At the beginning of March, Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, unveiled two video studios in its new Sydney headquarters. Fairfax hired some broadcast consultants to help with the construction, which lasted about six months (with a previous four months of planning). Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, explained why newspapers shouldn't focus on TV-type bulletins, how journalists can manage the extra workload, and why newspaper video is financially viable.

The top floor studio is smaller, integrated within the Herald's newsroom. It is equipped with broadcast-quality HD cameras and 2-3 people can be on camera at once.

A larger studio on the downfloor, which can fit a car, was designed to be used by all Fairfax Media outlets. It is equipped with six editing suites with Final Cut Pro, and Fairfax has installed a fiber optic cable to enable quick transfers: all videos shot in the studio are centralized in a database which is made available to the various platforms.

The new building for The Age in Melbourne, which is to be ready towards the end of 2009, will also be equipped with two similar studios.

For Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, Fairfax and its newspapers can be at an advantage for online video, compared to broadcast TV professionals. Because they are not tied to a traditional broadcast news schedule, they can often bring breaking news online faster.

They can also benefit from the newspapers' core coverage, by using a "short video story associated to a much more in-depth newspaper story." In other cases, a news video can be the main story, if it has more impact or is more illustrative than a text report.

Fairfax's video and digital production team counts 18 staffers, 10 of whom are dedicated to news video. Each major city (each major newspaper newsroom) counts two or three videojournalists, one or two staff supporters and a local multimedia editor. Fairfax Digital news sites have been drawing about 6.5 million unique users monthly, with up to 3.4 million monthly video views, delivering video to over 800,000 unique browsers.

What type of video content works? Not TV news bulletins

Fairfax produces two main types of video content:
- video news reports, short and local
- everything else that can't be considered 'news', which consists mostly of sports, panel shows, thematic reports...

Fairfax's video content runs along the spectrum of newspaper video offerings, whether it's in-house studio footage, a TV review program with occasional guests, punctual shows focused on sports events, local news reports shot by specialized videojournalists or Fairfax journalists, or one-minute interviews with journalists about a topic in their field of expertise.

However, Vaile and Fairfax have already experimented with online video and TV-type content (see similar lessons from Le Télégramme) and have a clear view of the type of content that works. Vaile's words speak for themselves:

"The studios will make it much faster to turn around news from the newsroom. We are unlikely to do typical TV news bulletins for some time because they don't work online."

"The typical TV short bulletin didn't work online. That's because online people can choose to watch the stories they're interested in and don't want to watch the stories they're not interested in. The normal linear TV news bulletin fails online."

Even for typical broadcast channels, such as ABC in Australia, where Vaile previously worked, online TV-type news reports weren't successful online, "although they worked very well on mobile phones," because "the navigation on mobile hardware is so much more difficult" than online, so "people are much more willing to adopt a linear viewing platform."

"So it will be some time before we go to making digital TV news bulletins again."

Fairfax will try other online video alternatives, "the kinds of things which use newspaper journalists who are specialists in a particular area and have very high credibility," to produce specific reports.

Do multimedia journalists work more? No, if workflows change

As mentioned above, under Fairfax's integrated approach, local news video reports could potentially be shot by Vaile's digital production team, or by a regular reporter, or by a combination of both. In some cases, the reporter will simply take a few minutes to walk to the studio and provide some comment. In others, the text reporter will be expected to shoot video, perhaps even edit it himself (this year Fairfax is making available in every newsroom a couple Canon Tx-1 cameras, a hybrid between a still and video camera, which cost about 400-500$, for reporters to take while on the ground).

Does this mean more work journalists?

"That's a problem that has yet to be fully resolved," Vaile said, admitting that "inevitably it's more work and / or different work to what they have been doing."

For Vaile, management must make "space in their working day for them to do this work without it being on top of what they have to do already."

"Working as a cross-media journalist means that you are expected to work in many different platforms, on the paper, for online, potentially for radio or for video, but you clearly can't do all those in addition to everything else."
"The working day has to be planned bearing in mind that each of these things takes time and precludes you doing something else. Because this is all new it's a balance that has yet to be fully worked out."

In some cases, the idea of multi-skilled journalists can also be counter-productive. For some aspects of video production, such as editing, it can be much more efficient to have specialists rather than waste hours of reporters' time.

Audience and business: is video viable?

The construction of the studios was "a very significant investment," in the range of "several million dollars," said Vaile.

Traffic to Fairfax Digital news sites (mainly those of The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald) have been averaging about 6.5 million unique browsers and 214 million page views monthly. In contrast, there have been roughly only 3.4 million monthly video downloads, for over 800,000 unique video browsers (so roughly 12-13% of the total audience watches video, about 4-5 times monthly on average).

About 50% of video traffic goes to news items, while 'the rest' draws the other half. Interestingly though, Fairfax is attracting significantly more advertising revenues for segments within 'the rest', as advertisers are more interested in a less scattered, more targeted audience, such as for sports.

High traffic goes to news, high value advertising goes to the rest, according to Vaile.

Ads consists mostly of display advertising, pre-roll ads, as well as sponsorships for shows, However, sponsors "have no say in the editorial content in the programs," said Vaile, following standard editorial independence practices of newspapers - and quite unlike TV. In 2008, major advertisers are starting to flock towards online video, such as LandRover which will sponsor a 28-part travel program that launches at the end of March.

Future of newspaper online video: HD, streaming, tapping the TV market

In the future, "we are ready to go broadcast in HD, should we need to do that," said Vaile. "There's no question that at some stage in the near future we'll be delivering something in HD format, whether it's podcasts or products going into a very high bandwidth environment."

Vaile also believes "very much" in the future of live video streaming. Fairfax has already had a few successful experiments with live streaming, including coverage of a ship that ran aground last June thanks to cameras from the local surf patrol boat, as well as live streaming from the victory speeches of last November's federal elections in Australia. Fairfax has equipped a few of its reporters with 3G kits, which enable live video wireless streaming.

But considering the significant investments and costs of newspaper video online and badnwidth, is the current business model viable?

"Yes, definitely," said Vaile, although "we're at the very beginning of seeing the benefits of a business model which is based on display advertising around online video."

Although Fairfax doesn't have the same resources or content as a TV network, many traditional broadcasters aren't sure how to approach online video, and many traditional TV media buyers are hesitant to buy into the much smaller online audiences. So Fairfax Digital's longer term goal is to eventually tap into some of TV's advertising budget, both in news and non-news areas.

"The intention is that by providing a comprehensive video news service during the day, we will remove a share of the people who watch broadcast news bulletins at night."

Source: Ian Vaile, Director Fairfax Digital Productions