seconds, is it worth those reporting resources and is it worth investing in a more expensive camera?

Having a video player that does play 360 video is also important but we’ve found workarounds. In a perfect world, we would have matched the technology with what our website can do.

What situations and settings have you found work well for your 360 video and that the audience likes?

Schlichtman: Some of our more popular videos have been concerts and festivals.

We also find moving with the camera hasn’t worked extremely well. We found that putting the video in the middle of the action and making sure the video is at eye level creates the most pleasing videos to the eye. Steamboat hosted WinterWonderGrass, which is a huge bluegrass festival, and we were able to put the video right up on the stage with the performers. It was amazing because we were able to show not only the band but the crowd and you really felt like you were there. Any events, any festivals are great places to use 360 video.

We also produced a video where one of my reporters was up in a helicopter above Fish Creek Canyon where there had been an avalanche. This was more of a news project. It was extremely effective. People could actually feel like they were flying in a helicopter. We plan to do a 360 video of a hot air balloon ride and have a long list of other things to video in and around Steamboat.

What’s next for your “Wish You Were Here” or 360 video projects?   

Schlichtman: We’re going to keep producing “Wish You Were Here” videos and create a library of them on our website. One of our missions as Steamboat’s daily newspaper is to be the first place where people go for information, especially those who are planning a trip to Steamboat. I think it’ll be great when we have one hundred 360 videos on our website that people can view.

I definitely think we’ll also look for ways to use 360 video to cover news events, where fitting, especially anything that’s weather related. But we’ll use it judiciously.

People love to read about restaurants and chefs and anything food related, and so we plan to incorporate new restaurant openings in the “Wish You Were Here” series. We’ll actually let people take a view of the restaurant before they make a reservation. I think that should be hugely popular because anytime we write about a restaurant, we get amazing engagement.

I also believe there’s an opportunity to scale our “Wish You Were Here” project to other mountain resort newspapers owned by Swift. Of course, we’ll look for ways to monetize the project going forward.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post What 360 Video Is Teaching One Resort-Town Newspaper Team appeared first on MediaShift.

This Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.

A planning editor with the Fort Collins Coloradoan is experimenting with bot technology and it’s taught her that it doesn’t require a team of technologists. Jennifer Hefty says it doesn’t even require HTML coding experience.

Relying on research, a free bot interface and resources already in the newsroom, Hefty built and launched her first bot, dubbed Elexi, prior to the November 2016 elections to provide audiences with the necessary information to become more informed voters.

Hefty was inspired to bring the technology to her newsroom after learning more about bots at the Online News Association annual conference in September 2016. With positive feedback from the first experiment, she’s getting ready to launch her next bot experiment.

Senior Information Specialist Jennifer Nelson spoke recently with Hefty about Elexi and its use during the fall elections.

Jennifer Nelson: What is the Elexi project and what prompted you to launch it?

Jennifer Hefty: We really wanted to find a way to present our election information in a way that was easy for our audience to use and interact with, and to try something new.

We had been talking before ONA about text alerts or something similar for the election. What could we do and what would that look like?

I decided to build a bot with the technology I had learned at ONA. There is a program called Chatfuel. It’s pretty intuitive and it connects with Facebook. They say you can build a bot in seven minutes or less, and you probably can, but this one took me a little bit longer.

Elexi

My goal for the bot was to create something that wasn’t just routing users through a pre-determined set of options. I wanted Elexi to be smart and conversational. I wanted people to be able to ask questions, just as they would if they were in a chat with a human being. We had all these preview stories on our site on local issues. If a user asked a question about a candidate or a race, Elexi would come back and say, “Here’s the preview on this and what you need to know.”

I also wanted to give her a little bit of a personality, too. If people asked about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I wanted her to be a little cheeky in her responses, since we weren’t covering the presidential race on a local level. For example, if a user asked, “Who should I vote for for president?” Elexi would encourage the user to instead ask her about a local race and say, “I’m staying out of the heated presidential debate.”

