Vlogs and other new-media ideas
A few new-media ideas for the Star and NS Radio:
Vlog is short for video blog. See www.rocketboom.com for an example. I don’t think hard news would be the best fare for this to succeed on the Star's site. Something more entertainment related. Maybe Flavor could help develop and contribute to it, since some of their content translates well to a video format. Sports, too. A couple of minutes a day would be long enough. For example:
- The Diet Coke and Mentos experiment you did this spring, and other strange science experiments, would be perfect for this.
- How-to cooking features
- Photo polls
- Football tailgating
- Funny takes on soft news stories that have been in the Star, like the Cole fountain, new Subway (could even play it like you think NIU is getting an underground train).
Tours of campus buildings and random interviews with people inside.
We have budgeted for a digital video camera this year. Remember, though, that this kind of stuff needn’t have high production value. In fact, sometimes the cheesier it looks, the more fun and better received it is. The key factors: Is it smart and funny? And we also would want regular hosts who are good on camera.
We could sell advertising around this, obviously. If it’s consistently well-done, I think we could build a loyal audience.
NS Radio and Star Sports could do a daily Huskie Sports video update, too – maybe incorporating highlight video from sports info.
I wonder if this might be the future for NS Radio – producing audio and video podcasts and vlogs that users could download and play any time, anywhere.
- Jim
posted by Jim Killam @ 2:09 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
That's an interesting idea. I think it would be definitely worth our while to try a few of those, especially for Flavor. Watching videos online is really popular and if we could get some funny material up on the Web site, I think it would generate a good response. And if more people are visiting the Web site for vlogs, headlines and other news may catch their attention and we will attract more traffic around the Web site in general.
People spend so much time on Web sites like ebaumsworld watching stupid home videos and everything, so if we have a cheesy, funny type of video I think that would catch our audience's attention...since college students enjoy watching stupid home videos anyway...!
quite frankly, this seems like direct competition with NTC. im not sure if i really care about that, but it is an issue of consideration. what would be cool is having footage of events that our stories cover. then we can link to it in the pages of the paper. example: cole hall fountain actually works now=story, and at end of column="check out video footage of the fountain at www.___.com!"
and then at the site, have a before and after video sweep. totally silly, just silly enough to get college kids to check it out (dont ask me why that works, but it does)
--Colin L
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