Randy Wright is executive editor of the Daily Herald, a 32,000 daily in Provo, Utah. He can be reached at rwright@heraldextra.com.
ACROSS THE NATION, BASIC CITY infrastructure is expanding. In at least a hundred communities to date, government has added fiber optics to the usual lineup of roads, sewers, bridges and water lines. You can connect your computer to the Internet, make a phone call and watch your favorite television program all over one little cable of glass filaments.
When government got into the data delivery game in Utah, the Daily Herald saw an opportunity to start a TV channel dedicated to local news. Here's how things unfolded.
Utah law limits government to basic connections only; programming must be obtained through private vendors with whom cities have agreements. So we cooked up a trade with the local service provider, MStar. In exchange for print advertising for MStar, the Herald got a TV channel. We chose an open slot next to Fox News in the local lineup.
This seemed like a win-win scenario. The more MStar grows, the more we can theoretically charge for TV advertising.
But the larger question was whether a small news operation could sustain a TV channel with stories and video. How would we get video footage? What about the talking heads? What about all that expensive equipment it takes to mix video into a TV show? And what about the show itself? There was no way, initially, to deliver hours of fresh content every day.
The solutions were waiting for us, but we had to demolish some old stereotypes to see them. Like a guerrilla band against well-funded local TV armies, we had to frame our objectives carefully and use our resources wisely.
We started with a simple daily news program, starring our own reporters and editors. We aim for six to 10 local stories per day, each supported by local video – about 10-15 minutes. The news show loops hourly with 45-minute gaps filled by a background of rolling classified advertising (homes, jobs, cars). Music is donated by local musicians in exchange for on-screen credit.
Our own reporters and editors read the news from a homemade TelePrompter in a homemade studio under homemade lights. Total start-up cost was less than $26,000.
Do regular staffers hold up on camera? Absolutely. We actually like the fact that they've got a few rough edges. The unvarnished approach brands us as real people. A former colleague accurately described our style as "slick, yet homely."
Video collection has become part of every news reporter's job on every assignment. They've been issued Pure Digital video cameras (less than $100), which fit easily into a purse or shirt pocket. And they're trained to collect short clips - wide, medium and tight. Back at the office, we simply string the digital files together end-to-end, and they come out looking edited.
Expanding the duties of reporters to video collection has been powerful. What we sacrifice in slickness is more than made up in volume. Would you rather have one $2,500 camera in the field or 25 cameras at $100 each? We chose the latter, and we're getting more looks at more stories than ever before, all quintessentially local.
We have adapted Wirecast from Vara Software to create finished news segments on the fly. Our mantra, "one story, one take," means that each read of a story yields a single digital file. If a reader makes a mistake, we just shoot it again. The advantage of this approach is that individual story files can be associated with text on the Web. Or we can butt stories together like railroad cars for continuous play. Studio time for eight to 10 stories totals about 30 minutes.
Results? In three months, video viewership has climbed to 20,000 per month on the Herald's Web site, with five times that for material uploaded to YouTube, which we use to save bandwidth costs (search "DHTV" on YouTube). *
An overview of the Daily Herald video project can be found at http://www.heraldextra.com/dhtv.