I’m planning to buy a little camcorder to play around with videos on this blog, so I thought I’d check out the videos produced by our sister paper the Birmingham Mail.
The paper employed their video journalist Phil Vinter a few months ago and they have been playing around with the medium ever since, trying to find out what works for the paper.
I think some videos work better than others, but this particular one had me in hysterics (it would be nice if I could embed it, can I?). It’s all about Alfie the budgerigar who can, apparently, sing along to Il Divo. A slow news day perhaps?
Got a few more video journalists now – still waiting to see what the Mail is going to offer in terms of training though. Have a look at the video on Hull Daily Mail, they’re pretty high quality.
Very slow news…
You can embed the videos – the secret is finding the code. Right-click and View Source, then do a text search for “swf” – you’ll find a bit of code that starts <object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash ….