Editor's Pick: My most memorable video of the year

One thing we've been able to do this year on GazetteNET -- and a thing that's been a long-held goal of this news organization -- is to really ramp up our ability to tell a wide variety of stories on video, a medium that certainly befits a Website and complements a print newspaper well. Over the past couple of years, and particularly in 2009, we've tackled breaking news and a wide range of features with an eye toward extending the value of stories for our audience. Our numbers say you approve, so we'll stick with it.

A big reason for that is the contributions of a wide variety of staffers and college interns. All of our photographers (Carol Lollis, Jerrey Roberts, Gordon Daniels and Kevin Gutting) now shoot video, and with predictable excellence given their excellent eyes for images and how they can tell a story; a couple of them have mastered production as well, and 2010 should yield a full raft of fully produced video stories from that department. Similarly, our staff reporter Catherine Baum has taken to the world of video with a fresh eye and meticulous attention to storytelling and detail. And it looks like we have a couple more staffers in the pipeline.

We also rely quite a bit on interns from the college community -- mainly the Five Colleges, of course, but also from other institutions. Modern journalism students are being taught (and correctly so) that simply scribbling it down for print isn't a full approach to their professional futures anymore, and they're responding with a solid interest in multimedia forms of storytelling. I was fortunate in 2009 to have the chance to work with a couple of interns exclusively assigned to GazetteNET multimedia; throughout the summer, UMass senior Kylie Jelley took every oddball assignment I threw at her and came back with some sterling video work and a lot of improvements to our overall presentation. I also got some good contributions from interns assigned to other departments in the newsroom who sought a chance to do some multimedia work. This wonderful piece from summer features desk intern Chelsey Pollock is actually my favorite from the entire year; she really caught a great look at the women who are skating in the revival of Roller Derby and why they're motivated to go after such a rough, demanding sport.

But I think the most memorable video of our year here came from my fall GazetteNET intern, UMass senior Sara Cody. Early in her excellent stint here, I assigned Sara to go to the Amherst 250th anniversary parade on a rainy late-September Sunday and see what she could bring back. The result was a great look at a once-in-a-generation event that will serve as a solid record of a rare milestone in that storied town's history -- not just any old parade, but one that both marked the depth of Amherst's history and captured the people and places of its current moment. It really was one for the books, both for Amherst and for GazetteNET. Great job, Sara.

All of our videos remain available at our GazetteNET Videos page and at GazetteNET's YouTube channel, and we hope you'll keep watching and sending us your feedback. See you in 2010...

Sound and vision

Last night, was, for me, a nice evolution in the slow-but-steady growth of things we can do more easily with this site. The UMass Minutemen were playing in the finals of the NIT basketball tourney, and of course our UMass beat reporter Matt Vautour was down at Madison Square Garden in NYC, covering the story. Matt's pretty aggressive on the curve of "Let's try (X)" on the Web side. He (along with his sports colleagues Mike Moran and Jim Pignatiello) is one of our earliest bloggers, and easily our most prolific one; we worked through the fall and winter on a UMass sports podcast; and he's getting ready to crack the video barrier.

For his stories in the last part of the hoop season and throughout the Atlantic 10 and NIT tournaments, Matt was also sending back audio of press conferences, interviews, and anything else he encountered while out news-gathering. This is as basic as Web stuff gets, really; he uses a digital audio recorder that also functions as a little USB flash drive, pops it into his laptop, dumps the file onto the computer and e-mails it to me. I put the attachment onto my laptop, fix things like volume and add fades at the beginning and end, convert it to mp3, upload it to our site and drop it into his stories. This is completely nothing groundbreaking, but it nonetheless adds to what we can bring you in terms of coverage of an event. More is good, you know?

