Studio805 Fills a Television News Hole

To fill a television news hole and give a video-hungry audience local news in Ventura County, Calif., The Ventura County Star launched Studio805.tv earlier this year. The newspaper’s video site features a new local newscast every day at noon.

Ventura County is 50 miles west of Los Angeles and 30 miles southeast of Santa Barbara on the California coastline. Although Ventura County has a population nearing 800,000 there is very little television news coverage from the Los Angeles or Santa Barbara television stations.

“It’s one of those holes we’ve always said we wanted to partner with somebody or do something to fill,” said Gretchen Macchiarella, a Ventura County Star staff writer who is now producer and host of Studio805.tv, the newspaper’s video site.

This lack of television news coverage of Ventura County was a significant reason for the newspaper to launch into video earlier this year.

“The primary motivation was that there was an unserved audience for local news in Ventura County, one that preferred to receive that information in a video broadcast format,” Ventura County Star Editor Joe Howry saidvia e-mail. “We don't have a local television station in Ventura County. We occasionally get a mention on some of the L.A. stations and an ABC affiliate in Santa Barbara but that's it.”

Studio805.tv is “a repackaging of our reporting, but a standalone news product,” Macchiarella said. “You can come here and get as informed as you could watching TV news, and hopefully people read the stories and get more informed than watching TV news. We wanted it to be something for people who maybe don't read the newspaper every day.” The “805” part of the name comes from one of the county’s main telephone area codes.

In August 2006, the 85,000-circulation newspaper (96,000 Sundays) started a newsroom-wide effort to train reporters in multimedia, including video, audio and Flash. Toward the end of Macchiarella’s training, she mocked up a page that could host a video newscast. She showed her mock-up to an editor, who offered to switch Macchiarella’s job so she could focus entirely on launching what became Studio805.tv.

Macchiarella started working on the project in early November 2006. She spent about a month holed up in the local Barnes & Noble bookstore to overcome what she called a “huge technical learning curve.” Macchiarella taught herself XML, ActionScript and additional Flash programming, ultimately designing a Web-based content management system to update the mostly Flash-based video page.

As luck would have it, the photo department had video lights and cameras, old backdrops and more. “There was actual duct tape and a paper clip holding my backdrop together for a while,” Macchiarella said. The only major piece of equipment the newsroom purchased was a teleprompter.

“We did look at other newspapers that were doing video broadcasts. The lasting lesson that we took away was that newspapers trying to copy television news were abysmally bad,” according to Howry. Broadcast television news is “a different medium with different skill sets. It's a little like the current in vogue thinking that anyone can be a journalist. There are required skills that involve training and expertise, whether it's as a print journalist or a broadcast journalist. Most newspaper Web casts look like amateur hours.”

The newsroom internally launched Studio805.tv in January 2007. "We really tested it very thoroughly, so there have been few surprises,” she said.

The newspaper ran its house ads in the newspaper and ran a front page story on Studio805.tv in early February 2007, opening the newscasts to the public. With material from the newspaper and original reporting and video footage, Macchiarella puts together news, entertainment and weather packages every weekday. The videos appear on Studio805.tv at noon.

At first, traffic to Studio805.tv popped, but audience growth has been slow since then. Macchiarella could not release specific traffic numbers.

"Web video is still not a huge part of most people's daily lives, and it's going to take a lot to get people used to it. It's not that they don't like it; it's not that they don't want to [watch]; it's just not in their routine. There's a big curve to get a steady audience."

Studio805.tv viewers tend to watch at work or at home during business hours, and there is a significant drop in traffic on holidays and summer vacation periods.

The project is very time-consuming, however. “The killer thing that I'm learning is that it takes a very long time, even on a fairly good computer … to compress and render a video.” Macchiarella uses Final Cub XPress, a program that will live-capture video as the camera records it. This cuts out the time she spends uploading video from the camera to the computer for editing. She exports the edited video as a flash video file, uploads the video via FTP (file transfer protocol) and updates the site through a ColdFusion Web-based content management system.

To cut down on video storage costs and bandwidth costs, the Studio805.tv archives are stored on YouTube. “I knew that at some point storing hundreds of videos would start to get my IT guys a little grouchy, and YouTube will store them – an unlimited amount – for free, forever as of right now,” Macchiarella said. In order to keep traffic on Studio805.tv instead of sending site visitors to YouTube for archives, she is working on a widget that will play archived video on Studio805.tv, even though the content is stored on YouTube.

So far, she said, the newsroom is very interested in the project and reporters have been very helpful. If any of the reporters do a video story to go onto the newspaper’s main Web site, the reporter will give Macchiarella a short clip to promote the video during her newscast. Reporters have even expressed interest in “coming to play,” she said. “It’s such a sandbox for everyone.”

This summer, Macchiarella got a few interns to free up her schedule to redesign the site and add new features. In addition to the interns, two Ventura County Star reporters are studying the video system to cover for Macchiarella if she is sick or takes a vacation.

For revenue, each video features an ad that holds in place at the end of each news clip, the opening animation features a “sponsored by” element, and there are sponsored videos. Eventually, Studio805.tv will include paid business profiles. "I don't think it's paying my salary yet," Macchiarella said.

But that’s ok for now. Howry said, “I view it as both an experiment and a permanent part of our digital offerings. More precisely, I see it as a working laboratory; one that will evolve as we learn more about this new medium.”

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First Published:
August 18, 2007