Fargo Star is back! from Zac Echola on Vimeo.

This is a little project we started last year at The Forum of Fargo Moorhead, one of my employer’s (Forum Communications) flagship papers. Without getting into too many details because of my blogging agreement with my employer, it was successful at bringing younger people to The Forum’s brand. More so, I’d say, than those stupid “For Teens” pages that were all the rage in the 90s. Seriously. When I was a teenager in the 90s, they made me feel like jumping off a cliff.

Anyway, I hate to pimp out my work, but it’s a pretty cool little idea. Basically. (I’m really not the target demo for this sort of thing. I am way too snarky).

Users create tapes of themselves singing a capella, upload them to a site like youtube or vimeo or whatever and then send us the link.

On in-forum.com, people can go online and vote for their favorite singers. The top 10 move on to a live concert a couple months later at a popular night club in town. The winner gets a few pretty sweet prizes. Last year we had about 1,500 people at the venue (with zero out of house ads, mind you) and we didn’t even think about how to monetize that.

This year, we’re planning to take things out beyond just our sites and papers. And this is really why I’m blogging about this.

First, we’re not just promoting on our sites. While we love that our current readers see the contest and follow it (really, we love you for reading!), the object is to also show outside readers that newspapers aren’t necessarily boring. We’ve set up a Facebook page for Fargo Star that will be monitored by real humans. Our YouTube channel will also be watched by real people. We don’t want these to fall stagnant, to become brochures. The idea is to get out there and do something instead of talking about it. The key word here, obviously, is real.

Also, I’ve kicked around the idea of helping users along with posting video to their myspace profiles and personal Web sites. We already have the embed code from youtube that we’re using to display the video, so why not point that back at the public? Give them a snippet of code of the video and a permalink back to the Fargo Star page (which is in the early stages of production, I’ll post a link when we launch).

Lastly, merchandising. Last year, the staff at the live event all wore these hideous pink shirts with the Fargo Star logo on it. They were horrible. I had at least 6 people from the public ask me where they could buy one. And I was behind the scenes in a video control room most of the night worrying about a live web cast!

The single most important part about this whole project, though, is getting Web, editorial and advertising staffs in the same room and keeping everybody focused on a singular goal: Promote The Brand To A Tough Demographic In A Way That Doesn’t Suck. Turn our readers (old and new) into cheerleaders for our products. Because these products aren’t just ours, and we’re starting to understand this. This is their videos, their votes and their comments. We’re just providing some tools and some prizes. Community.

We aren’t worrying so much if the people who watch Fargo Star videos also read city hall stories in the paper. We hope they do, but we understand that people want what they want. The technical and philosophical lessons we learn from this project vastly outweigh any other reason for doing it.

One day it’s sharing videos for a contest, the next it’s sharing news videos. One day it’s participating in the Fargo Star chats, the next day it’s posting a restaurant review with a rating and some photos. Same philosophy. Same technology.

Howard Owens has been arguing with what seems to be the entire videography field over this for too long.

Having worked in the TV news business and in newspaper Web sites, I can say without a doubt that 1 hour production time is well within reason for most videos. If a TV photographer can’t work under that kind of pressure, they’re in the wrong business. I’ve seen photogs edit great VO-SOTs (Voice Over to Sound On Tape, usually a talking head, for the uninitiated)–with linear bays, no less!–in under 10 minutes.

Multitasking skills, solid understanding of shooting basics and good division of labor (where possible) are key to kicking out quality vids fast. Newspapers just aren’t prepared for this quite yet. Thankfully, we’re starting to get there.

It all comes down to the economics of the medium.

Documentary film is meant for larger scale audiences. With TV, everybody watching is going to see that long, well-produced packaged. On the Web, not everybody hitting the homepage cares about that well-crafted 2:30 package on whatever. They just won’t click on it. Because they don’t care or something else on the site interests them more and their time is limited.

You might get a few hundred views from interested people in a day and then that video falls into oblivion. News has a pretty short shelf life.

Why spend 5 hours on one video, when you can spend 5 hours on 5 videos to get a thousand or more page views (a few hundred times 5+) and possibly increase time on site (assuming some users might watch more than just one video)? Put more “crap” on the Web.

This nonsense about the “craft” is infuriating. We’re not in a storytelling business (if we were our stories wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly boring; Very few newspapers write terribly compelling long form pieces with any regularity. And yes I know that statement will piss people off–deal with it. I consistently read better articles in my wife’s copy of Glamour than most of the stuff the newspapers I read put out every year). We’re here to disseminate information to an audience. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

Which suggests we should strive to better understand our audience.

We in the news business get so hung up with ourselves we usually forget about what our audience actually wants. We need to stop being so high and mighty.

In live TV, I’d go home pissed about a horrible show. Everything went wrong in production. Supers were mixed up, cues were late or missed, the guy on the audio board was asleep at the wheel and the studio camera crew couldn’t properly frame up shots. And I’d get home, fuming. I’d start to rant to my wife or my in-laws or my friends about everything and rarely, very rarely did they ever notice these details that I thought ruined everything. They were still able to parse the info they needed. They didn’t have the same notions about my product as I did.

And this is our problem. A good story might come up and we won’t cover it because we’ve covered a similar story earlier, assuming everybody else in the world already knows about it. Christ. What is wrong with that? Anyone who has ever looked at Web traffic data can tell you, rolling their eyes no less, that it’s simply not true. Nobody, except for a few people at the paper reads every story. Nobody!

Getting back to Web video. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to do great videos. We certainly shouldn’t do video for the sake of doing video.

But, we should stop worrying about the little details. Who cares if the edit isn’t quite tight enough or the audio is a bit too hot? We do. But we care too much! Just ask yourself if the video and any accompanying package gives the audience what they need. Then move on to the next story.

There’s this weird tradition in news media that if we don’t produce the best possible craft we can, we’ll lose our readers. Look at it like this: First, we’re already losing readers. Second, there are people in your audience that care about higher quality and people that don’t.

First, target the group that will make you more money, then, when you’ve nailed that model down, go after the other group. Look for tangible results. Because honestly, that’s what your advertisers are looking for.

While intangibles like “reputation” and “preferred source” and “best” are nice for marketing yourself to clients or possible new readers, they’re not as valuable in the long tail market.

People want what they want. Brand hardly matters. Or rather, information is brand.

Clown Co finally has a name–and it sucks.

Don’t know what Clown Co is? It’s the much hyped, poorly executed online video venture from News Corp. and NBCU that was supposed to take on YouTube and other video sites. Bloggers and jokers in the media world dubbed the partnership ClownCo because they announced said partnership long before they had even hired anyone to execute it.

So, let’s get back to the shitty name, Hulu.com. Terry Heaton put it best:

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

Rather ironically, these were the reasons behind the name, according to Hulu.com CEO Jason Kilar:

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

I also have to agree with Heaton and the commenters at Lost Remote that beyond thinking up a name with hilarious translations (have I mentioned yet how much I hate made up Internet names like flickr, twitter, tumblr, blogosphere, etc.?), a meatier list of partners would have been killer. Neither ABC nor CBS wanted to stick with the idea. CBS has its own InnerTube, and ABC is building video players for their affiliate sites.

All that said, I signed up for the private beta of the site, coming in October. Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck. We’ll know more if and when I get that invite. I hope Hulu.com isn’t as awful an experience as the Joost beta.

To be honest, News Corp. and NBCU own many of the television shows I love (and pay for through iTunes and on DVD, sometimes twice over). I think it will be a hit, despite the har-hars all over the tech and media blogs today.