Her purpose was two-fold: I wanted her to provide a guide so that readers could ask the bot questions about ballot initiatives and learn more about them. And I also wanted her to be a tool to provide election results in real-time on election night.

What kinds of questions did your audience ask Elexi?

Hefty: During the election, our readers asked a multitude of things about specific candidates or ballot measures.

If they asked, “Who is running for Senate in Colorado?” or “Tell me about the senate race,” Elexi would send them a link to the story “What you need to know: U.S. Senate race: Michael Bennet versus Darryl Glenn.”

Readers could also ask how they could register to vote or ask how to check their registration status, and Elexi would give them appropriate links on the county or secretary of state websites. Elexi could also provide ballot drop-off locations and hours, as Colorado is a mail-only ballot state.

If Elexi didn’t know the answer to a question specifically — for example, we got a lot of questions about whether judges should be retained — she would send them to the Blue Book online to learn more.

Readers could also ask Elexi’s opinion on candidates and ballot measures. While Elexi was programmed to remain impartial, she would give users the option to visit the Coloradoan’s endorsements. For example, if you asked Elexi “Who should I vote for?” she would say: “Whom and what you vote for are extremely personal decisions, and our goal is to give you as much information as possible to make informed choices. That said, the Coloradoan Editorial Board is weighing in on important issues in the community. Click below if you’re interested in reading this year’s endorsements.”

What resources did you need to launch this project?

Hefty: I did some research on it [beforehand] but there was no extra money spent. The interface to build a bot through that program is free. We had no extra manpower but it did take me a bit of time — probably about a week on and off — to get it built and get everything programmed because the ballot was really robust in November.

The nice thing about the program is you can see what questions people are asking. Anytime the bot would say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” we would go back and re-program it so hopefully the next time, it would understand.

Also, at any point, a staff member could override the bot and provide resources and information to users.

How did the first bot experiment go once you launched it?

Hefty: I hated some of the other bots I experimented with that didn’t adapt or learn or get smarter. So I spent a lot of time with Elexi to program the AI [artificial intelligence] so that it would start to understand and get smarter as more people would ask it questions. Chatfuel allows you to “teach” your bots words or phrases, and then direct the user to certain responses. The bot gets smarter over time, and the more users interact with it, the more easily it recognizes those words or phrases.

We really had no benchmarks for success because we had never done anything like this before. I think we ended up with about 200 people who used the bot during her lifetime. The interesting thing was coming up with a content marketing plan and describing to our audience what the technology is. I made a video showcasing Elexi’s “personality” and wrote a column, and we promoted the bot in print, on site and across many social platforms.

On our Facebook page, we have about 50,000 followers and we get messages from people daily and we try to respond to every single one. We didn’t want to have this very specific bot tied to our brand account so I created a separate page for her. I feel like this made the marketing harder because people had to leave our page and go to something else. When I shut down the bot, I sent everyone a message that said that it wasn’t going to be updated from that point forward. I sent people a survey asking if they liked the experience, what they didn’t like, what they wanted to see more of. I got about a dozen or so responses and most of them were positive and that they liked the technology. The thing was it’s still new to people and they weren’t fairly sure how to apply it to anything else.

Now that you have one experiment under your belt, what will you be doing differently with your next bot project?

Hefty: The next one will be tied to the brand account. This bot will be able to do a few things. First, it will address minor subscription issues, like if people don’t get a delivery or they want to put a vacation stop, it’ll send them to a real person in Fort Collins who can do that. There’s also a subscription-ask in there if people want to subscribe, that sends them to a deal for a subscription rate. The new bot will also ask users what their interests are: “So are you interested in breaking news and weather? Are you interested in receiving our top five stories of the day?” What I’m able to do is to save groups’ preferences and then I can send alerts to those groups.

Jennifer Nelson is the senior information specialist at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Previously, she was the news editor of the Osceola (Iowa) Sentinel-Tribune.

The post How the Coloradoan Is Experimenting with Bots and What They’re Learning appeared first on MediaShift.