"Thank God we've moved away from the time when you think you can just put television online," said David Hayward, head of the journalism programme at the BBC College of Journalism, opening a session on online video at news:rewired in London on Friday.

John Domokos, video producer at the Guardian, elaborated on this sentiment, explaining that a newspaper can't hope to beat TV for the polished version of a story, thoroughly edited with a highly-structured narrative, so it is better to focus on what it can do that is different and complementary. He often adopts a "microcosm" approach, aiming to create a three or four minute film that gives viewers a window onto a specific world.

This works particularly well with stories that focus on a community, he explained, such as the Birmingham riots in the UK last summer. It's easier to gain the community's trust if you are just one man with a camera, rather than a whole TV crew, he said, and if you can get close to the characters you don't need too much movement and visual drama to create something compelling.

The most important thing when it comes to video is to know your audience, said the Financial Times' editor of video, Josh de la Mare. At the FT, "our bread and butter is the talking head," he explained: the paper's audience is happy to watch two people in a room talking, "as long as they are talking about the right thing." The FT is able to pull in good people to talk about complicated financial issues, and its audience has even enjoyed an 11-minute video on the stock market. Most are much shorter however, de la Mare said, with three or three-and-a-half minutes being the 'magic number.' He tracks engagement closely by monitoring how many viewers watch until the end.

Consequently, the paper's studio is very central to the video effort, although it does also produce videos featuring its correspondents on the ground. Generally, FT journalists and editors have on-camera roles in many of the videos.

Speaking on the technicalities of hosting online video, Christian Heilmann, Mozilla's principal developer evangelist, highlighted the importance of coming up with good headlines and descriptions for videos so that search engines can find them. Subtitles are also search engine-friendly, he emphasized.

He encouraged the audience to use HTML5 when putting video on their sites as unlike using Flash, SilverLight or Quick Time, it allows the video to become a workable element of the page rather than a "black hole."

Timestamps on HTML5 videos allow developers to use Mozilla's open-source video tool called Popcorn to remix online video and overlay social media results. For example, you could display a video of a speech made by a politician with a Twitter feed alongside that showed you exactly who was tweeting what at what point in the speech. "Video on the web should use the web," Heilmann said.