So, last night, the game ended, and I turned off ESPN and logged into our network. I'd already arranged with our sports editor, Stan Moulton, to put up wire coverage of the final result until we got Matt's story. Easily done. Stan called me at about 11 p.m. to let me know Matt's piece was in and edited, so I went back in and subbed that into the top story slot. Great -- local coverage of the day's breaking story less than two hours after it ended. This is how news is supposed to function in 2008, after all. But before I closed my connection to the network, I checked my e-mail, and lo and behold Matt had already sent along Travis Ford's press conference, which I wasn't expecting to see until the morning. Bingo! It took maybe 10 minutes to get it to my laptop, clean it up, upload it back into the system and get it into his story. Not even 2½ hours after the game's end and probably no more than 90 minutes after his remarks, we were able to bring you a full report with audio included. That's how it's supposed to work on the Web, kids, and I'm really happy every time we can get a story to you like that. Everyone here is.

That accords with many of the wishes I hear from readers in casual conversation around the area -- "Will you have more video?" "Audio?" "What about the report on the zoning issue in my neighborhood -- could we see that?" And this is what we're working to be able to do more often and more quickly. It's gratifying to be able to turn around that kind of story material, and particularly that fast. There's more where it came from: Just this week, we had video on the Amherst Bulletin site of voters at the polls talking about their choices that was produced by our New Media intern Simon Armata (plus more at our YouTube channel), the copy of a proposed ordinance on rezoning of an Easthampton neighborhood that has people over there pretty fired up, and the letter from Northampton's building commissioner to residents working to stop some operations at the city landfill. None of those, in and of themselves, are a major big deal, but they enhance and extend the story in exactly the way a community news organization should be doing these days.

Again, we're not inventing the wheel here; we're not even joining the party, given that we've been doing this since I got here nearly two years ago. But it's getting simpler to do now. Hey, if you're reading this, you could do the same thing. Got a video camera? A point-and-shoot camera? Using those tools to put things on the Web is simpler than ever, and the cost barrier to publishing, if not technically zero (try doing any of this if you haven't paid your broadband access bill), is still cheaper than it's even been in history. It's already a big ol' information party out there. My old colleague Mary Serreze is doing a lot of this at her Northampton Media and Community Radio Hour blogs, and so are tons of other people throughout the area, the country, and the world. More power to them, too. We'll work to hold up our end; there are a couple of projects brewing that we think will make for great reading and viewing, and that will extend the way we can bring you stories.

No rain

Yes, the View from the Cube today is sunny and cloudless for a second straight day. The literal view, that is (as seen through six of the nine large windows at the top front of the building; the new press building takes up the other three), and I'll take it -- as will we all. It's easier to work on anything when the weather is decent, wouldn't you say? That certainly applies here, too.

As for the view of the site, I'd call that a mixture of sun and clouds, which I guess isn't a bad forecast either. Last week was pretty slow on that front: I was out for a day with some mal de whatever, and ace web developer Chip, who's the person who implements the steady stream of fixes that we're discovering and applying as we understand this site more thoroughly, was away all week at a software conference. It was a worthwhile trip for understanding many of the capabilities of Drupal, the system that underlies the new site, but it also meant not having him at hand throughout the week. So it was largely status quo. No problem, fortunately.

Now, we're back to more assessment, implementation of the next round of items (a few more blogs among those; all just part of our efforts to expand the types of information we offer to you, O gentle readers), and squashing more bugs as we find 'em. Sometimes we don't experience these until we try something, as when I posted a couple of videos over the past few weeks and discovered how those can freak out the page layout. Startling? You bet. But then the trick is to just not panic, go into the code and see if there's something there that explains the anomaly. I did, there was, and now I can confidently post those without messing things up as long as I do them....just....so. Which I will; the ability to just slap a video up there goes on the fix list, but as a pretty low-level priority.

Tomorrow, I'll set aside some time to reply to some of the feedback and questions we've gotten (directly, not here...well, maybe I will post a few here -- why not?). Those are much appreciated; we're certainly not the only ones who can ID issues with this site. And this is a belated opportunity to thanks some of our early beta testers, too. We got some good feedback from those folks, and not all of them held back on describing the deficiencies, either. And that is a good thing.