In Focus: The Miami Herald
 Two years ago, if a Miami Herald crime reporter was working on a story and knew the police had related video footage, the reporter would call the local television station to see if they had it. Now, the crime reporter calls the police’s public information officer directly.
“That’s the evolution,” Multimedia Manager Karen Burkett says.
The example she gave is representative of the general trend at the newspaper. Many Miami Herald staff members have embraced online video, and their willingness to adapt has contributed to the newspaper’s success with it. In just a few years, the newspaper has moved from two early adopters experimenting with their own equipment to multiple people producing up to 30 original videos per week, Burkett says. Soon, the newspaper will have a video studio of its own adjacent to the newsroom.
 Although the Herald feeds its own video into the Associated Press’ free video player, it is the locally-focused video that gets the most traffic. “The locally produced video gets a ton more traffic than nationally produced video, which is very encouraging,” Suzanne Levinson, director of site operations, says. In mid-April, for example, a video story about a featherless cockatoo at the local Humane Society (at right) was especially popular.
Of the local video, news is widely viewed, and daily news reporters and photographers produce much of it. “We try to do some daily breaking news video and that actually drives quite a bit of traffic – not always, but certainly with big stories where there’s a huge appetite for it,” Burkett says.
 Shooting, Editing and Publishing
Photo Editors Chuck Fadely and Battle Vaughan were among the earliest adopters of online video at the Miami Herald, using their own time and resources to experiment with the medium. Ricardo Lopez, who is no longer with the paper, and Candace Barbot, who now trains others in addition to producing video, joined their efforts.
The newspaper’s rapidly growing staff of video shooters and producers now has a variety of tools. The newspaper has several cameras, including some high-definition cameras from which the newspaper can take still photos. In addition to those large HD video cameras, the newspaper has Canon S5 cameras that look like still cameras but record quality audio and video and are useful for breaking news video. The newspaper uses Final Cut Pro editing software on Macs, and dedicated videographers and the newspaper’s photo staff do most video editing for the Web site.
The newspaper also has a camera set up in the newsroom as part of a partnership with the local CBS affiliate. Interest in the partnership waxes and wanes, though neither the newspaper’s newsroom nor CBS’ seems particularly invested in it, Burkett says. Part of the challenge of the partnership is that the newspaper and the television station have different deadlines and different goals. Competition, culture and time limitations all get in the way.
One thing Levinson says the newspaper staff learned, after trying a few lower cost Flip-style cameras, was the importance of high-quality cameras. “The quality of the video isn’t very good and the sound is terrible” with some models, Levinson says. “One of the key learnings is that audio quality is very important.”
Another key, Burkett says, is getting good tools into the hands of smart people.
Training
In the newspaper’s early video days, key people from each department went to training through the University of California system or at the Brooks Institute. Those people became liaisons between their departments and the video team in addition to being the newsroom’s early adopters.
Newspaper executives quickly figured out they would not be able to send everybody out for training, and Barbot helped develop an internal training program with a unique approach. Instead of giving all interested staff the same training, it is targeted based on newsroom positions and skills.
Barbot explains an editor may not need to know many technical aspects of operating a video camera, but an editor does need to understand how much time is involved in shooting and editing video. This spring, Barbot has been hosting brown bag lunches with supervisors and editors to talk about what multimedia is and how best to use it with stories. They are also talking about managing projects and people and considering the time factor.
Barbot is teaching reporters how to think visually, and she is working with photographers on how to ask questions that “elicit descriptive narratives,” she says. “That was not intuitive for photographers.”
Initially, Barbot spent a lot of time teaching the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro, the newsroom’s video editing software. Now that the newspaper has people on staff who focus on video editing and production, she’s teaching less of that. The newsroom employs at least two full time people and two or three additional part-time people for video projects, and photo editors assist with video production.
“You don’t just have a class and give the lessons and have everyone get wide-eyed and then run away,” Burkett says. “Training is not train and run, it’s train and stay – and staying is hard.”
In addition to the training, Burkett says it’s key for reporters and photographers to use their newfound skills immediately and consistently, like a new language. “If you spend two weeks speaking Spanish and then you don’t speak it for two months – not even a word – and then you go back in, you’re lost and you’re slow. You have to use your training right away,” Burkett says.
Many people on the newspaper’s staff have embraced video, Levinson says, and training rooms are full whenever the newspaper offers it.
However, Barbot points out that video is “a medium that requires a person to have a passion for it.” Although several reporters and photographers are passionate and active about gathering video for the Web, not everyone is that way.
“I think we deal with smart and talented people; everybody gets it, but not everybody wants to do it,” Barbot says.
