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Virginia paper seeks new viewers with 'TimesCast'
"We don't wear makeup. We don't worry (too much) about wardrobe," Times editor Mike Riley wrote in an e-mail. "We're fancy ourselves the anti-TV. We want to connect. We want to engage. We want to be interactive. That said, we have brought in some TV folks to talk about their trade to help us get a baseline on the industry, and we have used an acting coach, mostly to help us get comfortable in front of a camera. (He's been terrific, by the way.) For most news folks, as you know, video is an unnatural act. We hope we can find a way to make online video sync with the paper's newsgathering, and there's no reason it shouldn't."
TimesCast plays weekdays at 3:30 p.m. (ET) and uses Macromedia Flash to allow viewers to click on the video itself to read stories, view additional images or leave comments. There's not much source video, instead, the focus remains on the newsreader. Which makes the broadcast feel a bit like a podcast, but one where you can see the speaker.
Riley wrote that cost shouldn't provide a barrier to other newsrooms looking to try something similar to reach broadband-enabled younger Web users.
"It actually doesn't cost much to get in the game as far as the digital equipment goes (we went fairly high end, though). The real cost is in staffers' time, and for us that translates largely into the multimedia editor, a script writer, a graphic artist, the news editors contributing items, and the TimesCasters. So those costs are well-dispersed, which makes it a more feasible project.
"So I don't think cost is the barrier. I think fear is, namely the fear of taking a risk, trying something new, venturing into a new medium, and facing the fact that the experiment could fail. But what we'll learn, even from failure, outweighs the costs."
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