Advertising
Revenue has been growing slowly for MiamiHerald.com video, partly due to delays in settling a revenue-sharing contract between McClatchy Interactive and AP, Levinson says. That contract is ready to go, and the newspaper will be selling 15-second pre-roll ads for local video. “We want to limit the pre-roll to only 15 seconds because we don’t want to frustrate the user,” says Alex Fuentes, of sales for miamiherald.com. Fuentes says the newspaper is working on a model where viewers will only see a pre-roll ad once per user session.
By the end of the year, however, the newspaper hopes to have its own video player that offers more flexible advertising options. When that player launches, the advertising staff will be able to sell overlay ads that appear along the bottom of the video as it plays. The newspaper will still offer short pre-roll ads, but advertising representatives will push the overlays more. “We think that’s a lot more accepted in this day and age than a 30-second pre-roll,” Fuentes says.
In addition, overlay ads can open the door for advertisers who do not have a television ad or the resources to have one made, Fuentes says.
For now, the newspaper is focusing on selling sponsorships for video. The newspaper has been successfully selling sponsorships for the daily video show “What the 5!” that covered the show’s production costs.
Also, Fuentes says, the newspaper can make more money from sponsorships than from charging the average video cpm rate of $20 to $25. The decision for any newspaper should be based on traffic, Fuentes says. “We don’t have hundreds of thousands of streams. We have a healthy number of streams, but if you do a $20 or $25 cpm for streams, which is the average rate for video right now, it wouldn’t be that much money if you don’t have a high number of streams.”
Innovative Projects
Video on MiamiHerald.com is not all breaking news and local features. In addition to special investigations with longer videos, the newspaper’s site features “What the 5!”. The daily video show features five interesting, quirky or newsworthy short features, many of which are entertainment oriented.
Two part-time reporters, an audio and preproduction specialist and a director/editor put the show together. The University of Miami’s School of Communications has opened their studio to MiamiHerald.com in the wee hours of the morning when the studio is not otherwise in use. In exchange, the University gets credit on the What the 5! Page and University of Miami students have an opportunity to work on the show.
Traffic to “What the 5!” is limited, but the show is paying for itself, Levinson says. One advertiser purchases a sponsorship for a set amount of time, and receives an ad on the homepage of MiamiHerald.com with the “What the 5!” promo and larger ads on the show’s video page.
In addition to a homepage promotion on MiamiHerald.com, online editors link to “What the 5!” from news articles and the show has received in-print promotion. Rather than upload “What the 5!” to the Associated Press’ video player, the Herald created their own specialized video player that works with the format of the show by allowing viewers to skip ahead to any of the day’s features.
The small “What the 5!” staff includes hosts J.R. Biersmith and Toni Gonzalez, audio and preproduction specialist Jabari Brown, and director and editor Andrew Richardson. “I think that they partly do this as a labor of love,” Levinson says. “I know it’s an incredible amount of work.”
Burkett says the newspaper will continue to invest in innovative video projects. “I think that if you’re really trying to figure out what’s going on in multimedia, you can’t just be looking at other newspaper companies. We need to be looking outside the newspaper industry for solutions.”
Fast Forward
Managing Editor for Multimedia and New Projects Rick Hirsch, along with Burkett and others, is working on the plans for a new video studio in the Miami Herald’s newsroom. Hirsch says the plans involve moving some staff members and building an 875 sq. ft. video studio and adjacent support space near the photographer’s area of the newsroom. Construction could be complete by the end of the summer, with ongoing development planned for the future. The new video studio will include switchers and teleprompters, high-definition cameras and more. The Herald is getting estimates for the construction now.
“We kind of view this as something that will become more sophisticated over time,” Hirsch says. “We wanted to do something that would allow us to add on bells and whistles over a period of time, but we wanted to be careful not to make decisions in the beginning that would box us in and prevent us from evolving.”
Herald executives sought input from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Naples Daily News, the Virginian-Pilot and production facilities and television stations in and around Miami. (For more about building a newsroom studio, with advice from Hirsch and executives from The Oklahoman and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, see “Live from the Newsroom: Set Building 101”.)
The newspaper briefly considered renting video facilities near the newsroom. But the cost was high, and Hirsch had concerns that renting space elsewhere would discourage the paper’s own growth in online video. “We’re a working newsroom – this has to be easy. It has to be easy for people to contribute and for people to buy in.”
Going forward, quality will remain paramount for all newspaper video, Barbot says. “I think the mistakes we’ve made is that we’ve often given up quality in the search for clicks…. I would say to you that there’s a way to make money doing what we do well. We don’t have to look very far.”
Barbot brought up a parable of a boy who walked through the woods with a lit torch looking for fire. “We’re looking for fire with a lit lantern,” Barbot says of the newspaper industry. “That’s the way I see it, and we just need to realize that we have it in our hands. It’s already there.”
First Published:
May 7, 2008 
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